Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 - Softcover

A note about Joining Music with Reason In the preface to this marvellous new anthology, its editor, Christopher Ricks, writes: Dr Johnson couched his high praise of poetry in these terms, and with reason, in The Rambler No. 86 (12 January 1751): 'The poet has this peculiar superiority, that to all the powers which the perfection of every other composition can require, he adds the faculty of joining music with reason, and of acting at once upon the senses and the passions.' Ricks was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2004 and 2009, and during his tenure arranged for 29 poets - a roughly equal mixture of British and American, established and new - to read from their work when he was in Oxford to deliver his lectures. Joining Music with Reason brings together a generous selection of work by all of those poets:

Christopher Ricks is a Warren Professor of the Humanities, co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He was formerly professor of English at the universities of Bristol and Cambridge and is the author of many scholarly works on the great British poets.