About the Author:
Christopher Ricks is a Professor of the Humanities as Boston University, having previously taught at Oxford and Cambridge. He has published books on Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Beckett, as well as two collections of critical essays.
From Booklist:
Good poets are usually known in their lifetimes. The religious poets Thomas Traherne (1638-74) and Edward Taylor (1642-1729), discovered in the twentieth century, are rare exceptions to that rule, as is editor Ricks' invaluable find, James Henry (1798-1876). Unlike Traherne and Taylor, Henry assailed the God and the morality of the Bible. A physician turned classicist, thanks to an inheritance, he pursued the study of Virgil on foot throughout Europe until he was 70. Anglo-Irish, he championed Ireland against England. A radical, he was nonetheless skeptical of his era's progress. He favored unrhymed trochaic tetrameters (the line of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha), varied by spondees and iambs. When seriously fulminating, he sounds like a cranky Quaker (see "Progress"); when bearding religion, like a better-educated Ambrose Bierce; when questioning life's meaning, like a proto-Samuel Beckett. He is frequently funny, especially in the only prose here, a dialogue between a doctor and an unborn child that stops just short of recommending abortion. He would be at home on today's op-ed pages. Ray Olson
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