Christopher Ricks does not ride on horseback or look particularly like Sir Lancelot. Nonetheless, the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at BU recently received one of the highest honors for a British citizen when Queen Elizabeth granted him a knighthood. His sense of humor intact, he recently told the Boston Globe, “I’m tremendously indebted to (former University presidents) John Silber and Jon Westling. I don’t think I can do anything with the honor, except maybe expect to be bowed and curtsied to. And it brings me very nice letters from friends.” He joins Professor of Biology Hans Kornberg, who was knighted in 1978, as the two Arts & Sciences professors with that distinction.
Ricks is co-director of the Editorial Institute at BU and lectures in the Core Curriculum. He was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University in 2004 for a five-year term, and is known both for his critical studies and for his editorial work. He has edited the poems of Tennyson and of the young T.S. Eliot, as well as The Oxford Book of English Verse, and has written books on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, Beckett, and Bob Dylan. He is undertaking a full critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s complete poems, to be published by Faber & Faber. With Frances Whistler, he co-directs the selected edition of the work of James Fitzjames Stephen.