C. Ricks' True Friendship

Reading True Friendship, by Christopher Ricks. Explores subtexts of Eliot's poetry in the work of Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, & Robert Lowell; also deals with the three poets' varying, sometimes conflicted, critical/poetic responses to same. Though I think sometimes Ricks' hunt for allusions & verbal echoes takes him a little too far, on the whole I'm really enjoying this book. Very much a sense of a high art tradition that lives on, in the subtle inter-poem conversations Ricks uncovers and interprets.

Reading poems of Anthony Hecht lately. Very strong, very impressed. Elephant in the playroom. Enjoying it a lot. Hecht's blank verse narratives, like "Venetian Vespers", with their plot twists and (sometimes) surprise endings, offer fine examples of R.S. Crane's & E. Olson's Aristotelian principles.