Christopher Ricks
Our annual BOAT RACE DINNER was held on Sunday, 5th June, at The Cambridge Boat Club, Gerry's Landing, Cambridge, Mass., starting at 6:15p.m.
In the annual boat race on the Charles River, Oxford got off to a fast start and held this initial lead to win by about a length.
Our after dinner speaker was Christopher Ricks (Balliol, Christ's), Warren Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University and recently-elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Described in Boston Magazine as the greatest teacher in the post-Socrates era and a lone champion of dead white male European writers in the Anglophobic English Department at Boston University, he says "I sometimes think there is a specific prejudice against English people in English Departments". His 'critical genius' has included work on Milton, Tennyson, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot and more recently Bob Dylan. The New Yorker described his most recent publication "Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917" as "simply the best book ever written on T.S. Eliot".
Sincerely
Nick Copley,
Balliol College, Oxford
President of the Society
Reception: 6:15 PM
Dinner: 7:30 PM