He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length;[2] a trenchant reviewer[3] of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead).
[7] He was born in Beckenham, the younger son of James Bruce Ricks, who worked for the family overcoat manufacturing firm, and Gabrielle (née Roszak), daughter of a furrier of French origin.
[8][9][10] Ricks was educated at King Alfred's School, Wantage[11] (a near-contemporary of the jockey Lester Piggott), then – as the first of his family to attend university[10] – studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in his B.A.
In an important essay,[14] he contrasts principles derived empirically from a close parsing of texts, a tradition whose great exemplar was Samuel Johnson, to the fashionable mode for philosophical critique that deconstructs the "rhetorical" figures of a text and, in doing so, unwittingly disposes of the values and principles underlying the art of criticism itself.
The intellectualist bias of professional theorists cannot but make their strenuously philosophical readings of literary texts discontinuous with the subject matter.
In this subtle negotiation between the value-thick sensibility of the reader and the intertextual resonances of a literary work lies the tactful attunement of all great criticism.