Christopher Ricks is the author of Milton's Grand Style (1963), Tennyson, Keats and Embarrassment, The Force of Poetry, T.S.Eliot and Prejudice, Beckett's Dying Words, Essays in Appreciation, Allusion to the Poets, Dylan's Visions of Sin, and True Friendship. He edited The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Poems of Tennyson, and (with Lisa Nemrow and Julie Nemrow) Bob Dylan: The Lyrics, as well as (with Jim McCue) The Poems of T.S.Eliot (2015).

• Prefatory Note 1: The Best Words in the Best Order 2: The Anagram 3: Dryden's Heroic Triplets 4: T.S. Eliot and 'Wrong'd Othello' 5: Congratulations 6: The Novelist as Critic 7: Henry James and the Hero of the Story 8: John Jay Chapman and a Vocation for Heroism 9: T.S. Eliot, Byron, and Learning Actors 10: Geoffrey Hill's Grievous Heroes 11: Norman Mailer, Just Off the Rhythm 12: Ion Bugan on the Iron Curtain 13: Heroic Work by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Beckett

[Rick's] magisterially assured account of the heroic, in the English heoic line (or the iambic pentameter) and in the heroic writer, amounts to an affirmation of the supreme body of writers and readers, spanning the centuries with the ebb and flow of their subtly modulated exchanges. ... it is richly absorbing