In certain of his critical essays, Hill detects a decline in Eliot's work. In Four Quartets, he has argued, "tone" has come to predominate over "pitch". This comment troubles and puzzles Ricks. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand why Hill's distinction so puzzles Ricks. The pitch of a voice is individual and unmistakable, while tone is how we all inflect certain utterances: Prufrock's tone varies but his Prufrockian pitch remains indelible. For that matter, Hill's use of "haruspicate" above shows distinct pitch — who else could sound quite that note? — while Eliot's earlier line, to which Hill supposedly alludes, is all tone ("Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry"). I disagree with Hill about Eliot's supposed decline. If in Four Quartets he sacrificed the intense quirkiness of individual pitch in favour of a more neutral tone, that may be because he meant to speak to and for all of us, and to do so in a common voice, during a period of unprecedented menace. Prufrock's pitch would have been drowned out in the Blitz.
Ricks has long been fascinated by punctuation — or its absence — in poems. In his masterful The Force of Poetry of 1984 he wrote brilliantly on Geoffrey Hill's cunning deployment of such markers. Twenty years later, in Dylan's Visions of Sin of 2005, he lavished praise on the singer-songwriter's "dramatic punctuation", largely because the singer's hesitant replies in an interview were transcribed as hyphens. Now, in True Friendship, he extols Hill's "imaginative hyphenation". Ricks is positively bewitched by hyphens and here they make a triumphal return, though charged with virtually cosmic significance. He can speak of "a hyphenating patience" or declare that the hyphen "realises the metaphysical union of the one and the many". The placement of commas still enchants him too and in Ezra Pound's poetry, the ellipsis "has a way of musing; there is a bizarre play of dot dot dot..." He admires Eliot's "parenthetic power". The crucial difference between Robert Lowell's poetry and prose has "everything to do with punctuation".
In an age of slapdash reading, such meticulous focus is admirable. And it is impressive to see just how much hidden significance Ricks can wring from a cunningly deployed comma or the hush of a hyphen. Still, to admire, even to applaud, is not to be held spellbound. For all the playfulness and occasional elegance of his prose, despite his witty puns and extravagant wordplay, there is something oppressive in Ricks's microscopic attention to detail. He may insist that "the difference is miniature but substantial" and yet a little of this goes a long way. As still another punctuation mark bobs into view, the reader is apt to feel not merely dazed but well-nigh comma-tose. He draws with commendable thoroughness not only on the texts themselves but on transcripts, interviews, manuscripts, letters, typos and misprints, book-jacket blurbs and record-sleeve liners in his search for "allusive illumination". Though Ricks is a fine anthologist and chooses many magnificent examples from his chosen poets — he only falters when he includes some drab doggerel by "California poet Fred Smith" — the effect of his method is to direct attention less to the genius of his poets than to his own ingenuity as a critic.
To follow every jot and tittle of Ricks's analyses feels at times like being made a benumbed witness to the slow, excruciating digestive processes of some predatory mollusc. There's something all-consuming in his regard. If this is a form of "true friendship", it's one in which — in true Eliotic fashion — only "the indigestible portions" are left untouched.
