Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks

  • The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony by D.J. Enright
    Oxford, 178 pp, £12.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 19 212253 3
  • Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric by Donald Davie
    Cambridge, 76 pp, £15.00, September 1986, ISBN 0 521 32264 2

Faintly repelled by elaborate theories of irony and by taxonomies of it, D.J. Enright has set himself to muster instances, observations, localities and anecdotes. There is no continuing argument, and not much argufying even, but there are plenty of penetrating glances. ‘Rather than theory, it is something resembling “practical criticism” that this book will concern itself with: the exploration of individual ironies as they are manifest in life as well as in literature.’ This is good-naturedly loose, the recipe for something resembling a scrapbook, a scrappy one. ‘When I was making notes for this book I came, before long, to see irony everywhere.’ Likewise when you were making a book for these notes.

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