Editor’s note: The following paper was given by Christopher Ricks at a symposium organized by the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University in April on the subject of “‘Moral Education’: The Humanities and the Question of Values in Education.” The members ofthe panel were invited to address the question: “What is at stake in the ‘Battle of the Books?” Professor Ricks, who is now on the English faculty of Boston University, is the author of among much else, books on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, and Eliot. Among the other speakers at the Tale symposium were Martha Nussbaum, Hilton Kramer, James Atlas, Catherine Stimpson, Benjamin Barber, Norman Birnbaum, and Alasdair Maclntyre.
A quarter of an hour, on matters of such moment and such complexity, is not long enough to substantiate an argument but it should permit of relating some convictions. The most that such a relating can hope for is that it manifest a readiness for argument unpursued. But the polemics of travesty may be avoided by proposing not the but an answer to the question “What is at stake in the battle of the books?” My wish is to identify a prime consideration insufficiently admitted.
What follows is in three parts. First, one person’s sense of what is usually and rightly held to be, not at stake exactly, but at issue. Second, my expressing an objection to what is probably the best recent commentary on all this, an objection to the rhetoric in which the argument has been conducted.
