I. A. Richards Summary

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English-born American semanticist and literary critic, crusaded to have "Basic" English adopted as a fundamental English vocabulary.On Feb. 26, 1893, Ivor Armstron... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Lowell Goodbye Earth [Richards' first book of poetry] was begun when [he] was nearly sixty. It bristles with the difficulties of "mere mechanism," and is... Read more

Critical Essay by Frank Kermode [Internal Colloquies] collects all Richards's verse. In one preface here reprinted he argues that there should be no discernible relation between a poet'... Read more

Critical Essay by Bernard F. Dick That I. A. Richards was the progenitor of the New Criticism is now fairly well established; for the doubters [Complementaries: Uncollected Essays] will make it clear... Read more

Critical Essay by D. Rogers I. A. Richards's poems are not easily read, but they repay reading. [New and Selected Poems] is his fourth book of poems and includes selections from the first thre... Read more

Critical Essay by John Crowe Ransom Discussion of the new criticism must start with Mr. Richards. The new criticism very nearly began with him. It might be said also that it began with him in the rig... Read more

Critical Essay by Eric Bentley [To] many undergraduates of his generation the young Richards was a prophet. Not by accident, for it is a role he has always played. How was it possible to be a modern ... Read more

Critical Essay by R. P. Blackmur [Some] critics deliberately expand the theoretic phase of every practical problem. There is a tendency to urge the scientific principle and the statistical method, an... Read more

Critical Essay by Murray Krieger Even as Richards inadvertently paved the way for the study of poems as independent structures,… he created, as he meant to, several obstacles which his followe... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Foster To most observers the publication in 1935 of Coleridge on Imagination signaled a very important change in I. A. Richards' thinking as a literary critic. At the... Read more

Critical Essay by Gerald E. Graff [The critics] who have popularized the theory of the later Richards' conversion [to a chastened theorist] are literary critics who were dismayed by the positi... Read more

Critical Essay by Jerome P. Schiller The tone of I. A. Richards' writings on language and literature is so striking, so obtrusive, that the reader cannot help picturing the author as he reads:... Read more

Critical Essay by Basil Willey Richards is not only a pre-eminent Coleridgean but is himself, in many important senses, the Coleridge of our time. Like Coleridge, he has taught us that there can be n... Read more

Critical Essay by Christopher Butler Critical theory always seems to be in semi-conscious alliance with the contemporary—thus deconstructive criticism, so perversely applied to a poem by Shell... Read more

Critical Essay by Montgomery Belgion In two books, Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry, Mr. I. A. Richards had advanced the theory that the reading of poetry could and should repl... Read more

Critical Essay by D. W. Harding Conversational comments on Richards' work, favourable or unfavourable, seldom express opinions about his actual views; they seem more often than not to be react... Read more

Critical Essay by D. G. James [Poetry] is the conveyance, by the imaginative use of language, of imaginative objects, the compulsion upon the reader by the poet of his own imaginative prehension of t... Read more