[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 and still think poetry important? Most of Richards' early propositions may be regarded as answers to this question.

Chief among these answers is his apotheosis of poetry, in which he finds all the ecstasies and joys of religion, all the props and stays of morality. His eulogies of poetry read like a decoding of Shelley's, a translation into psychological terms of what the Romantics had said in incandescent metaphor. Poetry was just as holy a flame, just as much a firebird, to Richards as to any Romantic: but he did not talk that way. Where Browning said "God's in his heaven, All's right with the world", Richards said "all's right with the nervous system"; each was...