[My] purpose is to examine the role of I. A. Richards in calling attention to several important (and related) questions; the fact of disparity in poetry, the kinds of unification possible and desirable, and the positive values of a poetry that makes use of tension as its structural principle.

Richards has exerted during the last fifty years a powerful influence on our understanding of these matters—perhaps the most powerful influence of all. In the pages that follow I shall suggest some parallels between his thinking and that of other men of letters of our time, Yeats and Eliot in particular. The fact that in his stress upon a hard-won unity Richards is flanked by men who come at the same problem from quite different intellectual backgrounds makes evident that the problem is central to our culture. A concern for tensional structure does not spring from a narrow...