[In 1926] it was commonly understood that science was increasingly in possession of fact and truth. In Science and Poetry [1926] science gets a better press than poetry for that reason: science makes statements, poetry makes pseudo-statements. In later years, and in essays gathered now in Complementarities, Richards tried to take the harm out of this distinction. What he meant, and what his readers refused to understand, apparently, was that pseudo-statements are statements which, whether true or false, gain in the poem by being neither: they are free statements, mobile, suggestive, and they are such that the question of their truth, in that particular context, does not arise. In science, statements are made for the sake of their reference, so they are either true or false, the question of truth cannot be evaded. In poetry, language is used "for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by...