[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 bet...

I believe it can be shown that all Mr. Richards' troubles, all the weaknesses of his books, derive from [the] fundamental error of trying to cut off the organization and control of practical activity from science and bring it over into poetry. And first among these troubles I should mention the heavy labor it turns out to be, even for those vividly interested in the subject, to read his Principles of Literary Criticism. Rarely has a man rich in new and important thoughts produced a book so tiring to ...

Conversational comments on Richards' work, favourable or unfavourable, seldom express opinions about his actual views; they seem more often than not to be reactions to the general tone of his writing. Nor can this aspect of his work be neglected in an attempt to formulate a more precise opinion: some peculiarity of tone, or some prevailing attitude, undoubtedly distinguishes him from most scientific and critical writers. It would be laborious to analyse this attitude in detail. As a handy label for i...

Very few contemporary writers on aesthetics in English occupy Richards' authoritative position. Since the publication of The Principles of Literary Criticism his theories have gained increasingly in prestige among theoretical writers as well as among practical critics, and he seems in the process of gathering a school. Those interested in aesthetics or in practical criticism will generally admit, I believe, that his influence has already had some very salutary effects. He has been instrumental in sob...

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 right way, because he attempted to found it on a more comprehensive basis than other critics did. (p. 3) Richards approaches poetry as a psychologist. A psychologist, I should judge, is a thinker who invades our discussions by telling us that what we think is knowledge testifies less to any objective referent than to our own subjective emotions and d...

[Mr. Richards] brings into the account of poetry an unusual set of terms; and their principle seems to be that, if they are not quite physical terms, they will not be so very spiritual. I suppose they are orthodox terms in the new psychology. The analysis of a poetic experience given in Science and Poetry reads like the study of a brain. We encounter a surface—the impression of the printed words on the retina—and an agitation which goes deeper and deeper and involves images; then two streams, ...

Towards the end of his stimulating book, Principles of Literary Criticism, Mr. I. A. Richards discusses what he calls the 'revelation' theory of poetry; that is to say the theory that poetry, in its highest forms, does actually reveal somewhat of the else hidden nature of reality. The theory was first maintained in this country by the 'romantic' poets of the early nineteenth century. It is to be found also in Goethe. Centuries before that we find palpable hints of it in Plotinus;...

[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 the world or of some aspect of or object within it. And it is only with poetry in this sense that criticism is concerned. Now the view of poetry as the expression of imaginative prehension is a sufficiently ordinary one, and is certainly not new. But there are grounds for believing that it is not wholly idle to repeat it. For example, [Mr. I....

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 time, most other men of letters interpreted it as a shift away from "positivism." But what seems more interesting now is that it was also a shift toward a condition of mind that is pretty accurately described by the word "romanticism." It was indeed, as John Crowe Ransom once remarked, a kind of "conversion.&...

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 followers had to overcome in order to earn this position. It is impossible to conceive of the work itself as a self-contained entity when it is relegated to being a shadowy middleman that merely reflects the psychology of the two people who have to do with it, the poet and the reader. And it is reduced precisely to this status when Richards defines it...

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 no criticism without reconsidering fundamental conceptions; that we must watch our minds as well as use them, attending especially to what we are doing when we use words like "word," "meaning," "knowledge," "truth," "belief" etc. Like Coleridge, he sees poetry as bringing th...

[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, gai...

The influence of [Richards' "Principles of Literary Criticism"] has been at least as important on the negative as on the positive side. It has been largely responsible for the final breakdown of the "magical" view of literature, the view that literature, like art generally, is a mystical activity unlike any other. And this in turn has meant the gradual elimination from serious criticism of the simple "Oh, how wonderful" approach. On the positive side the infl...

The Principles of Literary Criticism is a milestone, though not an altogether satisfactory one. Mr Richards had difficult things to say, and he had not wholly mastered the art of saying them; it is probable that what he has there said with much difficulty, he will be able to say better. The present little book [Science and Poetry] marks a distinct advance in Mr Richards' power of expression and arrangement. It is very readable; but it is also a book which everyone interested in poetry ought to read. ...

[Some] critics deliberately expand the theoretic phase of every practical problem. There is a tendency to urge the scientific principle and the statistical method, and in doing so to bring in the whole assorted world of thought. That Mr. Richards, who is an admirable critic and whose love and knowledge of poetry are incontestable, is a victim of the expansiveness of his mind in these directions, is what characterizes, and reduces, the scope of his work as literary criticism. It is possible that he ought not...

[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 tran...

There can be little doubt that Coleridge's failure to get out of the dilemma of Intellect-or-Feeling has been passed on to us as a fatal legacy. If the first object of poetry is an effect, and if that effect is pleasure, does it not necessarily follow that truth and knowledge may be better set forth in some other order altogether? It is true that Coleridge made extravagant claims for a poetic order of truth, and it is upon these claims that Mr. I. A. Richards has based his fine book, Coleridge on the...

As you read [Practical Criticism], a feeling grows that it was not one man who wrote it, but a whole committee: on which were serving a semanticist, an educationalist, a philosopher, a psychologist, a sociologist, a mystic and a moralist—and also (I had almost forgotten him) a literary critic. The members of the committee do not always, by any means, find themselves in agreement. The chairmanship changes hands with bewildering rapidity; now the critic sits at the head of the table, now he is under it...

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 replace for us the holding of religious and other fundamental beliefs. He has now published [Practical Criticism], and, apart from a desire to restate his views, his reason for doing so is, I presume, that people had protested that they did not find reading poetry could be for them equivalent to holding fundamental beliefs, for in it he seeks to show t...

[Dr. I. A. Richards] has retained the intellectual adventurousness of an earlier and larger epoch, while everyone around him was giving way to dwarfish specialism. The result is that he stands out as an heroic figure, ready to have a go at anything, and able to draw up the most diverse sources of knowledge for his equipment. No task is too great for him to undertake, from clearing up the theoretical basis of literary criticism to reducing tension between the nations. To read Richards is a recognised tonic f...

[I. A. Richards' poetry] is a poetry of speculation, taking as its subject states of mind and feeling experienced in the later years of a long life. Richards is gnomic, epigrammatic, and conclusively inconclusive: "What," "Whence," "Whither," and "Why" are the cardinal points of his compass of interrogation. "What do, what should, I want?" one poem inquires; "Why re-awaken?" asks another; "Whereto? Wherefrom?&#...

The poems [in The Screens and Other Poems] are about how the soul acts without appearing to, how it influences without seeming to, how it changes and doesn't change, how it makes us who we are without our ever knowing who we are. These are delicate themes, vastly complicated and perhaps impossible of solution, but Richards does very well by them, according his vast knowledge of semantics and the difficult interchanges between words, selves, and things to his subjects in poems which are really more li...

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: the brash, impatient, perhaps glib, but always clearheaded iconoclast behind such works as Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Science and Poetry (1926); the wise, unassuming, somewhat vague guide behind the essays in Speculative Instruments (1955). Without the advantage of Richards' own discussion of tone …, the reader might...

Critical theory always seems to be in semi-conscious alliance with the contemporary—thus deconstructive criticism, so perversely applied to a poem by Shelley, will work very well for Robbe-Grillet or American experimental fiction. (p. 197) Richards's underlying values are worth looking at precisely because they are in such sharp contrast to current preoccupations. His aim was to show that literature could resolve conflict, bring the whole soul of man (however differently conceived in different...

Goodbye Earth [Richards' first book of poetry] was begun when [he] was nearly sixty. It bristles with the difficulties of "mere mechanism," and is unique in not providing [an] exhibit of failure…. Richards writing poetry is not much like the usual good critic. He doesn't wave a heavy baton, castigate the indulgences of the age, or try to build classical and exemplary models of rightness. He doesn't steel himself, entrench, and give an impression of unbelievable toil...

The achievement of Practical Criticism is such that it can hardly be canceled out by any subsequent defections. It was the beginning of objective criticism, the first organized attempt to stop theorizing about what people get when they read a poem and to find out. Its ultimate aim is no less lofty a one than the general improvement of reading, and as a consequence the general improvement of literary appreciation. (p. 315) The tremendous value of Practical Criticism lies almost wholly in its data on how poet...

There is something gallant but also quixotic in Richards' great faith in the power of a general theory of language and poetry from which he expects "new powers over our minds comparable to those which systematic physical inquiries are giving us over our environment."… Nothing seems to point to such a future. Richards' theory of poetry as long as it is entangled in his psychology and operates with the simple concept of emotive language seems to me an impasse in criticism. B...

[The critics] who have popularized the theory of the later Richards' conversion [to a chastened theorist] are literary critics who were dismayed by the positivism of the early works, and who applaud in the later works what they take to be a more congenial attitude toward truth and knowledge as constituents of poetry. The general contention of these interpreters is that in Coleridge on Imagination (1934) and his subsequent works, Richards repudiated his earlier positivist view of poetry as pseudo-stat...

[Internal Colloquies] collects all Richards's verse. In one preface here reprinted he argues that there should be no discernible relation between a poet's practice and his critical theory; and although his poems (and their notes) do reflect some of his theoretical interests they are on the whole very unexpected in other ways. There is a dryness, a cerebral quality (often quite playful), which somehow lacks the tone of modernity as well as all sensuous appeal. The material is modern enough ...

I. A. Richards is a learned poet, a formal poet, a witty poet, and a philosophical poet. One thinks mechanically of "metaphysical," but I think Richards is more advanced in metaphysics (or at least epistemology, I have trouble telling which from which) than any metaphysical poet I can think of. His erudition ranges easily from the Bible and Plato through Shakespeare and Milton to Whitehead and Wittgenstein. His own philosophy and critical theory speak for themselves where he has expounded them...

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 that as early as 1919, Richards thought of emotion as entering a work of art through a vehicle, a term that is now part of the critical vocabulary. These essays are important for another reason: they reveal an awesomely rational mind that is not afraid of schemata, equations or distinctions (art versus science, verifiable belief versus imaginat...

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 three as well as a selection of recent work. I do not think Richards has written better than in Goodbye Earth (1958). In "The Solitary Daffodil" the poet is beckoned from "committee doodled day" by "the cocktail roar." The flower welcomes him "And almost opened me a door / Through which I may st...