DSC 301. I.A. Richards. Principles of Literary Criticism. Intro. 26,
I.A. Richards (born Feb. 26, 1893, Sandbach, Cheshire, Eng.—died Sept. 7, 1979, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was an English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly influential in developing a new way of reading poetry that led to the New Criticism (New Criticism, post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work. The primary technique employed in the New Critical approach is close analytic reading of the text, a technique as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. and that also influenced some forms of reader-response criticism).
Richards was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period he wrote three of his most influential books: The Meaning of Meaning (1923; with C.K. Ogden), a pioneer work on semantics; and Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), companion volumes that he used to develop his critical method. The latter two were based on experimental pedagogy: Richards would give students poems in which the titles and authors’ names had been removed and then use their responses for further development of their “close reading” skills. Richards is best known for advancing the close reading of literature and for articulating the theoretical principles upon which these skills lead to “practical criticism,” a method of increasing readers’ analytic powers.
During the 1930s, Richards spent much of his time developing Basic English (Basic English derives its vocabulary and grammar from English but reduces both to a remarkable extent: there are 850 basic vocabulary items, 600 of which are nouns and 150 of which are adjectives. The remaining 100 are operative words such as “can,” “do,” “across,” “after,” “to,” “the,” “all,” “if,” “not,” and “very.” Only 18 verbs are used, and these are conjugated as in standard English; but through combination with nonverbs these 18 verbs can replace about 4,000 standard English verbs (e.g., “put together” for “assemble” or “combine”; “make up” for “invent”; “take pictures” for “photograph”). There are only a few rules concerned with formation of plurals, comparative degrees of adjectives, and use of such prefixes and suffixes as un-, -er, -ing, -ed, and -ly. Features of the language are dealt with in Ogden’s books Basic English (1930), The Basic Words (1932), and The ABC of Basic English (1932)), a system originated by Ogden that employed only 850 words; Richards believed a universally intelligible language would help to bring about international understanding. He took Basic English to China as a visiting professor at Tsing Hua University (1929–30) and as director of the Orthological Institute of China (1936–38). In 1942 he published a version of Plato’s Republic in Basic English. He became professor of English at Harvard University in 1939, working mainly in primary education, and emeritus professor there in 1963. His speculative and theoretical works include Science and Poetry (1926; revised as Poetries and Sciences, 1970), Mencius on the Mind (1932), Coleridge on Imagination (1934), The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Speculative Instruments (1955), Beyond (1974), Poetries (1974), and Complementarities (1976). His verse has been collected in Internal Colloquies (1971) and New and Selected Poems (1978).
Principles of Literary Criticism comprises 35 short chapters, which combine to create that ‘body of coherent knowledge with many provinces’ (Quoted in Constable, 2001: ix-x). As well as chapters on our experience of music, sculpture and the visual arts, there are also chapters on the artist, creativity and imagination; on value, communication and the mind; on ‘Badness in Poetry’ and its negative effects; on the distinction between ‘The Two Uses of Language’, the referential or scientific and the emotive or poetic. But it is the chapter located almost at the book’s literal centre that is the most important: namely, chapter 16, ‘The Analysis of a Poem’, which had originally appeared as an essay in the Psyche journal in 1923 under the more appropriate title ‘Psychology and the Reading of Poetry’. It is here that Richards provides his most explicit and comprehensive account of poetic experience and value, and where he presents his well-known diagram or ‘hieroglyph’ depicting ‘the mental events which make up the experience of […] “reading” a poem’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 102).1For Richards, there are ‘six distinct kinds of events’ that contribute to ‘the whole reaction’ or ‘full response’ that ‘arises’ in the interaction between poem and reader, these ‘events’ beginning in ‘[t]he visual sensations of the printed words’ and ending in ‘[e]motions’ and ‘[a]ffective-volitional attitudes’ (2001 [1924]: 105).