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Principles of Literary Criticism
To us, Richards was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World: Christopher Isherwood Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the founders of modern literary criticism. He enthused a generation of writers and readers and was an influential supporter of the young T.S Eliot. Principles of Literary Criticism was the text that first was the text that first established his reputation and pioneered the movement that became known as the 'New Criticism' Through a powerful presentation of the need to read critically and creatively, with an alertness to the psychological and emotional effects of language, Richards presented a powerful new understanding both of literature and of the role of the reader. Highly controversial when first published, Principles of Literary Criticism remains a work which no one with a serious interest in literature can afford to ignore. Contents: The chaos of criticism theories | The phantom aesthetic state | The language of criticism | Communication and the artist | The critics' concern with value | Value as an ultimate idea | A psychological theory of value | Art and morals | Actual and possible misapprehensions | Poetry for poetry's sake | A sketch for a psychology | Pleasure | Emotion and the coenesthesia | Memory | Attitudes | The analysis of a poem | Rhythm and metre | On looking at a picture | Sculpture and the construction of form | The Impasse of musical theory | A theory of communication | The availability of the poet's experience | Tolstoy's infection theory | The normality of the artist | Badness in poetry | Judgement and divergent readings | Levels of response and the width of appeal | The allusiveness of modern poetry | Permanence as a criterion | The Definition of a poem | Art, play and civilization | The Imagination
283 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
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550 people want to read
About the author
Ivor A. Richards
89 books35 followersBritish literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards helped to develop Basic English, a constructed language that British linguist Charles Kay Ogden introduced in 1930 and that uses a simplified form of the basic grammar and core vocabulary of English; he also founded the movement of New Criticism, a method of literary evaluation and interpretation that, practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s, emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances of its production.
Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.
Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 5, 2017
I.A. Richards wrote this book at a time when English literature was a nascent field of study and the different branches of modern literary theory weren't quite codified yet. His most important contemporaries were F.R. Leavis, William Empson, and T.S. Eliot. It is striking to me how each had a unique character to their writing. Leavis was dry and academic, and preoccupied with morality. Empson was dry and academic, and preoccupied with close reading. Eliot was flowery and ostentatious, and preoccupied with broad concepts of tradition. Richards, in contrast, is the psychology guy. He has more in common with Empson than the others. His writing draws from several disciplines and both are cited as practitioners of New Criticism, an important step between liberal humanism and structuralism that privileges the significance of content over context.
At the time he wrote Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards was quite taken with new theories about the brain. He tries to build an account of literary theory based chiefly on how literature is received through psychological experiences. There is a lot of fertile discussion here. He talks at length about the systematization of impulses that happen in the mind when we receive a work of art, and how these interact with theories in linguistics, communication, and aesthetics. I do not claim to understand it all, but a crude sketch his views is that Richards wanted to make literary criticism more like a science, and that many things we once took for granted like beauty are subjective responses in the mind. He tries to explain several errors he perceives in the practice of critics who don't account for this, such as using language in such a way that it treats subjective experiences in the mind as if they were essentialist properties of the artwork in question.
My main issue is that much of Richards's terminology is arcane at times and likely outmoded. He is quite contradictory at times, deriding snobbery but happily partaking in it when it suits him. One particularly egregious part claims that our psychological impulses are a product of the consensus of the community we live in, and that racial boundaries (not cultural) are a barrier to successful communication about art. He cites F. G. Crookshank's discredited book The Mongol in Our Midst to support this, which suggests Down syndrome is an evolutionary throwback that originated in Mongols. Even looking at it as a product of his time, Richards's book isn't very good. It is worth reading if you are tracking the slippery history of literary theory before semiotics, but other than the introduction and a select few chapters, I can't say I recommend it.
At the time he wrote Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards was quite taken with new theories about the brain. He tries to build an account of literary theory based chiefly on how literature is received through psychological experiences. There is a lot of fertile discussion here. He talks at length about the systematization of impulses that happen in the mind when we receive a work of art, and how these interact with theories in linguistics, communication, and aesthetics. I do not claim to understand it all, but a crude sketch his views is that Richards wanted to make literary criticism more like a science, and that many things we once took for granted like beauty are subjective responses in the mind. He tries to explain several errors he perceives in the practice of critics who don't account for this, such as using language in such a way that it treats subjective experiences in the mind as if they were essentialist properties of the artwork in question.
My main issue is that much of Richards's terminology is arcane at times and likely outmoded. He is quite contradictory at times, deriding snobbery but happily partaking in it when it suits him. One particularly egregious part claims that our psychological impulses are a product of the consensus of the community we live in, and that racial boundaries (not cultural) are a barrier to successful communication about art. He cites F. G. Crookshank's discredited book The Mongol in Our Midst to support this, which suggests Down syndrome is an evolutionary throwback that originated in Mongols. Even looking at it as a product of his time, Richards's book isn't very good. It is worth reading if you are tracking the slippery history of literary theory before semiotics, but other than the introduction and a select few chapters, I can't say I recommend it.
November 10, 2019
Inevitably dated but surprisingly readable a hundred years later. The rigor with which Richards analyzes a poem is something I might outwardly frown upon but secretly admire. In conjunction with Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, this presents an illuminating view into the then-emerging field of New Criticism.
March 31, 2015
It's weird to finally actually read I.A. Richards, after essentially being saturated in approaches drawn from his writing (and from the New Critics, and from those who came after them) for something like my entire educational career. Certainly I now see where a lot of things I regard as integral to reading literature came from, or at least received a famous articulation: reading a work on its own terms, particularly, noting as we do so tensions within a particular piece. Although Richards does address ambiguity, which is central to the New Criticism, he does so briefly. Also, much of the book is interested in aligning this mode of criticism with contemporary theories of psychology and what I will imprecisely call brain science. With some exceptions, Richards is pretty judicious with this material--and by "judicious," I of course mean "he does it in a way that I mostly agree with." Richards is less judicious in a series of snap judgments that appear throughout the book--this poem is obviously good, this one bad. This I could have learned to live without.
There's also a lot here I wasn't expecting--this is a big book, with content that I suspect I'll need another few readings to fathom fully. Although I hate in general the kind of criticism that compares reading poetry to, say, looking at a picture, Richards is so slow and careful in developing these analogies that I found myself won over--and even with new things to notice in paintings and sculptures, to boot.
Why read this book? Firstly, I really do think it will make you a better reader of poetry, even if you've seen these ideas a thousand times--or maybe particularly if you have, since remaining focused on the basic, the obvious, and so the essential is often difficult the more you know about a topic in depth. Within these techniques of reading (Richards calls the book a "machine for thinking") are several interesting binaries, which I hope to use in my consideration of poetry in the future--his division of the "critical" and the "technical," between what a work of art conjures up and what it is physically made of, is something that I think would reward future consideration. There's even a consideration of the raw practicality of literature, in encouraging efficient communication in a way Richards compares favourably to mass media advertising, that our beleaguered departments of literature might do well to at least consider as we survey what, exactly, it is that we offer to students. I don't want to make it seem like Richards is some sort of revanchist future for literary studies: much has been written since it, and we need to read that as well. (As Richards himself says, research moves forward.) But there's much here that I believe is complementary to all sorts of literary studies--as, indeed, this work, and the approaches it engendered, has been.
There's also a lot here I wasn't expecting--this is a big book, with content that I suspect I'll need another few readings to fathom fully. Although I hate in general the kind of criticism that compares reading poetry to, say, looking at a picture, Richards is so slow and careful in developing these analogies that I found myself won over--and even with new things to notice in paintings and sculptures, to boot.
Why read this book? Firstly, I really do think it will make you a better reader of poetry, even if you've seen these ideas a thousand times--or maybe particularly if you have, since remaining focused on the basic, the obvious, and so the essential is often difficult the more you know about a topic in depth. Within these techniques of reading (Richards calls the book a "machine for thinking") are several interesting binaries, which I hope to use in my consideration of poetry in the future--his division of the "critical" and the "technical," between what a work of art conjures up and what it is physically made of, is something that I think would reward future consideration. There's even a consideration of the raw practicality of literature, in encouraging efficient communication in a way Richards compares favourably to mass media advertising, that our beleaguered departments of literature might do well to at least consider as we survey what, exactly, it is that we offer to students. I don't want to make it seem like Richards is some sort of revanchist future for literary studies: much has been written since it, and we need to read that as well. (As Richards himself says, research moves forward.) But there's much here that I believe is complementary to all sorts of literary studies--as, indeed, this work, and the approaches it engendered, has been.
June 2, 2019
لو خرجت من هذا الكتاب بتأمُّل هذه العبارة البديعة لكفاني
لكل
إحساس
ممكن
صورة
ممكنة
تُطابقه
لكل
إحساس
ممكن
صورة
ممكنة
تُطابقه
October 3, 2021
Unfortunately, found it dated and irrelevant. Could be possibly be of value for the professional historians of literature, but not for the simple literature enthusiasts as myself.
September 16, 2024
Re-Read:
In his preface Richards affirms that criticism is the endeavour to differentiate between experiences and to evaluate them.
In chapter I of his book he dwells on the ‘chaos of critical theories’ and mentions ‘aesthetic choice’.
Chapter II is entitled ‘The Phantom Aesthetic State’ where he quotes Bosanquet to make the point, between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is in-between amid understanding and reason. He moves forward to observe that the aesthetic mode is generally supposed to be an uncharacteristic way of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting experiences are valuable, or indifferent.
The third chapter, ‘The Language of Criticism’ deals with construction, design, form, rhythm and expression. Then he makes a distinction between experiences, one he calls the critical part and the other he calls the technical part. With regard to the technical part he comments, ‘we pay attention to externals when we do not know what else to do with a poem.
The fourth chapter is ‘Communication and the Artist.’ He is of the opinion that the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with ‘communication’. His work is to ‘embody’ precise experience. He quotes from Paradise Lost and Kubla Khan and comes to the conclusion that the arts, if rightly approached supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others.
Chapter V is about ‘The Critics’ concern with value which is continued in chapter VI which is entitled ‘Value as an ultimate Idea’.
Chapter VII reconnoiters ‘A Psychological Theory of Value’ which is followed by chapter VIII, ‘Art and Morals’. Richards observes that the basis of morality, as Shelley insisted is laid not by preachers but by poets.
Chapter IX is entitled ‘Actual and Possible Misapprehension’ which concludes with reference to ‘pleasure’ which has its place in the whole account of values.
Chapter X ‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake begins by quoting two lines from a French poem,’ ‘one passes more easily from one extreme to another from one nuance to another. Richards rejects the theory of art for art’s sake and comments it ‘is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—aesthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so no.’
Chapter XI is entitled ‘A Sketch for a Psychology’ where he notes that the mind is the nervous system, with which he relates a theory of feeling, of emotion.
Chapter XII is on ‘Pleasure’. He begins the chapter by noting sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleased and pain which are names for the Conscious characteristics of impulses.
With this he passes in chapter XIII to ‘Emotion and the Coenesthesia’. His explanation is interesting. He refers to stimulating situations giving rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness. These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger and other emotional states. These emotional states with pleasure and unpleased are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling from sensations. These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient of an emotional experience and account for colour or tone.
Chapter XIV is on ‘Memory’. Richards refers to the richness and complexity of experience. There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not intervene.
Chapter XVI, ‘The Analysis of a Poem’ is a fairly long chapter. Richards starts the chapter by noting the qualifications of a good critic which are three. ‘He must adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features.’ In the rest of the chapter sensations and imagery- are discussed. He concludes the chapter by commenting that among all the agents by which the “widening of the sphere of human sensibility may be brought about, the arts are the most powerful.”
Chapter XVII deals with ‘Rhythm and Metre’. Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition and expectancy. The texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, which the sequence of syllables brings about is rhythm. Metre has a mode of action which may be mentioned. There can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated with dancing.
Chapter XVIII, ‘On Looking at a Picture’ deals at length with mass, density of colour and space. Richards concludes by noting that the fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value depends, are alike.
In chapter XIX he mainly discusses form with reference to sculpture, by implying that a literary critic should have exposure to all the arts including music.
Chapter XX is entitled ‘The Impasse of Musical Theory’. He quotes from Gurney’s book, The Power of Sound, ‘The musical faculty defies all explanation of its action and its judgments.’ It is not very clear whether Richards theory approaches that of Pater.
Chapter XXI is on ‘A Theory of Communication’. ‘In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed.
Chapter XXIV, ‘The Normality of the Artist’, introduces the concept of imagination. He observes that there is nothing peculiarly mysterious about imagination. Richards takes an anti-Romantic and scientific attitude to imagination.
Chapter XXVI is devoted to ‘Judgment and Divergent Readings’. The main consideration here is ‘ambiguity in a poem’. Hamlet is cited as an example of great art whose greatness is accepted in spite of ambiguous readings.
Chapter XXVII, ‘Levels of response and the width of Appeal’ notes the possibility of a work of art being enjoyed at many levels which happens with Elizabethan drama.
Chapter XXVIII in dealing with ‘The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry’ makes a striking comment on allusion. Richards comments, ‘Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specifically acquired. And the trouble which it raises is simply a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will undoubtedly increase for the poetry of the future.
In chapter XXIX, Richards discusses various theories of art from Aristotle, Coleridge to Croce. In the later part of the chapter he introduces the concept of belief. ‘There are few terms which are more troublesome in psychology than belief’. The bulk of the beliefs involved in the arts are provisional acceptances for the sake of the imaginative experience.
Richards focused attention upon the problem of discriminating good art from bad art and stressed the organic structure of the work itself.
To sum up, in this key work in the development of modern criticism Dr. Richards argues that literary criticism is fundamentally a branch of psychology, which deals with the states of mind induced by the experiences communicated by art.
And it was on this scientific basis that Dr. Richards created a new school of practical criticism devoid of subjective emotionalism.
This book is a classic.
In his preface Richards affirms that criticism is the endeavour to differentiate between experiences and to evaluate them.
In chapter I of his book he dwells on the ‘chaos of critical theories’ and mentions ‘aesthetic choice’.
Chapter II is entitled ‘The Phantom Aesthetic State’ where he quotes Bosanquet to make the point, between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is in-between amid understanding and reason. He moves forward to observe that the aesthetic mode is generally supposed to be an uncharacteristic way of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting experiences are valuable, or indifferent.
The third chapter, ‘The Language of Criticism’ deals with construction, design, form, rhythm and expression. Then he makes a distinction between experiences, one he calls the critical part and the other he calls the technical part. With regard to the technical part he comments, ‘we pay attention to externals when we do not know what else to do with a poem.
The fourth chapter is ‘Communication and the Artist.’ He is of the opinion that the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with ‘communication’. His work is to ‘embody’ precise experience. He quotes from Paradise Lost and Kubla Khan and comes to the conclusion that the arts, if rightly approached supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others.
Chapter V is about ‘The Critics’ concern with value which is continued in chapter VI which is entitled ‘Value as an ultimate Idea’.
Chapter VII reconnoiters ‘A Psychological Theory of Value’ which is followed by chapter VIII, ‘Art and Morals’. Richards observes that the basis of morality, as Shelley insisted is laid not by preachers but by poets.
Chapter IX is entitled ‘Actual and Possible Misapprehension’ which concludes with reference to ‘pleasure’ which has its place in the whole account of values.
Chapter X ‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake begins by quoting two lines from a French poem,’ ‘one passes more easily from one extreme to another from one nuance to another. Richards rejects the theory of art for art’s sake and comments it ‘is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—aesthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so no.’
Chapter XI is entitled ‘A Sketch for a Psychology’ where he notes that the mind is the nervous system, with which he relates a theory of feeling, of emotion.
Chapter XII is on ‘Pleasure’. He begins the chapter by noting sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleased and pain which are names for the Conscious characteristics of impulses.
With this he passes in chapter XIII to ‘Emotion and the Coenesthesia’. His explanation is interesting. He refers to stimulating situations giving rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness. These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger and other emotional states. These emotional states with pleasure and unpleased are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling from sensations. These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient of an emotional experience and account for colour or tone.
Chapter XIV is on ‘Memory’. Richards refers to the richness and complexity of experience. There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not intervene.
Chapter XVI, ‘The Analysis of a Poem’ is a fairly long chapter. Richards starts the chapter by noting the qualifications of a good critic which are three. ‘He must adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features.’ In the rest of the chapter sensations and imagery- are discussed. He concludes the chapter by commenting that among all the agents by which the “widening of the sphere of human sensibility may be brought about, the arts are the most powerful.”
Chapter XVII deals with ‘Rhythm and Metre’. Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition and expectancy. The texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, which the sequence of syllables brings about is rhythm. Metre has a mode of action which may be mentioned. There can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated with dancing.
Chapter XVIII, ‘On Looking at a Picture’ deals at length with mass, density of colour and space. Richards concludes by noting that the fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value depends, are alike.
In chapter XIX he mainly discusses form with reference to sculpture, by implying that a literary critic should have exposure to all the arts including music.
Chapter XX is entitled ‘The Impasse of Musical Theory’. He quotes from Gurney’s book, The Power of Sound, ‘The musical faculty defies all explanation of its action and its judgments.’ It is not very clear whether Richards theory approaches that of Pater.
Chapter XXI is on ‘A Theory of Communication’. ‘In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed.
Chapter XXIV, ‘The Normality of the Artist’, introduces the concept of imagination. He observes that there is nothing peculiarly mysterious about imagination. Richards takes an anti-Romantic and scientific attitude to imagination.
Chapter XXVI is devoted to ‘Judgment and Divergent Readings’. The main consideration here is ‘ambiguity in a poem’. Hamlet is cited as an example of great art whose greatness is accepted in spite of ambiguous readings.
Chapter XXVII, ‘Levels of response and the width of Appeal’ notes the possibility of a work of art being enjoyed at many levels which happens with Elizabethan drama.
Chapter XXVIII in dealing with ‘The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry’ makes a striking comment on allusion. Richards comments, ‘Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specifically acquired. And the trouble which it raises is simply a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will undoubtedly increase for the poetry of the future.
In chapter XXIX, Richards discusses various theories of art from Aristotle, Coleridge to Croce. In the later part of the chapter he introduces the concept of belief. ‘There are few terms which are more troublesome in psychology than belief’. The bulk of the beliefs involved in the arts are provisional acceptances for the sake of the imaginative experience.
Richards focused attention upon the problem of discriminating good art from bad art and stressed the organic structure of the work itself.
To sum up, in this key work in the development of modern criticism Dr. Richards argues that literary criticism is fundamentally a branch of psychology, which deals with the states of mind induced by the experiences communicated by art.
And it was on this scientific basis that Dr. Richards created a new school of practical criticism devoid of subjective emotionalism.
This book is a classic.
September 29, 2012
What a brilliant mind! I am not in agreement with Richards about many aspects of human nature (I tend to think he is rather too optimistic about the mind of the poet and the value of art) but this is excellent stuff. His work on the possible relations and confusions between emotion and cognition is particularly illuminating, and as a reader I daresay Richards is one of the best around (regardless of what one thinks of his critical assumptions). In fact I think the reader and the psychologist exist only rather uneasily in him, and the attempt to reconcile the 2 has resulted in an admirable attempt to understand what happens when we read. It is too bad that Richards wrote when he did, without the access to the scientific knowledge that we are just beginning to uncover now. I have no idea how the main assumption of N.C. got across (eg historical context is irrelevant etc) if Richards inspired most of it -- I am inclined to lay blame at the foot of A.C. Bradley. Deserves to be read carefully and more than once. Another thing I have to praise is his writing. It is concise, elegant and musical without being overly romantic or prosing. Abstruse ideas are put across in the most digestible form, and on the whole despite the denseness of the book (as in density of its ideas) the prose is incredibly enjoyable to read. Alas, modern criticism has little lived up to the promise that Richards made in pioneering the field that we now call criticism.
December 24, 2009
Reads like a fount for the study, teaching, and learning of literature and the arts as these have gone on in American classrooms from Richards' time even to our own. An amazing argument, or complex of arguments, for the educational value and indispensible importance of the arts, both in school and out of school, in life and for life. His perspective is skeptical and thoroughly naturalistic -- bravely and unapologetically grounded in psychology and neurology. And our vaunted interdisciplinary inquiries in this scholarly region hardly seem to have advanced very far beyond the point where Richards took them in 1926.
Art, he says, creates the possibility for experiences that define us, as individuals and as social collectivities. For that reason art warrants our closest attentions, our most careful thought and strenuous efforts at understanding. I cannot say I have fully comprehended the complexities of Richards' position. I found it worrying how easily his intent to discriminate experiences and rank them as more and less valuable could tip (and in lesser hands clearly has tipped) into snobbish prejudice, or something much, much worse. Having gotten once through the book, I have set out to read it again. It repays study. It deserves study. It is indeed what Richards himself calls it, "a machine to think with."
Art, he says, creates the possibility for experiences that define us, as individuals and as social collectivities. For that reason art warrants our closest attentions, our most careful thought and strenuous efforts at understanding. I cannot say I have fully comprehended the complexities of Richards' position. I found it worrying how easily his intent to discriminate experiences and rank them as more and less valuable could tip (and in lesser hands clearly has tipped) into snobbish prejudice, or something much, much worse. Having gotten once through the book, I have set out to read it again. It repays study. It deserves study. It is indeed what Richards himself calls it, "a machine to think with."
May 25, 2018
I have spent more time with this book inside my head than any person deserves to these days, for the sake of an academic project and, without reproducing said project here, I will ask, dear readers: seriously? I've spent half my life reading critical theory, and it's mildly astonishing that this text is given such stature as being foundational. It's hogwash. Please explain to me where, exactly, Richards elucidates a single sound, grounded psychological principle, backed by solid and factual "science"? Or where, for that matter, he offers a good or model reading of a poem? A book is a machine to think with ... The mountain of bad thought that has sprung from such a wrongheaded premise is immeasurable. His fetishism of "Science" at the expense of the entire history of aesthetics and literary criticism is staggering. He seems to know little about the tradition of his own discipline. It's hard not to imagine him as a kind of steampunk mad scientist, goggled and surrounded by burbling beakers, stuffing a poem into a tube to see what comes out the other end. My article on this matter will be more judicious. I'm just in full "emperor's new clothes" mode at the present moment, and fed up with the eccentricity. Please, fellow readers, consult the "diagram" on page 107 -- a pictographic illustration of the mental processes involved in confronting a line from (though he does not tell us) Browning, I believe -- and tell me in what way this bears any resemblance to "Science" or modern psychology? In fact, by that point, the drawing is so eccentric and absurd, it's almost touching; I almost come around and feel for the guy. We all need to read more: the "foundations of modern criticisms" include some really loose beams.
February 7, 2017
I. A. Richards tells us that the major function of art, although not the most upfront, is communication. Funny that he mentions it, because this book fails at it miserably. The concepts are easy to grasp once you manage to extract them from the text, but here is the tricky part. There is no balance between the simplicity of notions and the complexity of the turns of phrase.
Ivory Arms, Strong Richards, your verbiage is perplexing to a derisive extent. Why does it induce such somnolence? Why do I keep zoning out in the middle of sentences? Like a sheath of determined out-of-reach-ness stretched over the pages, like a sophisticated damsel in a passing caravan. Ivor, with your lucid mind amidst the fog of unbreachable distance. I felt your potential, it ran like watery might-have-beens through my fingers.
Ivory Arms, Strong Richards, your verbiage is perplexing to a derisive extent. Why does it induce such somnolence? Why do I keep zoning out in the middle of sentences? Like a sheath of determined out-of-reach-ness stretched over the pages, like a sophisticated damsel in a passing caravan. Ivor, with your lucid mind amidst the fog of unbreachable distance. I felt your potential, it ran like watery might-have-beens through my fingers.
August 14, 2023
A wise, ambitious and pioneering work animated by 'the desire to link even the commonplaces of criticism to a systematic exposition of psychology'. It picked up the thread where Aristotle's Poetics had left it, and by doing so it also foreshadowed cognitive poetics, as extensively argued by David West in his I. A. Richards and the rise of cognitive stylistics (London, Bloomsbury, 2013).
'poetry itself is a mode of communication. What it communicates and how it does so and the worth of what is communicated form the subject-matter of criticism. It follows that criticism itself is very largely, though not wholly, an exercise in navigation' (p. 11)
'poetry itself is a mode of communication. What it communicates and how it does so and the worth of what is communicated form the subject-matter of criticism. It follows that criticism itself is very largely, though not wholly, an exercise in navigation' (p. 11)
November 19, 2024
Short, but managed to cover enormous ground. Richards presents a theory of psychology that he uses as a basis for his own theory of value in literature. He also covers many previous prominent theories of value.
The final chapter is a glorious peice of insight about belief, giving voice to feelings that have been rumbling around inside me without form.
For this we are in his debt.
The final chapter is a glorious peice of insight about belief, giving voice to feelings that have been rumbling around inside me without form.
For this we are in his debt.
March 8, 2024
I have so much thoughts on this I'll post a proper review later
Read
July 16, 2025will revisit at some point
May 25, 2021
Old-fashioned to the point of near uselessness in terms of some of its central claims, like the odd anti-Moorean moral naturalism, and sometimes the early-20th Century Cambridge aesthetics of the prose annoys me, but in its formal style of reasoning is an excellent model of HOW to think about literature.
January 2, 2022
Hard for me to understand how this could be so influential. Certainly not worth the time for 21 C readers aiming to build their own critical perspective. No remotely persuasive defense of any particular value/quality as being the ultimate currency of critical evaluation. And essentially all of the psychology material has been rendered false (at best irrelevant) by subsequent study. Like reading a big book on the relationship between art and Lamarckism.
Read
October 26, 2010Espero nunca tener que volver a leerlo. Está interesante pero muy técnico para mí, aunque llega a tener partes humorísticas: "un crítico debe ser arrogante en su lenguaje, juzgar la moral de una obra es trabajo del gobierno y la iglesia, los psicoanalistas son unos ineptos críticos".
December 15, 2014
It´s an interesting book, but it is a little bit too "old" to be useful, but that is just my opinion.
È un libro interessante, ma un po' troppo datato per essere veramente utile, ma questa resta comunuque soltanto la mia opinione a riguardo.
È un libro interessante, ma un po' troppo datato per essere veramente utile, ma questa resta comunuque soltanto la mia opinione a riguardo.
dnf
August 5, 2024DNF @ 6%
So dense and so boring. I was expecting something that rivaled Lewis's "An Experiment in Criticism"—this is not that. Richard's writing sucks the joy out of reading, even if that wasn't his intent.
So dense and so boring. I was expecting something that rivaled Lewis's "An Experiment in Criticism"—this is not that. Richard's writing sucks the joy out of reading, even if that wasn't his intent.
November 23, 2008
Richards' book is essential reading for the writer/critic in search of principles of 'analytic' and 'appreciative' literary understanding.
December 28, 2010
Sure, there's plenty of crackpot psychology (which Richards later recanted) in here, but as you read the book you can see the modern discipline of English studies taking shape.
March 15, 2020
I regard this book as a foundation for the statistical documentation of the psychological phase of reading Us.
Read
August 23, 2017Overall this was really boring. There were some surprises, good and bad. Also it's racist. The most interesting part was the second appendix on Eliot, since Eliot was still contemporary at the time.
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