11
Unlike William Empson, I.A. Richards had nothing good to say about Robert Graves – at least, not in print. Which is rather curious, for Graves exercised a demonstrably positive influence upon his work throughout the 1920s. As we shall see, Graves developed a psychological method of criticism that Richards would in many ways appropriate, even while attacking it; he listed topics for theorizing that Richards would accept by addressing, sometimes rather extensively; and he modelled a manner of close reading that Richards would adopt by adapting it to his ostensibly more scientific purposes. In the end, then, one might read Richards’s animus against Graves as, at least in part, a sign of anxiety about the latter’s influence.
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Before his precocious student Empson spoke to him so excitedly about A Survey of Modernist Poetry in the fall of 1928, I.A. Richards was very much aware of Graves. Miranda Seymour observes that by the autumn of 1928, Richards “had collected all of Graves’s prose works and poems.”1 She suggests that Richards knew Graves’s poetry “well” and that without naming Graves in Science and Poetry (1926), Richards “evidently had him in mind when describing de la Mare’s poems” – implying that unlike the best poet of the day, T.S. Eliot, a poet like Graves or de la Mare was “lost in a world of dreams and out of touch with his times.”2 As we have seen, Richards also associates Graves’s literary criticism with the world of dreams, explicitly crossing swords with him in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) on the question of the appropriateness of Graves’s model of dream interpretation as a model for literary interpretation. In fact, he trashes Graves’s attempt in The Meaning of Dreams (1924) to offer a psychoanalytical reading of Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” So Richards was aware of Graves both as poet and literary theorist, and he approved of neither.
That Richards was aware of Graves’s work as literary theorist is not surprising. As part of his research for his own early works, The Foundation of Aesthetics (1922, co-authored with C.K. Ogden and James Wood), The Meaning of Meaning (1923, co-authored with C.K. Ogden), and Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), research that was all part of his project of establishing the new academic study of literature on a more scientific footing than it had ever had, he surveyed a wide range of contemporary work on aesthetics generally and poetics particularly.3 No one was publishing more frequently and more substantially than Graves on this topic (there were six books in six years, and just as many articles as well), and no one was publishing to more provocative effect among the new generation of undergraduates studying English literature. So there were clearly professional reasons for collecting Graves.
Yet there were more personal reasons, too, for keeping an eye on Graves, for they were positioned as rivals in the 1920s, at least in a certain public’s eye. Richards is today regarded as the more important theorist and the greater critic, and so it was by 1930. Yet, as George Watson observes, when contemporary English literary theory was born in the early 1920s, things were otherwise: “Theory was English, in those days, and the world knew it was. It was not wholly or even mainly academic, and perhaps all the livelier for that. In the 1920s Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves were both working excitedly in the field, and before Richards had published at all.”4 In fact, before the publication of Graves’s On English Poetry (1922), his first work of theory and criticism, Richards had published a number of short but significant essays from 1919 onward that would find their way into his own first books, The Foundation of Aesthetics and The Meaning of Meaning, yet it is also true that Graves was well-known as a poet some years before Richards had published anything, so his name was the more familiar one in the early 1920s.5
The circumstance of their publishing histories placed them together in competition for the attention of readers interested in literary theory. Their earliest books of criticism and theory were often published in the same year and no doubt sat near each other on the bookstore shelves: On English Poetry was published in Britain in May of 1922, with Richards’s co-authored The Foundations of Aesthetics appearing later the same year; The Meaning of Dreams was published in 1924, sufficiently before the publication of The Principles of Literary Criticism later that year for the former to have been quoted in the latter. Their essays sometimes appeared in the same British periodicals. Richards published early essays in Athenaeum, for instance, and Graves did likewise shortly thereafter in its successor Nation & Athenaeum.6 Richards and Graves also published essays regularly in American periodicals throughout the 1920s. For instance, they both published essays in the Saturday Review of Literature: Graves in 1925, Richards in 1926.7 As Richards was collecting Graves’s books, it seems likely that he would have noticed these essays, too.
Watson is correct that Graves’s notoriety as a theorist preceded (and for some time exceeded) that of Richards. Graves’s books were more accessible to the average reader than Richards’s, determinedly avoiding an academic style, and so they were more popular. As Richard Luckett confesses in his Introduction to The Selected Letters of I.A. Richards, he himself preferred Graves’s theories to those of Richards in the 1920s.8 Similarly, John Lehman traces the growth of his sophistication about poetry in the 1920s via the line extending from Graves to Empson: “Seven Types of Ambiguity … I still consider one of the cardinal books of my initiation into the deeper mysteries of poetry, as important for me then as Robert Graves’s On English Poetry had been at an earlier stage.”9 As we know, Empson himself read Graves carefully long before he first met with Richards in the fall of 1928, referring knowledgably to “‘the Robert Graves’ school of criticism” in a book review of 11 May 1928, and he recalled many years later that Graves seemed in the 1920s well ahead of the curve in bringing the science of psychology to bear on literary criticism.10 Even Richards was reading Graves.
For many, Graves was a counter-balance to the relatively aggressive scientism of Richards, whose anatomy of literary criticism in Principles of Literary Criticism actually includes a diagram in which he depicts “the eye … as reading a succession of printed words” by means of an illustration showing interactions amongst eyeball, cells, nerves, ganglia, and so on. Graves confesses in On English Poetry that “It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyse … [M] ost scientists on the other hand, being either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or, if interested, insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters.”11 Explaining in Poetic Unreason his own sense of the virtue of his theoretical position, Graves also explains the appeal to others of his middle way between science and emotion: “the strength of my position lies … in a synthesis suggested between modern analytic psychology and the reading of poetry ‘emotionally,’ if you like, and ‘for its own sake.’”12
Whether or not Richards noted Empson’s recommendation of “‘the Robert Graves’ school of criticism” to the readers of Granta, it is unlikely that, during his research into literary theory at this time, he managed to avoid noticing Graves’s essays and also decided not to read the books by Graves that he was collecting. Moreover, it is quite likely that the salient points of Graves’s literary theories were brought to his attention by his students in the Practical Criticism course of lectures that he was developing at Cambridge from 1923 to 1928. What Graves’s theory lacked in the way of scientific method and disciplined scholarship, it made up for with a wit and ingenuity that provoked interest amongst the teens and twenty-somethings who were entering the new English literature programmes from Oxford and Cambridge to the University of Leeds. Richards was no doubt aware that Graves’s literary theory was a rival to his own for the attention and allegiance of undergraduates.
Certainly Graves’s reputation was not confined to Oxford. When Empson refers to the “‘the Robert Graves’ school of criticism” in May of 1928, he is writing a review of the book Words and Poetry by George Rylands, whom he characterizes as a follower of Graves who lacks the concentration necessary to achieve the “impressive” results of the master, and he is writing in Granta, the playful, irreverent student magazine dedicated to keeping Cambridge up-to-date about what is happening in the world of art and ideas.13 So Empson’s casual reference to the Graves school of criticism assumes that his readers will already have acquired some knowledge of Graves’s conflict theory and his related practical literary analysis. The testimony of Luckett and Lehman about their own interest in Graves during the 1920s suggests that Empson’s assumption was not unwarranted.
Richards might also have been aware of a parallel rivalry as to whether he or Graves was the most stimulating speaker. In terms of their notoriety in this regard, Graves’s fame at Oxford was at least matched by Richards’s at Cambridge. John Paul Russo’s picture of Richards as lecturer in the early 1920s is instructive:
Richards had a stunning impact in the lecture hall. Basil Willey audited the first lectures, which became Principles of Literary Criticism … “I want to testify to their electrifying effect – on me, and on many others, including many senior lecturers” … Joan Bennett said the lectures were “spell-binding,” and Francis Partridge praises him as the “outstanding stimulus” in English studies … Richards was the “prophet we had been waiting for,” said Christopher Isherwood … “he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World” … “We were terrifically thrilled at I.A. Richards’s lectures,” Edward Upward recalled … William Empson … said that “more people would at times come to his lectures than the hall would hold, and he would then lecture in the street outside; somebody said that this had not happened since the Middle Ages.”14
Graves and Richards drew both undergraduates and senior lecturers as members of the audiences; each came across as iconoclastic and ground-breaking; each astounded audiences with hitherto unimaginable interpretations of the role of literature in general and the meaning of certain poems in particular; each came across as speaking about and for – and even, in a sense, from – the future of English studies. Since Principles of Literary Criticism was based on Richards’s early lectures at Cambridge, it is quite likely that the reference to Graves in Chapter Four of the book indicates that Richards included references to Graves in these lectures.
•
Yet however different contemporaries like Luckett and Empson might have perceived Graves and Richards to be, the passage of time allows us to see that their literary theories in the 1920s had much in common. We can appreciate now, for instance, the fact that they shared an intense interest in at least three major influences on the development of literary theory in the twentieth century: Coleridge, Eliot, and the new science of psychology in particular and the new social sciences more generally. These common interests mean that there are many points of convergence and agreement in their work, often where it was most influential on the development of New Criticism.
Graves suggests that “Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible.”15 As Elizabeth Friedmann points out, he and Riding shared an interest in Coleridge that became evident in their famous reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry: “They had both read Coleridge on Shakespeare, and were drawn to his observations about a poem’s ‘multëity of integrated meanings.’”16 Richards calls Biographia Literaria “that lumber-room of neglected wisdom which contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever written upon the subject.”17 Richards finds Coleridge full of such hints: “Coleridge drops the invaluable hint almost inadvertently,” “luminous hints” that “seem to have dazzled succeeding spectators” ( “How otherwise explain why they have been overlooked”?).18 Richards is grateful to Coleridge for suggesting in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria that the poet is one who, in Richards’s terms, experiences “the wholeness of the mind in the creative moment … without suppressions or restrictions.”19 Richards and Graves both accept that the fundamental act of the imagination is the reconciliation of opposites within an aesthetic whole, and, as we shall see, they both also regard this as the key to poetry’s real-world impact: its psychotherapeutic reconciliation of conflicts in the emotional lives of its readers. Graves did not introduce Richards to Coleridge but he showed him how Coleridge in particular, and romantic literary theory in general, could be interpreted in terms of contemporary psychological theory.
Graves and Eliot campaigned together against poetry anthologies in 1920 and planned throughout 1925 and 1926 to collaborate on a critical study of modern poetry until Riding took Eliot’s place in the project, shortly after which Graves quarrelled with Eliot about an insulting review of Riding’s poetry that Eliot had allowed to be published in the Criterion.20 This event marked the end of friendly relations between them for many years to come. From Eliot nonetheless descends Graves’s engagement – individually and in collaboration with Riding – with the topics of modern poetry and anthologies, modern poetry and difficulty, modern poetry and wit, modern poetry and history, and modern poetry and anti-Semitism.21 Indeed, Graves’s work with Riding in A Survey of Modernist Poetry is implicitly an explanation and justification of Eliot’s aesthetic.
Richards was an even closer friend of Eliot’s during these years, having first sought him out in 1920 and thereafter hosting him occasionally at Cambridge. Important aspects of Richards’s aesthetic theories are designed to make poetry like Eliot’s comprehensible, and Eliot’s own writings about impersonality, the poem as object, and significant emotion in poetry, as much as his poetic practice of radical disjunctions and obscure allusions, established many of the topics that Richards addressed throughout the 1920s. Graves and Richards both accepted that Eliot defined modern poetry – at least by his practice, if not by his critical prescriptions – and that therefore any definition of modernism and any theorization of criticism would have to comprehend his work.
Although Richards called Graves a “Freudian,” Graves himself, as we know, preferred to think of himself as non-Freudian in important respects, championing the theories of W.H.R. Rivers as a corrective to Freud’s primitivizing and sexualizing definition of the unconscious.22 On the one hand, Graves knew Rivers personally and received direction from him as to how he might try to cope with the effects of shell-shock, and, on the other hand, he balked at Freud’s conception of the unconscious: “The most general notion, which I cannot accept, is that every grown man and woman has a sort of hidden bogey inside them, with the uncontrolled emotion of a child or savage, and as little sense of the decencies or refinements of civilized life as this same child or savage, and that dreams are the work of this creature.”23 Here, as Watson notes, the views of Graves and Richards converge: “The new psychology went wide, and far beyond the demands of therapy. Richards had studied it at Cambridge, and like Rivers and Graves he felt that Freud’s view of the unconscious, born of the cosseted, introspective world of late-nineteenth-century Vienna, had been excessively sexual and infantile in its emphasis.”24 Yet although Richards agreed with Graves in his criticism of Freud, Richards did not know Freud nearly as well as Watson implies. As Russo observes, “psychoanalysis entered England in 1913, but the war delayed its progress. By the early 1920s Richards had already formed his philosophical position and was too caught up in mapping out his own system to entertain anyone else’s seriously, especially one constructed on entirely different foundations.”25 Although, as Russo also notes, “for many years Richards was tagged as a behaviourist in orientation, and for good reason: he used stimulus-response phraseology, toyed with Pavlov’s conditioned reflex mechanism to depict sign interpretation, debated John B. Watson, and perhaps borrowed from Margaret Washburn’s psychology,” he is best described as following a “functionalist approach” to psychology, interested to trace the evolutionary dynamics by which consciousness is used by human organisms to adapt to their environment – the more efficient organization of attitudes through exposure to poetry representing a selective advantage.26 And so, beyond their agreement that Freud’s theories were not adequate to the task of explaining everyday psychology, let alone the traumas of the Great War, Graves (with his belief that “dreams … have a value on their own account, quite apart from the light that they throw on the waking life”) and Richards (with his “pragmatic psychologism”) appear to follow quite different psychological paths.27
Still, just as we can see now that Coleridge’s emphasis on the reconciling powers of the imagination and Eliot’s conception of poetry as an impersonal act of creation stimulated both critics in the direction of what we now call New Criticism, so we can also see that, different though the psychological paradigms to which they subscribed proved to be, Graves and Richards were each convinced that the explanation of the way words and images become meaningfully associated in the writing and reading of poetry would be found in the study of psychology. And so whether students of literary theory in the 1920s favoured the approach of the one or the other, reading either Graves or Richards at this time confronted them with the suggestion that the modern social sciences would be necessary to a full understanding of the imagination.
According to Graves, in the poet as “spokesman” of the “group-mind of his culture,” “men of smaller scope … hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.”28 Supplementing Shelley with Frazer and Durkheim, Graves aligns poetry with magic and religion as a development and expression of the group mind as conceived anthropologically and sociologically. What Graves has secularized, Richards further secularizes in language that Graves would later describe as “an uneasy mixture of Victorian literary incantation … and bald modern laboratory exposition”29: “In the arts we find the record in the only form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences which have seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating persons. Through the obscure perception of this fact the poet has been regarded as a seer and the artist as a priest … The arts, if rightly approached, supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others.”30
That Graves balks in the 1940s at describing the arts as a record of scientific data should not obscure the fact that he and Richards both present themselves in the 1920s as amateur anthropologists able to demystify the origin and function of poetry. They take from Biographia Literaria the language of reconciliation and the conception of the imagination and adapt them to the twentieth-century – a post-Frazer and post-Durkheim context in which magic, religion, and poetry, diachronically and synchronically related, are conceived as a development and expression of the group mind.
•
Despite their being positioned by students as rival literary theorists, and despite there being significant points of contention between their literary theories, there remains an emotional energy expressed in Richards’s engagement with Graves in Principles of Literary Criticism that is surplus to the requirements of his argument. He deploys a rhetoric of disdain against Graves that is deployed against no one else in the book, even though it is clear that Graves is a surrogate for Freud. And he does so in the context of an argument that is neither accurate nor effective: he misidentifies Graves as a follower of Freud, and he pretends to displace Graves’s reading of “Kubla Khan” with a reading that merely supplements it. There is more sound and fury and less sense in Richards’s dealing with Graves than with any other figure.
His complaint about Graves’s thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught is based, at least in part, on misunderstanding: Richards refers to Graves as a “Freudian” yet Graves explicitly distances himself from both Freud and Jung (as Richards himself knows) and defines himself as inspired instead by W.H.R. Rivers. For example, Graves concludes The Meaning of Dreams with the reading of “Kubla Khan” that Richards notes, to demonstrate the interpretive potential available to literary critics who apply Rivers’s understanding of the dream state to the literary state – the state of inspiration that produces illogical or fantastic romantic poetry. Moreover Graves opens The Meaning of Dreams explaining that: “Dr. Rivers … traces the part played in dreams by what is called Dissociation, that is the breaking up of the human individual into two or more rival ‘selves’ under the stress of difficult circumstances … [W] hen we are up against a problem that has two possible ways out … we split up [into] two selves, each self standing for one of these opposing courses of action … When a person is in a conflict between two selves, and one self is stronger than the other throughout the waking life, the weaker side becomes victorious in dream.”31
By allowing expression to the repressed self, dreams of conflict balance the personality that has split in waking life. In case a reader thinks that he and Rivers follow Freud and Jung on this point, Graves hastens to add – as we have seen above in the section on Empson – that “the so-called ‘unconscious self’ … is not the sort of primitive bogey that people think, but is just the self which in conflict happens at the time to be beaten.”32 Further distancing himself from Freud and Jung, Graves suggests that “the usual claim of modern dream-interpreters is not justified, when they say that once a dream of conflict is interpreted the conflict thereby ends.”33 A symbol’s effectiveness might thereby disappear, but not necessarily the conflict: “If a dream of conflict is interpreted and the conflict remains strong, the dream will merely change its symbols and come again in a new guise.”34
Again, as we have already seen, the work of Rivers is the key to understanding all of Graves’s criticism in the 1920s prior to his collaboration with Riding. In On English Poetry, which was dedicated to Rivers, Graves treats romantic poetry as analogous to dream, declaring that “emotional conflict is necessary for the birth of true poetry.”35 Poetry’s usefulness for both the writer and the reader, in fact, consists of the way it deals with emotional conflict. For the poet, poetry is “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas.”36 After this “spontaneous process … over which the poet has no direct control,” it “becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus [ “the unforeseen fusion in his mind”] in the most effective way possible” so that the poem can function for the reader as it does for the poet: “Poetry … is a form of psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind … poetry has the power of homeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them … with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished.”37
In his psychoanalytical account of “Kubla Khan,” Graves suggests that the fact that the poem had “very few alterations after the first draft” marks it as an inspired poem better read as analogous to a dream of conflict (expressing conflicts about Coleridge’s married life, his opium addiction, his disappointed ambitions) than as a poem that “had not and never could have any particular meaning attached to it” (appreciable only in terms of “its simple beauty of images and rhythm”) or as a poem whose meaning might be found in a “literary source” (Graves implies that any such question has either been answered by Coleridge’s declaration of Purchas’s Pilgrimage and Maurice’s History of Hindoostan as his sources or been frustrated by Coleridge’s refusal to name other sources).38
According to Graves, Coleridge is Kubla, “making himself half-divine on the strength of his genius, not only to impress his friends who are losing confidence in him, but also as a weapon against his ambitious and disillusioned wife.”39 Chasms, caverns, and caves, as well as rivers that burst high, run mazy, and fall, all emerge as symbols from Coleridge’s imagination as symbols in a dream emerge from the state of deep sleep: “What of the romantic chasm and the woman wailing for her demon lover? I would suggest that this refers to the former strong passion that Coleridge had felt for his wife who was now bitterly reproaching him for his supposed unfaithfulness … The cave into which this river sinks to run underground in the lifeless ocean would represent … his wife’s [pregnant] condition at the time complicating his attitude towards her … In a more general sense the river is probably also the life of man, from birth to death; we understand from the poem that Coleridge has determined to shun the mazy complications of life by retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and opium.”40
The apparently incredulous Richards does not dignify this reading with direct comment upon any particular point, regarding none of it as worth summarizing, but all of it as worthy of disdain: “The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught.”41 According to Richards, readers can imagine whatever reading they like – as Graves has done – since “nearly all speculations as to what went on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind.”42 And so, “whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. They offer far too happy a hunting-ground for uncontrollable conjecture.”43
Of course Graves is not concerned that his conjecture be correct, nor is he very interested in controlling his conjecture. His primary purpose is to persuade readers that there is always a logic in the mental processes of poets even if it is only the logic of idiosyncratic personal associations, and that such logic accounts for a poem’s words, images, ideas, and events no matter how fantastic these might seem. Thus in Poetic Unreason, Graves entertains the idea of Herbert as having been inspired to write a poem after listening to Donne’s account of having been invited by a tavern girl to sleep with her. His point is not that we need to know what actually happened in Herbert’s mind, but rather that we need to know that something of this sort – even if very different from this conjecture – will have happened in his mind. Similarly, advancing considerably more scholarly research, he constructs a picture in The Meaning of Dreams of Coleridge and Keats wrestling in their poetry with conflicts among physical disease, desire for women, and poetic ambition. Trained to control conjecture by the discipline of scientific method, Richards is disdainful of the psychoanalytical methodology that Graves proclaims in The Meaning of Dreams. Graves’s method is determinedly “poetic,” rather than scientific:
I admit frankly that in certain cases for the sake of the argument I have run together two and even three records of dreams that have come to my notice, where the conflict was in outline similar. My reasons for doing so have been to make the argument clearer, the book less of a catalogue and the dreams themselves more interesting to the reader … In taking this course, I have availed myself of the licence readily allowed to poets and novelists, that of telling the truth by a condensation and dramatization of their experiences of life – which is, of course, the method of dreams themselves and a very good one. There is no reason that I can see for scientists to object to this way of writing so long as the general principles of classification satisfy them. Their method of recording each case minutely and conscientiously may be sure, but is at any rate extremely slow … [I] f occasionally in order to illustrate a point I have had … to embroider a bare outline of history with picturesque detail, such additions do not make the story any the less true as illustrating the general mechanism of the fantastic dream which arises out of the conflict; and indeed the easiness with which the images have formed in my mind with a complicated cross-reference existing between them … is in itself proof of the constructive and direct powers of this fantastic method of thought, a proof of the value of dreams on their account.44
Richards can perhaps be forgiven for balking at Graves’s displacement of proof according to the scientific method of thought by proof according to the fantastic method of thought. To him, Graves’s reconciliation of scientific and emotional readings of poetry must have involved precious little science.
Yet because of what Graves avers about a possible psychological explanation of “Kubla Khan” in particular and about the value of his method for the interpretation of dreams in general, no one suffers harsher treatment in Principles of Literary Criticism than him. Although Richards also complains of the poor quality of the practical criticism of the arts produced by Freud and Jung – “to judge by the published work of Freud upon Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe … psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics” – his whipping boy is Graves. The latter is not only named more often and criticized at greater length than either Freud or Jung, but he is also subject to a pun on his name: “the attempt to display the inner working of the artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers.”45
Empson would be inspired by Graves’s insights into “the constructive and direct powers” of the “fantastic method of thought” that Graves identified in poetry and dream in general (and identified often in his own poetry and dreams in particular – “images have formed in my mind with a complicated cross-referencing existing between them”), but Richards suggests that the only virtue of Graves’s reading is a negative one: it makes it easy to show that in psychoanalytical speculations about what went on in the poet’s mind “the most plausible explanations are apt to depend upon features whose actual causation is otherwise.”46 Richards himself claims to know the “actual causation” and “simple explanation” of many of the features of “Kubla Khan” that Graves makes the basis of his psychoanalytical interpretation, despite declaring that “nearly all speculations as to what went on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind.”47
Richards points out that the appearance and function of Coleridge’s river that rises in a fountain, then runs mazy for miles, and finally falls dispersingly into an ocean can be accounted for in other and more objectively verifiable ways – in fact, by the literary scholarship that Graves gives as short a shrift as scientific method. With great rhetorical flourish, Richards advises the reader how he might save himself from Graves’s “thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught”:
If he will … open Paradise Lost, Book IV, at line 223, and read onwards for sixty lines, he will encounter the actual sources of not a few of the images and phrases of the poem. In spite of –
Southward through Eden went a River large,
Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hill
Pass’d underneath ingulft …
in spite of –
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the neather flood …
in spite of –
Rowling on Orient Pearl and Sands of Gold
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar …
in spite of –
Meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst …
his doubts may still linger until he reaches
Nor where Abassin Kings their issue Guard, Mount Amara.
and one of the most cryptic points in Coleridge’s poem, the Abyssinian maid, singing of Mount Abora, finds its simple explanation … From one source or another almost all the matter of Kubla Khan came to Coleridge in a similar fashion … This very representative instance of the unconscious working of a poet’s mind may serve as a not inapposite warning against one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism.48
It is odd that although his account of the unconscious factors at work in “Kubla Khan” is different from Graves’s account of such unconscious factors, Richards does not see that the two accounts are not mutually exclusive. It remains open to Graves (or any member of the Graves school of criticism) to counter that the unconscious processes that he describes also account for the more text-based process of literary influence or verbal echoing that Richards documents.49 As we have seen, for instance, Empson, anticipating resistance to his explanation that the word “enrolled” occurred to John Ford as the most fitting one for a certain passage in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore because of several ambiguities in the meaning of the word that make for appropriate associations at this point in the play, argues as follows: “You may say this is fanciful, and he was only looking for a word that contained the letter ‘r’ which kept up the style, but in that case it is these associations which explain how that particular word came into his mind.”50 Similarly, Graves might just as easily have claimed that the state of mind that he describes in Coleridge (anxiety about his career, his marriage, his health) is responsible for the pattern of literary recollection of the particular passages from Paradise Lost to which Richards draws attention. In fact, Graves implies as much in On English Poetry when he announces his axiom: “‘Poetry contains nothing haphazard,’ which follows naturally on the theory connecting poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate a personal significance – a cipher that can usually be decoded from another context.”51 From Graves’s point of view, Richards’s reading implicitly reduces Coleridge’s poem to a cold-blooded exercise, albeit an unconscious one. Graves regards information of the sort that Richards provides about Coleridge’s literary sources as merely supplemental to his own kind of interpretation. Richards implies that his reading of the poem is objectively preferable to the one by Graves, celebrating his “simple explanation” of the poem in terms of its “actual sources.” Yet he actually demonstrates nothing conclusive beyond his contempt for Graves’s method.
One wonders, moreover, why Richards harpoons a minnow like Graves when he also tells us that he has equally serious criticisms to make of the leviathans Freud and Jung. Presumably the students to whom Richards was lecturing at Cambridge in the early 1920s cited Graves more often than they cited Freud or Jung when they posed questions to Richards, and did so far more credulously and approvingly than Richards could tolerate. Students like Luckett, Lehman, and Empson were clearly enamoured of conflict theory; Empson cannot have been the first student to have quoted Graves to Richards. One can hear in the rhetorical flourish of this passage about what Richards regards as the actual unconscious sources of Coleridge’s poem something of the manner with which he dismissed the Robert Graves school of criticism. The dismissive punning on Graves’s name probably comes right out of Richards’s lectures, where it would have been sure to get a laugh – especially with just the right exaggerated pronunciation and intonation.
Richards’s description of Graves as a “Freudian,” in complete disregard of Graves’s attempts to avoid such a label, suggests either that he does not know enough or, more likely, that he does not care enough, about the distinctions amongst Freud, Jung, and Rivers to be troubled by the inappropriateness of asserting the inadequacy of Freudian literary analysis by ostensibly demonstrating the inadequacy of Graves’s literary analysis. To Richards, they are all cut from the same cloth: they promote the idea that one finds in poetry an overdetermination of meaning that can be traced to the most lawless and unaccountable of the human provinces: the unconscious. Richards’s urging of a “simple explanation” of “Kubla Khan” in “actual sources” thus amounts to a reassertion of what Graves defines as the conventional, classical ideal for poetry: one word, one meaning – the very ideal for poetry that Graves enlists Rivers (and, less directly, Freud and Jung) to overturn.52
1 Miranda Seymour, “Robert Graves, Laura Riding, and William Empson,” accessed 1 December 2012, http://www.robertgraves.org/issues/37/2632_article_16.pdf.
2 Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), 124.
3 I.A. Richards, C.K. Ogden, James Wood, The Foundation of Aesthetics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922); C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1923).
4 George Watson, Never Ones for Theory: England and the War of Ideas (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2001), 14.
5 See, for example, “Art and Science,” The Athenaeum, (27 June 1919): 534–5, “Emotion and Art,” The Athenaeum (18 July 1919): 630–1, and “The Instruments of Criticism: Expression,” The Athenaeum (31 October 1919): 1131, all three essays repr. in I.A. Richards, Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 3–15.
6 See, for example, the essays by I.A. Richards mentioned in the preceding note; and also Robert Graves, “Mr Hardy and the Pleated Skirt,” Nation & Athenaeum, 33 (7 July 1923): 451–2.
7 See, for example, I.A. Richards, “Science and Poetry,” Saturday Review of Literature, 2.45 (5 June 1926): 833–4, and Robert Graves, “Sensory Vehicles of Poetic Thought,” Saturday Review of Literature, 1 (31 January 1925): 489–90.
8 Richard Luckett, introduction to The Selected Letters of I.A. Richards, ed. John Constable (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), xii.
9 John Lehman, The Whispering Gallery (London: Longmans, 1955), 151.
10 Empson, “Curds and Whey,” The Granta (11 May 1928): 419, quoted by John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 217; Empson, quoted by Haffenden, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 431n10.
11 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), vii–viii.
12 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), x.
13 William Empson, “Curds and Whey,” 217.
14 John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 92–3.
15 Graves, On English Poetry, 132.
16 Elizabeth Friedmann, A Mannered Grace: the Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson (New York: Persea Books, 2005), 98.
17 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 140.
18 Ibid., 189, 191, 191.
19 Ibid., 191.
20 See Paul O’Prey’s account of the letters exchanged between Graves and Eliot in 1927 in In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946, ed. Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 176–9.
21 On this latter topic, see Donald J. Childs, “Generating Modernism and New Criticism from Antisemitism: Laura Riding and Robert Graves Read T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry,” in Modernism and Race, ed. Len Platt (Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 77–96.
22 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 30.
23 Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 16.
24 Watson, Never Ones for Theory, 16.
25 Russo, I.A. Richards, 189–90.
26 Ibid., 174.
27 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 105; Russo, I.A. Richards, 273.
28 Graves, On English Poetry, 123, 123, 124.
29 Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (London: Cape, 1943), 406.
30 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 33.
31 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 19–20.
32 Ibid., 23.
33 Ibid., 90.
34 Ibid.
35 Graves, On English Poetry, 22.
36 Ibid., 13.
37 Ibid., 13, 13, 13, 85.
38 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 146, 145, 145, 156, 156.
39 Ibid., 156.
40 Ibid., 157–8.
41 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 30.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 29.
44 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 109–11.
45 Ibid., 29–30, 29.
46 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 111; Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 30.
47 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 30.
48 Ibid., 30–1.
49 Ibid., 31, 30.
50 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of Its Effects in English Verse, 1st ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 196.
51 Graves, On English Poetry, 32.
52 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 31.