12
Perhaps the energy invested by Richards to distance himself so publicly from Graves is explicable by a sense of rivalry that he felt with Graves. Or perhaps the cavalier methodology by which Graves proposed to join psychology and literary criticism really did call for just such a sharply dismissive response as the more scientific Richards gave it. Or perhaps Richards writes in anxious misprision of the precursor critic: Graves was first upon the scene and therefore must be misread if Richards himself is to be a strong critic and theorist. Whatever the case, Richards’s dismissal of Graves belies significant similarities and significant points of contact in the 1920s between their literary theories and their critical practice.
For instance, Richards’s account of poetry as communication and his account of the value of poetry as “the two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest” in Principles of Literary Criticism are more like than unlike Graves’s treatment of these topics in On English Poetry and The Meaning of Dreams.1 In addition, a number of the ideas advanced in On English Poetry and The Meaning of Dreams, as well as ideas announced in the essays that would become chapters of Poetic Unreason, are also important stimuli for – if not the source of – Richards’s account in Principles of Literary Criticism of the psychological dimensions of the writing and reading of poetry. Like Empson, Richards systematized and said better many things that Graves said first, and also like Empson, he usually did not bother to mention Graves by name as the one whose ideas he was engaging with.
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The portrait of the artist as a reconciler of conflict is Graves’s main claim to fame as a literary theorist by the mid-1920s. In On English Poetry, he defines “the typical poet” as follows:
A poet in the fullest sense is … an intermediary between the small-group consciousness of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To … many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to … many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practicing his exceptionally developed powers of intuition … But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous, more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of its parts.2
In Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards suggests that the poet represents the community or the race in the same way: the poet “is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself. His experiences, those at least which give value to his work, represent conciliations of impulses which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled and conflicting. His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered.”3 There is little to distinguish between the terms of the two passages; the shared language of conflict and (re) conciliation is notable. And there is even less to distinguish between their content.
As Graves sees it, the value of poetry’s reconciling function, for the reader as well as for the poet, is medicinal or therapeutic: “Poetry … is a form of psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble.”4 For poetry to serve as a cure for the reader, the latter must not only share the poet’s emotional conflict, but must also be able to translate into his own experience the experience that the poet communicates to him in the form of the poem:
The poet, once emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over the ground with minute care and makes everything sure, so that when his poem is presented to the reader, the latter is thrown off his balance temporarily by the novelty of the ideas involved … He is carried away in spite of himself … [T] he reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied conclusion laid for him to discover, and … finally carries it off as his own. Even where a conclusion is definitely expressed in a poem the reader often deceives himself into saying, “I have often thought that before, but never so clearly,” when as a matter of fact he has just been unconsciously translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own.5
Richards also sees poetry as having the psychological value of advancing the reader “from a chaotic to a better organised state,” “typically through the influence of other minds”; moreover, “Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused.”6 According to Richards, “the after-effects, the permanent modifications in the structure of the mind, which works of art can produce, have been overlooked … [A] mong all the agents by which ‘the widening of the sphere of human’ sensibility may be brought about, the arts are the most powerful, since it is through them that men may most co-operate and in these experiences that the mind most easily and with least interference organises itself.”7 Graves is certainly not one of those who overlooked the after-effects of poetry on the mind. Indeed, he is in advance of Richards in celebrating poetry’s power of reorganizing mental life in a more efficient way than the reader would otherwise be capable of achieving.
Just as for Graves poetry is a process of “healing other men’s minds similarly troubled,” a process depending on a reader’s feeling himself so similar to the poet as to think, “I have often thought that before, but never so clearly,” so for Richards a person achieves functional improvement through the reading of poetry by means of a circuit’s being established between normal poet and normal reader.8 According to Richards, if the poet’s “experience does not tally with that of those with whom he communicates, there will be failure.”9 Despite the seemingly “utterly eccentric experience” that we often associate with “great innovating artists,” “so much must be alike in the nature of all men, their situation in the world so much the same … that variation both wide and successful is most unlikely.”10 And so “the ways in which the artist will differ from the average will as a rule presuppose an immense degree of similarity. They will be further developments of organisations already well advanced in the majority … We should not forget that finer organisation is the most successful way of relieving strain, a fact of relevance in the theory of evolution. The new response will be more advantageous than the old, more successful in satisfying varied appetencies.”11
For both Richards and Graves, poetry “is the most successful way of relieving strain.”12 Richards prefers the terms of evolutionary psychology to the terms of psychoanalysis that Graves uses but the psychological mechanism is the same: poetry stimulates in the reader the reconciliation of contradictory, or opposed, or divergent impulses in an advantageously balanced system of emotional energies. For both Richards and Graves, it is a question of whatever gets you through the night, whether you are an individual facing personal conflicts, or whether you are all humanity, organizing yourself through an evolutionary process.
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Richards not only follows Graves in describing response to poetry as a matter of unconscious affiliation of experiences between normal reader and normal poet, he also describes the same psychological process of emotional release, reconciliation, and reorganization: “The mind which is, so far as can be seen, least wasteful, we take as a norm or standard, and, if possible, we develop in our degree similar experiences. The taking of the norm is for the most part done unconsciously by mere preference, by the shock of delight which follows the release of stifled impulse into organised freedom. Often the choice is mistaken … Little by little experience corrects such illusory preference, not through reflection – almost all critical choices are irreflective, spontaneous, as some say – but through unconscious reorganization of impulses. We rarely change our tastes, we rather find them changed.”13 There is little difference between the “release of stifled impulse into organized freedom,” after “the shock of delight,” for Richards’s reader and the solution of emotional conflict for Graves’s reader on “recovery from the first excitement,” after “being thrown off his balance temporarily,” and “being carried away in spite of himself.”14 Similarly, Richards’s conclusion that a reader’s “critical choices” are a function of an “irreflective, spontaneous … unconscious reorganization of impulses” is little different from Graves’s suggestion that “the reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied conclusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself that he has reached it independently, finally carries it off as his own … when as a matter of fact he has just been unconsciously translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own, and finding the formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the thought is originally his.”15
In fact, Richards’s reference here to “some” who say that critical choices are “spontaneous” may well be an allusion to Graves’s work. In On English Poetry, for example, the word “spontaneous” is prominent from the first page onward. Graves defines two types of poetry: “spontaneous Poetry over which the poet has no control” ( “the unforeseen fusion in his mind of apparently contradictory emotional ideas”), and “Poetry over which he has a certain conscious control”: “I would suggest that every poem worthy of the name has its central idea, its nucleus, formed by this spontaneous process; later it becomes the duty of the poet as craftsman to present this nucleus in the most effective way possible, by practising poetry more consciously as an art.”16 Partial more to the spontaneous form of poetry, and ultimately regarding all poetry as spontaneous in origin, Graves nonetheless acknowledges that each type has its weaknesses and that “each is helpless without the other”: “The weakness of originally unspontaneous poetry seems to be that the poet has only the very small conscious part of his experience to draw upon, and therefore in co-ordinating the central images, his range of selection is narrower and the links are only on the surface. On the other hand, spontaneous poetry untested by conscious analysis has the opposite weakness of being liable to surface faults and unintelligible thought-connections.”17
Graves explains that a spontaneous poem “is the surprise that comes after thoughtlessly rubbing a mental Aladdin’s lamp,” so the problem becomes how to communicate this surprise to the reader.18 According to Graves, the poet “creates in passion, then by a reverse process of analyzing, he tests the implied suggestions and corrects them on common-sense principles so as to make them apply universally.”19 In terms of his original metaphor, “If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from Aladdin’s Lamp, this conscious part of the art is like the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, lighted candle and rake to make the village ghost … The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, and surest of its effect, but the turnip Ghost is usually enough to startle rustics who wander at night, into prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other unusual state.”20
When the poet’s magic is successful, the reader will experience the same unforeseen fusion of apparently contradictory emotional ideas that the poet experienced: “The power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides.”21 It is homoeopathic psychotherapy. In “spontaneous poetry,” the “rhythm of emotions,” “the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous impressions” constitutes a “musical side of poetry” that is “not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in itself.”22 According to Graves, “Wordsworth’s lines ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ are … an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously … and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we can all recognize.”23 And so “bad poetry is simply the work of a man who solves his emotional problems to his own satisfaction but not to anybody else’s.”24 In each case, a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is as fundamental to the creation of the poem as it is to the personally transformative reading of the poem by the reader that Graves imagines.
The language of Graves is simpler than that of Richards, and his images livelier and more amusing, but his point anticipates the one made by Richards: the shock of surprise produced by spontaneous poetry reorganizes the impulses and startles one into a new life.
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In an address delivered at the University of Leeds in December of 1922, published in the North American Review as “What is Bad Poetry?” in September of 1923, Graves reflects further on the implications both for aesthetic theory and for literary history of the psychotherapeutic function that he locates at the heart of the writing and reading of poetry.25 It turns out that the reader’s response to poetry is as much responsible for bad poetry as bad poets are. Richards agrees, and he spares no effort throughout the 1920s to bring this point home to students and literary critics.
As noted above, denying that “there is somewhere already written a wholly good poetry … that is always good poetry and always good medicine for any age,” and denying that “there is a kind of poetry which does not and cannot serve any possible need either for the poet or the reader,” Graves argues that “aesthetic canons of good and bad” are relative (a function of time and place) and pragmatic (a function of usefulness): “One age values emotional intensity, another values sophistication and emotional restraint; one age demands a high standard of craftsmanship, another demands an anarchic abandon of grammatical or logical control … My suggestion is that these criteria are not accidental or foreseeable; they represent a need on the part of critics for poetry that will repair certain deficiencies or maintain certain successes not only in poetry of the past, but also in the social, religious and scholastic conditions at the time obtaining.”26 For Graves, a society’s reaction to poetry is always changing, but it is not necessarily the case for Graves as it is for Richards that a society’s reaction to poetry is an agent in the process of evolution, rather than merely an epiphenomenal shadow of such a process.
In On English Poetry, he had worked out the implications of such a reader-response determination of poetic value for the task of discriminating between genuine and fake poetry. On the one hand, “the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet felt not to be the ‘highest’ forms of Poetry … Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no poetry.”27 Genuine poetry emerges from conflict; fake poetry does not emerge from conflict, but pretends to do so: “As in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is a policeman.”28
On the other hand, through the response of later generations of readers to a fake poem, it may come to be accepted as genuine: “A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural and structural competence that the borrower has used in synthesizing the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of Parnassus winks and says ‘Pass Friend!’”29 Thus “hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common courtesy as ‘magicians.’”30 A non-policing Posterity, it seems, may project its own conflicts onto the poem in such a way as to turn a fake poem into a functionally genuine poem.
Graves makes a similar point in one of the passages in Poetic Unreason that caught Empson’s eye, when he imagines a scenario by which a poem execrated in one age becomes celebrated later as the best poem that the age produced. The problem of the fake poem is the same as the problem of the bad poem: in the fullness of time, readers may put into the poem what the bad poet did not. And there would seem to be no reason why the good poem should not be liable to the same problem, for lapse of time will make it hard for posterity to tell whether the conflict that the poem represents is genuine or fake: “Poetry is the protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming possible to put synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the latter perhaps only a sentimentality?”31
Richards reflects on similar problems in his discussion of the stock responses that bad poets can invoke and that bad readers can project onto virtually any poem. The biggest problem that the stock response poses, according to Richards, is its disabling of the psychological mechanism of “unconscious reorganization of impulses” within the reader. It disables this process by an inappropriate and inefficient fixing of attitudes, emotions, and impulses in a closed circuit. “Stock conventional attitudes” are ideas that gain “fixity or privileged standing … not by any special suitability to circumstances … but much more by social suggestion and by accidents which withdraw us from actual experience.”32 These stock conventional attitudes, “as we dwell in them, become more and more difficult to pass.”33 Whether in the workaday world or in reading poetry, “the losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of existence than the child. He is even in the most important things functionally unable to face facts: do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses.”34
Regular doses of good poetry might recover a person from such an artificial and limited existence, but such an outcome is not guaranteed. And so for Richards the “strongest objection” to a sonnet by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that he analyses – a poem that Richards finds to be dependent upon stock responses, a poem that Graves would call “fake” poetry – is that “a reader who … thoroughly enters into and enjoys this class of verse, is necessarily so organized that he will fail to respond to poetry.”35 Poets of this sort keep a reader trapped within his stock responses. According to Richards, “Time and much varied experience might change him sufficiently, but by then he would no longer be able to enjoy such verse, he would no longer be the same person.”36 We do not so much change our taste, it seems, as find it spontaneously changed, with no way back.
For Richards, as for Graves, genuine poetry depends for its existence as much on the reader’s response during the reading of it as on the poet’s experience and expression during the making of it. And they both feel that good poetry has never before required a stronger, more comprehensive defence against the badness of fake poets and the badness of weak readers.
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We recall that according to Richards, along with “an account of value,” “an account of communication” is one of “the two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest.”37 One of the distinctive features of the mind is that it is “an instrument for communication,” the emphasis that natural selection has placed on this human ability being “overwhelming.”38 And so “it is as a communicator that it is most profitable to consider the artist,” although “the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with communication, apparently regardless of its [art’s] communicative efficacy.”39 According to Richards, the result of the artist’s simply “getting it right” is that he communicates effectively, no matter how much he may have neglected the goal of communication: “The very process of getting the work ‘right’ has itself … immense communicative consequences … The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in others.”40 In fact, “those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect tend … to fall into a subordinate rank.”41
Graves presents virtually the same observations about the nature of communication in poetry in his essay “What is Bad Poetry?” According to Graves, the poet stands no chance of even knowing what he wants to communicate before the poem is written: “I wish to stress two important psychological phenomena: first, that no poet can ever rationally state beforehand what he is going to write about: second, that no poet can rationally state exactly what he has written and why; in effect, what the conflict is or what the new factor is that solves the conflict, until after completely emerging from the mood that made him write the poem.”42 He develops these points explicitly in relation to the question of poetry as communication: “the act of composition is primarily not communication between the individual poet and his neighbours, but an inter-communication of the different selves formed within the individual in relation to the various groups with which he has come in contact.”43 Generally, the poem’s “primary function” is a making sure of the unforeseen fusion of emotional ideas for the benefit of the poet himself:
Although there are a number of poems in which the communicative spirit is present from the start as a factor in the conflict, where the poet has missionary intentions or wishes to use the poem as a social weapon, yet in a vast number of cases the poem as it appears in first draft has no communicative intention at all … [M] y experience of the first drafts of other poets’ work and my own is that generally while the poem is what I might call a private poem not yet dispassionately viewed as a marketable commodity, the neat hand-writing, cleanliness, and orderliness of the communicative spirit are conspicuously absent. But when the poet wakes up to the poem as a poem … he begins the secondary or tertiary elaboration … But by then the poem has already fulfilled its primary function and has become a commodity or a record, nothing more.44
And so “poetry is in its first writing and first reading none but the poet’s own business and afterwards is elaborated only for a limited group of readers.”45 Graves makes the very distinction that Richards makes between poets “not … consciously concerned with communication” and poets paying “close separate attention to the communicative aspect.”46 Both agree that the poet’s job is to get it right for himself – that is, to say to himself what needs to be said.
In fact, Graves’s discussion of the balance between the poet’s desire to produce something for himself and something for others is remarkably similar to Richards’s later discussion of the same topic. According to Richards,
How far desire actually to communicate, as distinguished from desire to produce something with communicative efficacy (however disguised), is an “unconscious motive” in the artist is a question to which we need not hazard an answer … What concerns criticism is not the avowed or unavowed motives of the artist, however interesting these may be to psychology, but the fact that his procedure does, in the majority of instances, make the communicative efficacy of his work correspond with his own satisfaction and sense of its rightness … In any case it is certain that no mere careful study of communicative possibilities, together with any desire to communicate, however intense, is ever sufficient without close natural correspondence between the poet’s impulses and possible impulses in the reader. All supremely successful communication involves this correspondence, and no planning can take its place. Nor is the deliberate conscious attempt directed to communication so successful as the unconscious method.47
Virtually every point that Richards makes here has already been made by Graves in “What is Bad Poetry?”
In collaboration with Riding, Graves develops these ideas further in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. They suggest that the surest way for the poet to guarantee miscommunication is to try to write down to the reader for whom “clearness … is really the suppression of everything in the poem over and above the average standard of comprehension”: “A poem, therefore, that really is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which nevertheless conforms to it actually obscures its real meaning the more it observes this standard.”48 Their further elaboration of Graves’s original point brings it even closer to Richards’s formulation of it when they suggest that “A poem that is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which, disregarding it, fulfills all its potentialities, makes its real meaning clearer and clearer.”49 Just as for Richards the trick for the artist seems to be to please himself ( “what he is making is something which is beautiful in itself, or satisfying to him personally, or something expressive, in a more or less vague sense, of his emotions, or of himself”), so for Graves, and for Riding and Graves, the only standard of comprehension that counts is that of the poem’s best reader, the writer himself: “If a variable standard of comprehension were admitted, the poem would have the privilege of developing itself to the degree of clearness corresponding with the degree of comprehension in the reader most above the average. As the poet himself would thus be allowed as a possible reader of his own poem, it would be encouraged to attain its maximum, not its minimum, of real clearness.”50 As Riding goes on to say in Contemporaries and Snobs, developing Graves’s point even further, “The poem itself is supreme, above persons; judging rather than judged; keeping criticism at a respectful distance; it is even able to make a reader of its author.”51 Graves and Richards and Riding all agree: to say that “the very process of getting the work ‘right’” maximizes its communicative power is simply to recognize the poet as his own best reader, a recognition that Graves came to first.52
Richards, on the one hand, and the team of Riding and Graves, on the other, follow up on Graves by suggesting that compromise between the standards of the average reader and those of the poet as the reader of his own work is inadvisable. Riding and Graves suggest that Cummings’s poem “Among/these/red pieces of/day” “combines two qualities of clearness: clearness of composition in the interests of the poem as a thing in itself, clearness of transmittance in the interests of the reader.”53 They imply that “the poet has been wrong in paying too much attention to the rendering of the poem for the reader” and that “if he had allowed it to be more difficult, if he had concentrated exclusively on the poem as a thing in itself, it would have seemed less freakish.”54 And so Riding and Graves announce that “When … bare, undressed ideas are found in poetry instead of the rhetorical devices by which poets try to ‘put over’ their ideas … the poet has cut off all his communications.”55 For Richards, of course, communication is all, and since “the deliberate conscious attempt directed to communication” is not “so successful as the unconscious indirect method,” “the artist is entirely justified in his apparent neglect of the main purpose of his work.”56 They all agree that benignly neglecting his communications is the best poet’s best way of ensuring them.
Interestingly, Richards’s Graves-like observation that “the unconscious indirect method” of communicating meaning in poetry is more effective than “the deliberate conscious attempt directed at communication” immediately preludes his invocation of Graves in Chapter Four of Principles of Literary Criticism, “Communication and the Artist”: “Since the poet’s unconscious motives have been alluded to, it may be well at this point to make a few additional remarks. Whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation … [T] he 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 … Mr Graves has attempted to analyse Kubla Khan … The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught.”57 It is as though Richards anticipates that readers will recognize that he has paraphrased in his preceding paragraphs Graves’s observations regarding poetry as communication, requiring him next, therefore, to distance himself from Graves by explicit criticism of his conflict theory. Having summoned the spectre of Graves, an anxious Richards proceeds to exorcise an oppressive sense of belatedness – in part by “a not inapposite warning against one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism” (as distinct from his own application of psychology in criticism), and in part by the kind of misreading of similarity as difference that occludes his own debt to Graves here.
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Further evidence that Richards read Graves’s essay “What is Bad Poetry?” very attentively is suggested by his comments on how poetic communication is facilitated by the special nature of the poet: “He is pre-eminently accessible to external influences and discriminating with regard to them. He is distinguished further by the freedom in which all these impressions are held in suspension, and by the ease with which they form new relations between themselves. The greatest difference between the artist or poet and the ordinary person is found, as has often been pointed out, in the range, delicacy, and freedom of the connections he is able to make between different elements of his experience.”58 However much it has “often been pointed out,” Graves is the most recent to have defined the poet in print, both in On English Poetry and in “What is Bad Poetry?” by these very terms. In “What is Bad Poetry,” he explains his assertion that the poet’s primary responsibility is to communicate with himself by quoting his explanation in On English Poetry of how the poet’s special nature facilitates the inter-communication within him of external influences from the community as a whole:
the act of composition is primarily not communication between the individual poet and his neighbours, but an inter-communication of the different selves formed within the individual in relation to the various groups with which he has come in contact. I do not wish to retreat far from what I wrote in my previous volume:
“A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small group-minds of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions, among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member and to so many more has he virtually added himself as supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him at first appear everywhere as a hypocrite and traitor. But the rival selves formed in him by this relation to these various groups constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry and in proportion as these selves are more numerous, more varied and more inharmonious and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise (I should have said ‘synthesis’) so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group mind of his culture.”59
Richards’s observations about the range, freedom, and discrimination of the poet’s reconciling access to the experiences and perspectives of others are the same as Graves’s.
Richards even follows Graves in his explanation of the mental state that enables the poet to communicate the special experiences facilitated by his poetic nature. In his chapter “The Availability of the Poet’s Experience,” Richards suggests that it is the “available possession of the past which is the first characteristic of the adept in communication, of the poet or the artist.”60 Observing that “persons to whom the past comes back as a whole are likely to be found in an asylum,” and acknowledging the poet’s “superficial resemblance to those who are merely mental chaoses, unorganised, without selective ability and of weak and diffused attention,” Richards is concerned to distinguish the poet from lunatics and children.61 He explains that “what is in question here is not memory … but free reproduction. To be able to revive an experience is not to remember when and where and how it occurred, but merely to have that peculiar state of mind available.”62 He suggests that “how far an experience is revivable would seem to depend in the first place upon the interests, the impulses, active in the experience,” and in the second place upon the “the difference between understanding a situation and the more usual reactions to it”; “the difference between a systematised complex response, or ordered sequence of responses, and a welter of responses.”63 The poet’s responses to experiences are more complex and more organized: “In order to keep any steadiness and clarity in his attitudes the ordinary man is under the necessity on most occasions of suppressing the greater part of the impulses which the situation might arouse. He is incapable of organising them; therefore they have to be left out.”64 It is a question of mental vigilance:
Contrast the behaviour of the sleepy and the fully awake, of the normal man with the lightly and more deeply anaesthetised patient … To describe these differences in neural potency, and to mark the degree of physiological efficiency, Dr [Henry] Head has recently suggested the term vigilance … In a high state of vigilance the nervous system reacts to stimuli with highly adapted, discriminating, and ordered responses; in a lowered state of vigilance the responses are less discriminating, less delicately adapted. Whether we are considering the decerebrate preparation or the intact poet, the simplest automatisms or the most highly conscious acts, what happens in a given stimulus situation varies with the vigilance of the appropriate portion of the nervous system … The answer then, at least in part, to the problem of how the poet’s experience is more than usually available to him is that it is, as he undergoes it, more than usually organised through his more than usual vigilance. Connections become established for him which in the ordinary mind, much more rigid and exclusive in its play of impulses, are never effected, and it is through these original connections that so much more of his past comes to be freely revivable for him at need.65
It is important to note, furthermore, that “to understand a situation in the sense intended here is not necessarily to reflect upon it, to inquire into its principles and consciously distinguish its characters, but to respond to it as a whole,” and so we must not “make an artificial distinction between intellectual or theoretical and non-intellectual or emotional activities.”66
Richards reproduces here the terms and perspectives foregrounded by Graves. That the poet is able to respond to a situation “as a whole” and that a critic’s artificial distinctions within that whole between intellectual and theoretical elements and non-intellectual and emotional ones will thereby leave the critic incapable of appreciating the poem are points made first by Graves in the chapter of Poetic Unreason called “The Illogical Element in Poetry,” first published in the Spectator in 1922.67 Richards’s definition of the poet’s understanding of his experience as comprehending both thinking and feeling in a coherent whole echoes Graves’s defence of apparently illogical romantic poetry (full of “illegitimate associations”) in the face of the classical sensibility for which “thinking was a logical process of one continuous strand” and according to which “the poetry recommended was to pursue a steady course in which every image was to be deduced from the previous one.”68
Similarly, Richards’s concern to disavow the poet’s resemblance to “the patient in the asylum” and “mental chaoses” echoes Graves’s concern to counter the “false idea that the Romantic or emotional mode of thought has no place in civilized life and is merely a survival of the child or the savage.”69 According to Graves, the “method of Romantic poetry and the method of thought in fantastic dreams” is the “associative method of thought,” “for which Logic has had for centuries nothing but the sneering patronage of the self-respecting citizen for the grotesque but cheerful village idiot.”70 Although he had sneered at the extremes of Graves’s associational method of literary analysis earlier in the book, Richards now defends something very like that interpretive method.
Graves points out that the two modes of thought in which the poet specializes have equal integrity. He makes this point by means of his regular analogy between dreams and poetry, and also by means of a special analogy between the degree of consciousness observable in romantic and classical poetry, on the one hand, and the degree of consciousness observable in those who are sleepy and those who are fully awake, on the other, an analogy similar to that of Richards in the passage above. Graves quotes from W.H.R. Rivers’s Conflict and Dream:
the mind may be regarded as composed of a number of levels or strata comparable with the levels of neurological activity which are now widely held to furnish the best explanation of the mode of action of the nervous system. According to this view, the deeper the sleep the larger the number of these levels which are put out of activity, and the lower the level which finds expression in dream. The dreams of deep sleep in which many levels of activity are put out of action will reveal infantile modes of thinking, feeling, and acting; the dreams of less deep sleep in which fewer of the higher levels are inactive would express modes of mental function proper to childhood or youth; while the dreams of very light sleep would have a character but little different from that of the ordinary mental activities of the waking life … Dreams, or rather certain dreams, are readily forgotten because they are manifestations of levels of mental activity remote in character from those of later periods in life … [E] arly levels of mental activity are suppressed because they are incompatible with the activities of later life. The mental efficiency of a person would be greatly prejudiced if modes of thinking, feeling and acting proper to infancy or childhood were continually intruding into the activities of adult life.71
Graves agrees with much in this passage: “I can confirm Dr. Rivers’ observations on the relation between the depth of sleep and the character of the dream, by the poetic analogy. Critical or Classical poems are written in a mood in which the poet is preoccupied perhaps, but aware of the conventional waking view of reality: when the emotional Kubla Khan kind of poem appears, it arises either from actual deep sleep or from a ‘brown study’ trance, disturbance in which will affect the poet with the same shock as if he had been actually asleep.”72
Yet Rivers’s “admirable observations on the mechanism of dreams, especially admirable where he makes the accompanying physiology plain, are disappointing where they do not allow that associative thought is as modern and reputable a mode as intellectual thought, and regard it as a return of infantility.”73 And so, he explains, “I only disagree with sentences like ‘The mental efficiency of a person would be prejudiced if modes of thinking proper to childhood were continually intruding into the activities of adult life,’ when the implications are that (a) dreams are not an integral part of adult life; (b) poetry and humour of the kind which corresponds with imaginative dreams are less reputable and of less value than, say, scientific thought.”74 So Graves looks forward to a day when the clash between intellectual and emotional modes of thought will end; a day when “either one or other method of thought employed for dealing with any conflict” will be respected; a day that will come only “once it is admitted by philosophers that though Romantic thought cannot be exactly foreseen, neither any more can intellectual thought; and further, when they admit that emotional poetry and thought, once it has appeared, has discernible an orderly orientation and inevitability; and when further they observe that such poetry and thought is not so primitive in the popularly accepted sense that it cannot use intellectual formulae for its own purposes, but is a method constantly employed unknown to themselves by the most sophisticated and Aristotelian minds, and of great service to them.”75 According to Graves, then, the two modes of thought in which the poet specializes are both necessary for mental order and for mental efficiency – the same point that Richards makes.
For Graves, the poet’s mind is especially vigilant in terms of its associative ability. Richards agrees that the poetic mind capable of these associations or connections is one to be nurtured, especially given the more “rigid and exclusive” tendencies of the ordinary mind.76 And so for both, the poetic mind’s claim to fame in this regard is based upon its greater vigilance, whether that be a greater intellectual vigilance or a greater emotional vigilance. Of course Richards quotes Henry Head on the question of mental vigilance in waking life, whereas Graves quotes Rivers on the question of mental vigilance in states of dream as well as in waking life. Yet for all his determined acknowledgment of Rivers’s work as fundamental to his conflict theory, Graves actually dedicates Poetic Unreason to Henry Head. Graves clearly recognizes that his work complements Head’s research; it is not surprising that Richards should have recognized this fact too by adapting so many of Graves’s insights to his own purposes – even before Poetic Unreason and its dedication to Head had appeared.
•
Richards’s observation in the chapter of Principles of Literary Criticism called “Badness in Poetry” that critics who fail to receive the poem’s communication have no right to call it bad and his more general observations about the responsibilities of critics in his chapter “The Definition of a Poem” seem to have come right out of Graves’s essay “What is Bad Poetry?” According to Richards, “It would perhaps be best to restrict the term bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and to call the other cases defective art. But this is not the usual practice of critics, any work which produces an experience displeasing to the critic being commonly called bad, whether or not the experience is like that responsible for the work.”77 Graves puts this more succinctly: “where there is no contact there can be no criticism.”78 According to Richards:
A critic should often be in a position to say, “I don’t like this but I know it is good,” or “I like this and condemn it,” or “This is the effect which it produces upon me, and this quite different effect is the one it should produce.” For obvious reasons he rarely makes such statements … Any honest reader knows fairly well the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he fails as a normal critic and in what ways. It is his duty to take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon his ability to discount these personal peculiarities as upon any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.79
Declaring that “poetry is in its first writing and first reading none but the poet’s own business and afterwards is elaborated only for a limited group of readers,” Graves anticipates Richards in “What Is Bad Poetry” by calling for critics to observe the same principles:
what right has the reviewer to tax the poet with carelessness, obscurity, pedantry, dullness, immorality, or any other similar failing where the interests which the poet has shown in the conflict or construction of his poetry are not represented in the experience of the reviewer?
The most that a reviewer can sensibly say is, “So far as I can see, this poem represents such and such interests; it does not meet the demands of such and such other interests. The writer appears to take this or that philosophic position, to be in sympathy with this or that literary tradition … [H] e uses certain symbols in different senses from the accustomed ones, arguing particular incidents in his life, which we can only guess at, connected with these symbols …” But the time may come for him to admit honourably, “I cannot talk of this book dispassionately because the author has completely overcome me with one of the poems, which means far more to me than other people to whom I have shown it because the poet and myself have an emotional (or intellectual) experience of an unusual character in common.” Or instead, “I cannot talk of this book dispassionately because it is written by a man who stands for everything I most detest, and the qualities which put me out of sympathy with him are best shown in the following passages. I admit that there must be a complementary quality for him to detest in myself and therefore this review must be regarded as only one side of an antinomial story.”
Every poem, I repeat, can only be fairly judged in its own context.80
Both Richards’s duplication of the figure of the confessing critic and the similarity of the confessions that the critics make suggest that Richards recalled Graves’s paragraphs when writing his own.
•
Similarly, Richards’s discussion of the role of rhythm and metre closely follows Graves’s discussion of this topic. Graves also considers the communicative impulse evident in the poet’s “more-or-less deliberate attempt, with the help of mesmerism, to impose an illusion of actual experience on the mind of others.”81 He regards poetry “as being like Religion, a modified descendent of primitive magic.”82 According to Graves, poetry “originated” in “rhythmic dream utterances, intoxicating a primitive community to sympathetic emotional action for a particular purpose”: “Primitive man was much troubled by the phenomenon of dreams … [W] here it was felt that a dream was needed to confirm or reverse a decision, the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess would induce a sort of self-hypnotism, and in the light of the dream so dreamed, utter an oracle which contained an answer to the problem proposed. The compelling use of rhythm to hold people’s attention and to make them beat their feet in time, was known, and the witch doctor seems to have combined the rhythmic beat of a drum or gong with the recital of his dream.”83 And so “whoever it was who found it convenient that his word stresses should correspond with beat of drum or stamp of feet, thereby originated the rhythm that is common both to verse and to poetry.”84
Whereas prose “does not trouble to keep rhythmic control over the reader,” Graves suggests that “this constant control seems an essential part of Poetry proper.”85 Such control is not a matter of unvarying constancy in rhythm and sound: “In poetry proper our delight is in the emotional variations from a clearly indicated norm of rhythm and sound-texture; but in prose poetry there is no recognizable norm.”86 According to Graves, “the limitation of Vers Libre, which I regard as only our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated (this does not mean altogether ‘regular’) scheme of verse properly used would give him.”87 Suggesting that “there is some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write,” in fact, “there is often a queer, broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences of standard prose,” Graves points out that the key to the effect of rhythm is a reader’s listening in a particular way out of the expectation of rhythm: “One doesn’t ‘listen’ when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected.”88
The poet who answers this expectation faces a great obligation: since “in regulated verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines,” “the regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take.”89 Expectation answered becomes expectation established. The problem with vers libre is that it frustrates expectations: “In vers libre there is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed … [T] his seems to be leaving too much to chance.”90 So although “rhythmic control … seems an essential part of Poetry proper,” “to expect it in prose poetry” – or vers libre, “our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient line lengths” – “is to be disappointed; we may take an analogy from the wilder sort of music where if there is continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not ‘catch on’ to each new idiom, so that he is momentarily confused by the changes and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him.”91
As we shall see, as though addressing a list of topics distilled from Graves’s early work, Richards sounds all these notes: rhythm and metre, when repeated, create anticipation; the key to establishing expectations is control and regulation of rhythm and metre; vers libre forgoes this control and regulation for the sake of other freedoms, sometimes at great cost; readerly pleasure is a function of varying the meeting of expectations by occasional departures from expectations; breaking the unity of the whole is a source of pain for the reader, and a sign of failure in the poet.
In the chapter “Rhythm and Metre” in Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards begins by observing that “rhythm and its specialized form, metre, depend upon repetition, and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation. As a rule, this anticipation is unconscious.”92 Expectation is the key to rhythm, for without it “there can be no surprise and no disappointment” – a matter of some consequence, for “most rhythms perhaps are made up as much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and betrayals as of simple, straightforward satisfactions.”93 And so rhythm is the “tissue of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, surprisals, which the sequence of syllables brings about.”94 According to Richards, “there is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s control … in the way in which an adequate reader will stress particular syllables.”95 Graves points out in On English Poetry that “The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take.”96 Richards agrees: the poet brings about a proper stressing of syllables by “the modification of the reader’s impulses by what has gone before.”97
Drawing an analogy between poetry and “the plastic arts and … architecture”, Richards notes that “the difference in detail between a surprising and delightful variation and one which merely irritates and breaks down the rhythm … is here, as elsewhere, a matter of the combination and resolution of impulses too subtle for our present means of investigation. All depends upon whether what comes can be an ingredient in the further response, or whether the mind must, as it were, start anew; in more ordinary language, upon whether there is any ‘connection’ between the parts of the whole.”98 Graves says something remarkably similar with analogy to music: “if there is continual changing of time and key, the listener often does not ‘catch on’ to each new idiom … and the unity of the whole musical form is thereby broken for him.”99
Graves finds occasion in On English Poetry to explain the inadequacies of the traditional method of marking syllables in terms of just long and short stresses, and so does Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism. Graves suggests that “the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long or short,” is not subtle enough to indicate the full complexity of the whole that rhythm, metre, and sound form in a poem. What “many prosodists assume” – that “all words in daily speech [are] spoken at the same rate … all stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, [are] dwelt on for exactly the same length of time” – is simply not the case ( “poetry would be a much easier art to practise” if it were).100 According to Graves, however, “In true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the sound texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it … has in spontaneous poetry only a submerged existence … A far more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must be shown on the blackboard, poetry will be marked out not in ‘feet’ but in convenient musical bars, with the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the rest of them.”101 In fact, “The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to accepts suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in itself.”102
Richards devotes several paragraphs of his chapter “Rhythm and Metre” to the same topic. Explaining the role of anticipation in the reader’s response to the rhythm and metre of poetry, he suggests that “we do great violence to the facts if we suppose the expectations excited as we read verse to be concerned only with stress, emphasis, length, foot structure and so forth of the syllables which follow. Even in this respect the custom of marking syllables in two degrees only, long and short, light and full, etc., is inadequate … The mind responds to subtler niceties than these. The obvious comparison with the difference between what even musical notation can record in music and the player’s interpretation can usefully be made here.”103 Among the subtler niceties to which the mind responds are influences upon rhythm and metre of emotions stirred by the reading and the sense suggested by it: it is “impossible … to consider rhythm or metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect of syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from the emotional effects which come about through their sense.”104
Richards develops this point further in Practical Criticism: “the rhythm which we admire, which we seem actually to detect in the sounds … is something which we only ascribe to them and is, actually, a rhythm of the mental activity through which we apprehend not only the sound of words but their sense and feeling. The mysterious glory which seems to inhere in the sound of certain lines is a projection of the thought and emotion they evoke, and the peculiar satisfaction they give to the ear is a reflection of the adjustment of our feelings which has been momentarily achieved.”105 Richards’s “rhythm of … mental activity” that, by “projection,” we “seem to detect actually in the sounds” of the words that we read parallels closely Graves’s “rhythm of emotions” that “determines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants.”106 Richards even avails himself of a psychoanalytical term, “projection,” that attributes to successful rhythm and metre the same psychotherapeutic function for it that Graves identifies. And to explain some of the more intense psychological effects of rhythm and metre, he also, like Graves, invokes one of the “more important powers” of rhythm and metre – hypnosis: “We need not boggle at the word ‘hypnosis’ … [T] here is a change in the regime of consciousness, which is directly due to the meter … [S] yllables, which in prose or in vers libre sound thin, tinny and flat, often gain an astonishing sonority and fullness even in verse which seems to possess no very subtle metrical structure.”107
Richards also shadows Graves in his criticism of vers libre. Observing that vers-libre poets relinquish “the continual hold” over a reader’s attention that “a regulated … scheme of verse properly used” gives a poet, Graves suggests that “the temporary loss of control must be set off against the freedom which vers libre-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre.”108 This “freedom” is “a serious limitation”: “In vers libre there is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which, and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems to be leaving too much to chance.”109 Graves offers as “the most damaging criticism” of vers libre its failure to compensate for its serious formal limitations with greater virtuosity elsewhere: “with rhythmic freedom so dearly bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications than in closer bound poetry.”110
Like Graves, Richards aligns vers libre with prose: syllables that “gain an astonishing sonority and fullness” in verse “in prose or in vers libre sound thin, tinny and flat.”111 He and Ogden write to similar effect in The Meaning of Meaning, observing “the greater sensitiveness to vowel and consonantal characters which accompanies metrical reading, and the flat or tinny effect of the same syllables occurring in vers libre.”112 Criticizing a poem by H.D. that he regards as an example of failed vers libre, Richards complains that the poem leaves too much to chance not just in terms of elocution, but also in terms of sense: “The reader here supplies too much of the poem … [W] hat results is almost independent of the author.”113 Richards agrees with Graves that relinquishing the responsibility of controlling the reader is a freedom dearly bought and likewise suggests that the relative simplicity of the rhythm and metre of vers libre requires that this formal deficit be supplemented by other virtues: “Not the brevity only of the vehicle, but its simplicity, makes it ineffective. The sacrifice of metre in free verse needs, in almost all cases, to be compensated by length. The loss of so much of the formal structure leads otherwise to tenuousness and ambiguity.”114
Also like Graves, Richards traces the origin of rhythm and metre in poetry to its function in the religious practices of primitive times, and like Graves again he is interested in their “unconscious” effect, particularly in terms of their hypnotic power.115 Graves suggests that insofar as poetry is “a modified descendant of primitive Magic,” the poet is a descendent of “the peculiarly gifted witch doctor or priestess” who could “induce a sort of self-hypnotism,” from which emerged “rhythmic dream utterances” capable of “intoxicating a primitive community to sympathetic emotional action.”116 Similarly, Richards observes that metre’s “use as an hypnotic agent is probably very ancient”; its effect is similar to that of “much primitive music and dancing.”117 Graves notes “the compelling use of rhythm … to make [people] beat their feet in time”; Richards suggests that “there can be little doubt that historically [metre] has been closely associated with dancing, and that connections of the two still hold.”118 Graves regards the hypnotic agency of rhythm as physical: “hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily subject.”119 Richards again concurs: “As with rhythm so with metre, we must not think of it as in the words themselves or in the thumping of the drum … [I] ts effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings … [T] he pattern is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.”120
Graves describes poets as assuming control of their readers’ imaginations by “hypnotizing them into a receptive state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of verse-melody,” the efficacy of the hypnotic strategies depending on limiting the field of attention ( “the compelling use of rhythm to hold people’s attention”) and, because of “the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for wonder,” avoiding “foreign or unusual prosody.”121 The ancient process involved “intoxicating a primitive community.”122 The poetic process involves “a constant appeal … to the childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled emotion.”123 According to Graves, “the dream origin of Romantic poetry gives it the advantage of putting the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a naturally hypnotic effect.”124 This state of mind is the illogical mind of childhood: “dreams are illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those of childhood.”125 This is a process that many “a grown man and especially an Englishman” dislikes, “the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.”126
Richards also addresses the topic of poetic hypnosis with Ogden in The Meaning of Meaning. Explaining the effects of words in evoking feelings and attitudes, they suggest that it “may be reasonably supposed” that “rhythms and especially metres have to a small degree an hypnotic effect.”127 Furthermore, “emotionality, exaggeration of belief-feelings, the occulting of the critical faculties, the suppression of the questioning – ‘Is this so as a matter of fact?’ – attitude, all these are characteristics of metrical experiences and fit in well with a hypnosis assumption.”128 In Principles of Literary Criticism, he argues that rhythms that are “too simple” will “grow cloying or insipid unless hypnoidal states intervene, as with much primitive music and dancing and often with metre.”129 In fact, “That certain metres, or rather that a certain handling of metre should produce in a slight degree a hypnoidal state is not surprising. Poetry produces a slight degree of hypnotic effect. But it does so not as Coleridge suggests, through the surprise element in metrical effects, but through the absence of surprise, through the lulling effects more than through the awakening.”130
Principles of Literary Criticism accords the question of the role of hypnotism in poetry’s effect both a more extended treatment and a more ambivalent status than in Richards’s earlier text. We read that in addition to “giving an increased interconnection between words through an increased control of anticipation,” metre has “even more important powers” – the “very ancient” powers of hypnosis.131 But because Graves argued that “One may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendent of primitive Magic,” Richards quickly acts to subordinate it to science: “We need not boggle at the word ‘hypnosis.’ It is sufficient to say … that there is a change in the regime of consciousness, which is directly due to the metre, and that to this regime the above-mentioned characteristics attach.”132 Still, Richards notes the same effects that Graves notes: “Many of the most characteristic symptoms of incipient hypnosis are present in a slight degree. Among these susceptibility and vivacity of emotion, suggestibility, limitations of the field of attention, marked differences in the incidence of belief-feelings closely analogous to those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can induce.”133
Between The Meaning of Meaning and Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards has discovered the need to address those who “boggle at the word ‘hypnosis.’” In other words, he has discovered the need to reassure those who might think that his talk of poetry as hypnosis is evidence that he has gone over to the Graves school of criticism. Just as he is determined that his account of the imagination should not wander onto the theological shoals that consign Coleridge’s account to neglect, he is also determined that the hypnotic effect of rhythm and metre not be occulted by association with anything magical or mysterious, let alone theological, in Graves’s. In Principles of Literary Criticism, therefore, Richards implicitly does to Graves what he explicitly does to Coleridge: he removes the taint of an unscientific paradigm.134
Richards notes that “The history of science is full of mysterious unique entities which have gradually evaporated as explanation advanced … The struggles of economists with ‘utility,’ of mathematical philosophers with ‘points’ and ‘instants,’ of biologists with ‘entelechies,’ and the adventures of psycho-analysts with ‘the libido’ and ‘the collective unconscious’ are instances in point.”135 Graves’s popularizing psychoanalytical framework – “I am trying … to avoid the use of any technical words at all, and so I shall explain Dr. Rivers’ views and my own with as little quotation as possible from scientific works” – is the “theology” that Richards removes from Graves’s work.136
As prelude to “the analysis of poetic experience,” Richards suggests, “it is necessary to break away from the set of ideas by which popular and academic psychology alike attempt to describe the mind”:
We naturally tend to conceive it as a thing of a peculiar spiritual kind … endowed with … capacities … for knowing, willing and feeling … A violent shock to this entity comes when we are forced by a closer examination of the facts to conceive it as doing all these three unconsciously as well as consciously. An unconscious mind is a fairly evident fiction, useful though it may be, and goings on in the nervous system are readily accepted as a satisfactory substitute. From this to the recognition of the conscious mind as a similar fiction is no great step, although one which many people find difficult. Some of this difficulty … wears off as we notice how many of the things which we believed true of the fiction can be stated in terms of the less fictitious substitute. But much of the difficulty is emotive, non-intellectual, more specifically religious, in origin.137
Richards concedes that “the account which we give must frankly be admitted to be only a degree less fictitious than one in terms of spiritual happenings,” but he insists that “the kind of account which is likely to be substantiated by future research has become clear, largely through the work of Behaviourists and Psycho-analysts, the assumptions and results of both needing to be corrected.”138 We can see that vis-á-vis Graves, Richards acts as just such a corrector – purging psychoanalytical absolutes from Graves’s insights about how poems, poets, and readers operate, and replacing them with a more functional psychological account of their operations. According to Richards, “the mind is the nervous system,” so he has no need of such a ghost in the machine as Graves supplies.139
1 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 25.
2 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 123–4.
3 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 61.
4 Graves, On English Poetry, 84–5.
5 Ibid., 30–1.
6 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 57.
7 Ibid., 132–3.
8 Graves, On English Poetry, 84–5, 30–1.
9 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 190.
10 Ibid., 195, 194, 195–6.
11 Ibid., 196–7.
12 Ibid., 196.
13 Ibid., 198.
14 Ibid., 198, 198; Graves, On English Poetry, 30–1.
15 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 198; Graves, On English Poetry, 30–1.
16 Graves, On English Poetry, 13.
17 Ibid., 16.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 81.
21 Ibid., 24–5.
22 Ibid., 83, 83, 83, 85.
23 Ibid., 43.
24 Ibid., 21.
25 Robert Graves, “What is Bad Poetry?” North American Review 218 (September 1923): 353–68.
26 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 17, 17, 19, 18.
27 Graves, On English Poetry, 99.
28 Ibid., 97–8.
29 Ibid., 101.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 101–2.
32 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 197–8, 202.
33 Ibid., 202.
34 Ibid., 203.
35 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 204–5. See Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Friendship after Love,” in Principles of Literary Criticism, 200–1.
36 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 204–5.
37 Ibid., 25.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 26.
40 Ibid., 27.
41 Ibid.
42 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 4–5.
43 Ibid., 27.
44 Ibid., 26.
45 Ibid., 28.
46 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 26, 27.
47 Ibid., 28–9.
48 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 136, 137.
49 Ibid., 137.
50 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 26; Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 137.
51 Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1927), 60.
52 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 27.
53 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 88.
54 Ibid., 89.
55 Ibid., 142.
56 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 29.
57 Ibid., 29–30.
58 Ibid., 181.
59 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 27–8.
60 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 181.
61 Ibid., 181, 185.
62 Ibid., 181.
63 Ibid., 182, 183, 183.
64 Ibid., 184.
65 Ibid., 183–4.
66 Ibid., 183.
67 Robert Graves, “The Illogic of Stoney Stratford and of Poetry,” Spectator 129 (15 July 1922): 87.
68 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 133, 132, 132–3.
69 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 182, 185; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 127.
70 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 119.
71 Ibid., 129–30.
72 Ibid., 131.
73 Ibid., 127.
74 Ibid., 131.
75 Ibid., 133.
76 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 184.
77 Ibid., 199.
78 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 37.
79 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 224.
80 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 28–9.
81 Graves, On English Poetry, 13.
82 Ibid., 19.
83 Ibid., 20.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 14.
86 Ibid., 15.
87 Ibid., 45–6.
88 Ibid., 48, 48, 49.
89 Ibid., 46, 47.
90 Ibid., 46.
91 Ibid., 14, 14, 45, 14.
92 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 134.
93 Ibid., 137, 137–8.
94 Ibid., 137.
95 Ibid., 142.
96 Graves, On English Poetry, 47.
97 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 142.
98 Ibid., 138.
99 Graves, On English Poetry, 14.
100 Ibid., 83.
101 Ibid., 83–4.
102 Ibid., 85.
103 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 140–1.
104 Ibid., 142.
105 Ibid., 229.
106 Ibid., 229; Graves, On English Poetry, 83.
107 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 144.
108 Graves, On English Poetry, 45–6.
109 Ibid., 46.
110 Ibid., 48.
111 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 144.
112 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), 239–40.
113 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 200. Richards criticizes H.D.’s poem “The Pool,” which he reproduces in full in Principles of Literary Criticism, 199.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid., 134.
116 Graves, On English Poetry, 19, 20, 20, 20.
117 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 143, 138.
118 Graves, On English Poetry, 20; Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 144.
119 Graves, On English Poetry, 31.
120 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 139–40.
121 Graves, On English Poetry, 31, 20, 68, 68.
122 Ibid., 20.
123 Ibid., 69.
124 Ibid., 74.
125 Ibid., 68.
126 Ibid., 69.
127 Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 239.
128 Ibid., 240.
129 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 138.
130 Ibid., 143.
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid., 144.
133 Ibid., 143.
134 Quite enamoured of Coleridge’s literary theory, Richards is nonetheless determined to remove hints of Coleridge’s God from it – “There is nothing peculiarly mysterious about imagination … [O] ur account will be devoid of theological implications” and thereby “avoid part of the fate which befell Coleridge” through his mystification of imagination in chapter XIII of Biographia Litteraria as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”: the fate of being overlooked by people for whom God is dead. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 191, 191; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 1: 295–6.
135 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 43.
136 Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 20.
137 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 82–3.
138 Ibid., 83.
139 Ibid.