13
If the imprint that Graves’s early work left in Richards’s imagination is clear in Principles of Literary Criticism, it is even clearer in Science and Poetry (1926), where Richards presents the salient points of Principles of Literary Criticism in a more accessible and popular form. Richards adopts here what Graves calls in The Meaning of Dreams the “Theory of the Double Self” and adapts it to the more behaviourist, functionalist terms of his own literary theory. He is thereby put on the road to an appreciation of the overdetermination of meaning in poetry and an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of poetry’s systematic reconciliation of overdetermined meanings. Paraphrasing Rivers, Graves explains the occurrence in dreams of
Dissociation, that is the breaking up of the human individual into two or more rival “selves” under the stress of difficult circumstances … When we discuss a man, one John Jones, and … come to examine John Jones, it is possible that two or more John Jones’s who are very hostile to each other may appear in the one person … Now all … examples of double-self are alike in this, that they show that there is a conflict in the man or woman’s nature between different ideas or interests … The so-called “unconscious self” … is just the self which in conflict happens at the time to be beaten … So long as the waking life is ruled by one interest or view at the expense of the other the defeated interest will appear in one form or another in every dream dreamed.1
As we have seen, Graves further explains the literary application of Rivers’s conceptual framework in Poetic Unreason: “This book will principally show Poetry as a record of the conflicts between various pairs of Jekyll and Hyde, or as a record of the solution of these conflicts. In the period of conflict, poetry may be either a partisan statement … of one side of the conflict; or else a double statement of both sides of the conflict, one side appearing in the manifest statement … the other in the latent content … In the period of solution there will be no discrepancy between latent content and manifest statement.”2 In a person’s life, such a solution makes a “new individual” out of the conflicting sub-personalities: “Hyde and Jekyll co-exist in an individual as possibilities, but in relation to any given situation only one will appear at a time while the conflict continues. If a situation occurs in which they can sink their differences, the action of the individual will be neither Hyde-ish nor Jekyllesque but of such a nature that … a single individual will emerge not predominantly Jekyll or Hyde … but a new creation making the continuance of the conflicting elements unnecessary.”3
Graves discusses the poet’s sub-personalities in On English Poetry, regarding emotional conflict between them as so essential to poetry that should such conflict disappear, so would poetry. He suggests that the two ways in which poets overcome their conflicts and lose the ability to write poetry are when they “come to a dead end and stop writing” because “the poet’s preoccupation with the clash of his emotions has been transmuted into a calmer state of meditation” or when “the conflict of the poet’s sub-personalities has been finally settled, by some satisfaction of desire or removal of a cause of fear, in the complete rout of the opposing parties, and the victors dictate their own laws, uncontradicted.”4
Like Empson, Richards uses the language of Graves’s “conflict theory” without actually referring to the author of the theory: “Conflicts between different impulses are the greatest evils which afflict mankind.”5 Richards sketches the same picture of human psychology as a contest between conflicting impulses within a person, and he depicts the “good life” for such a person as “one in which … as many of his impulses as possible” are engaged, “with as little conflict, as little mutual interference between different sub-systems of his activities as there can be.”6 The language of “conflict” is the same and the language of “sub-personalities” is merely replaced by the language of “sub-systems of … activities,” as Richards converts the terms of psychoanalysis to the terms of behaviourism.
Also like Graves, Richards observes that “there are two ways in which conflict can be avoided or overcome. By conquest and by conciliation. One or other of the contesting impulses can be suppressed, or they can come to a mutual arrangement, they can adjust themselves to one another.”7 Richards again avails himself of a psychoanalytical term, and he does so quite self-consciously: “We owe to psycho-analysis – at present still a rather undisciplined branch of psychology – a great deal of striking evidence as to the extreme difficulty of suppressing any vigorous impulse. When it seems to be suppressed it is often found to be really as active as ever, but in some other form, generally, a troublesome one.”8 Graves is not interested in describing this “so-called ‘unconscious self’” as “the sort of primitive bogey” that Freud describes, preferring to regard it as “just the self which in conflict happens at the time to be beaten.”9 Similarly Richards avoids the Freudian paradigm, regarding a suppressed impulse not necessarily as primitive, but merely as defeated – “troublesome” not necessarily because it is transgressive but rather because it has been transgressed: “People who are always winning victories over themselves might equally well be described as always enslaving themselves.”10 Richards’s view is closer to Jung’s than it is to Freud’s, and it is closer to Graves’s than it is to Jung’s.
Those who are always winning victories over themselves and so always enslaving themselves are legion, for, “unfortunately, most of us, left to ourselves, have no option but to go in for extensive attempts at self-conquest. It is our only means of escape from chaos. Our impulses must have some order, some organisation, or we do not live ten minutes without disaster.”11 Fortunately, however, we are not left entirely to ourselves to organize our impulses, for we have poetry. According to Richards, the “good life” requires that “experience … be organized so as to give all the impulses of which it is composed the greatest possible degree of freedom”; after all, “conflicts between different impulses are the greatest evils that afflict mankind” and so “if it is asked, what does such a life feel like, how is it to live through? the answer is that it feels like and is the experience of poetry.”12
Immediately after this passage, Richards outlines a psychotherapeutic function for literature. Poetry is our best response to the fact that “persistent mental imbalances are the source of nearly all our troubles.”13 Since “suppression is wasteful of life, conciliation is always to be preferred to conquest,” and so we need a new “moral ordering of the impulses; a new order based on conciliation, not on attempted suppression.”14 Here, the poet leads: “Only the rarest individuals hitherto have achieved this new order, and never yet perhaps completely. But many have achieved it for a brief while, for a particular phase of experience, and many have recorded it for these phases … Of these records poetry consists.”15 His position is similar to that outlined by Graves, first in On English Poetry (1922), where he declares poetry “a form of psycho-therapy … homoeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled,” and then in Poetic Unreason (1925), where he explains that: “Poetry is for the poet a means of informing himself on many planes simultaneously … of the relation in his mind of certain hitherto inharmonious interests, you may call them his sub-personalities or other selves. And for the reader, Poetry is a means of similarly informing himself of the relation of analogous interests hitherto inharmonious on these same various planes. For the poet, the writing of poetry … enables him to be rid of these conflicts between his sub-personalities. And for the reader … the reading of poetry performs a similar service; it acts for him as a physician of his mental disorders.”16 So in Science and Poetry, despite his association of the psychoanalytical interpretation of literature with “the gravest dangers” in Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards now celebrates the psychological function of literature not just in terms of its organization of human impulses or the socially progressive development that it fosters, but also in terms of the psychotherapeutic effect that Graves has emphasized in three successive books.
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Richards also follows Graves in drawing an analogy between the poetic reconciliation of tensions within the poet and reader and the process of reconciling political tensions through the diplomatic mediation practised at international conferences. According to Richards, poetry will lead us toward “a new order based on conciliation, not on attempted suppression,” an allusion to hope after the Great War that Woodrow Wilson would lead the world to a new moral order based on the self-determination of peoples, a hope that was disappointed by the Treaty of Versailles: “In the past, Tradition, a kind of Treaty of Versailles assigning frontiers and spheres of influence to the different interests, and based chiefly upon conquest, ordered our lives in a moderately satisfactory manner. But Tradition is weakening. Moral authorities are not as well backed by beliefs as they were; their sanctions are declining in force. We are in need of something to take the place of the old order. Not in need of a new balance of power, a new arrangement of conquests, but a League of Nations for the moral ordering of the impulses.”17 However much, in the wake of twentieth-century history, one might be inclined to sneer, “Good luck to the League, and good luck to poetry,” one can also nonetheless see how, in the 1920s, Isherwood could perceive a lecturer like Richards as “the prophet we had been waiting for … our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astonishing lightning flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World.”18
Yet Richards has merely dressed up with contemporary political references an analogy developed by Graves at three different points in On English Poetry. First he suggests that “The mind of a poet is like an international conference composed of delegates of both sexes and every shade of political thought, which is trying to decide on a series of problems of which the chairman has himself little previous knowledge – yet this chairman, this central authority, will somehow contrive to sign a report embodying the specialized knowledge and reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of all factions concerned. These factions can be called, for convenience, the poet’s sub-personalities.”19 Later he recalls this analogy in slightly different terms: “I have … attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s précis of a warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some unusually controversial subject.”20 He also offers a more colloquial version: “The poet is consciously or unconsciously always either taking in or giving out; he hears, observes, weighs, guesses, condenses, idealizes, and the new ideas troop quietly into his mind until suddenly every now and again two of them violently quarrel and drag into the fight a group of other ideas that have been loitering about at the back of his mind for years; there is great excitement, noise and bloodshed, with finally a reconciliation and drinks all round. The poet writes a tactful police report on the affair and there is the poem.”21 Given Graves’s service as an officer in the Great War (often involved in military courts charged with disciplining soldiers for drunkenness, swearing, fighting, and so on), this final version of the analogy actually anticipates the allusion to the Great War constituted by Richards’s reference to the Treaty of Versailles. And of course the language of “reconciliation” in Graves’s analogy is directly echoed by the language of “conciliation” in Richards’s version of the analogy.
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In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Richards finally recognizes the affinity between his own perspective on the overdetermination of meaning in poetry and Freud’s with respect to the unconscious: “Freud taught us that a dream may mean a dozen different things; he has persuaded us that some symbols are, as he says, ‘over-determined.’”22 Richards now accepts the extension of this paradigm to the study of literature that Graves was encouraging almost fifteen years earlier: Freud’s “theorem goes further” than the study of dream symbols “and regards all discourse – outside the technicalities of science – as over-determined, as having multiplicity of meaning. It can illustrate this view from almost any of the great controversies. And it offers us – by restraining the One and Only One True Meaning Superstition – a better hope, I believe, of profiting from the controversies.”23 Of course it was the One and Only One True Meaning Superstition with which he had tried to restrain Graves’s Freudian reading of “Kubla Khan.” Now Richards advances via Freud’s teaching a “controversy” theory that recalls Graves’s “conflict theory” and the analogy by which he often explained it: “A controversy is normally an exploitation of a systematic set of misunderstandings for war-like purposes. This theorem suggests that the swords of dispute might be turned into plough shares.”24
Russo suggests that Richards’s recognition of the relation between his own work and Freud’s came “rather late,” yet I would suggest it is a case of “better late than never.”25 This is especially true when compared with the lack of any recognition at all by Richards of his position’s affinities with Graves’s insight that overdetermination of meaning can be found not just in English poetry, but also (as Richards notes ten years after the publication of Impenetrability, and fifteen years after Graves’s letter to the Society for Pure English, reproduced as the final chapter of On English Poetry) in every non-scientific use of the English language generally.
Graves repudiates the possibility of any single, simple determiner of meaning in poetry: “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. In the second case he may find it impossible to trace even in outline the history of every emblem that occurs in the poem, and any explanation of the poem in terms of the logical reasoning that demands a single recognizable character for every statement made in the poem will be inadequate in face of the associative complexities and absurdities that the multiple vision of the poet produces.”26
Graves restates here positions outlined in On English Poetry, where his oft-repeated claim is that overdetermination of meaning in dream and in inspired and fantastic romantic poetry is not just the norm, but is in fact the rule: “Prose in its most prosy form seems to be the art of accurate statement by suppressing as far as possible the latent associations of words; for the convenience of his readers the standard prose-writer uses an accurate logical phrasing in which … he only says what he at first appears to say. In Poetry the implication is more important than the manifest statement; the underlying associations of every word are marshalled carefully.”27 In “all true poetry,” he insists, “the underlying associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.”28 The carefully marshalled associations underlying the manifest content of the poem inevitably surprise readers incapable of the “fusion … of apparently contradictory emotional ideas” that the poet has achieved, and so “the power of surprise … marks all true poetry.”29 Graves offers his readers a further surprise by suggesting that the underlying associations of words is not something that can be kept out of language; they can only be controlled, for they are a property of language itself: whether the language is Chinese or English, the undercurrents of allusion contained in every word make possible in poetry a “pattern underneath.”30
Russo goes on to observe that “although their intellectual tradition and approach are entirely different, there are parallels between Richards’ comments on equilibrium and Freud … In both thinkers there is an awareness of the person’s need for equilibrium and an equal awareness of the dangers of habit and entrapment.”31 This parallel need not be regarded as coincidence, for Graves is acknowledged by Richards as someone mediating to him certain aspects of Freud’s work, and Graves foregrounds in his conflict theory the simultaneously balancing progressive functions of poetic consciousness. To recognize parallels between the work of Richards and the work of Freud is implicitly to note the effect of Graves’s unrecognized and unacknowledged influence on Richards.
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That Graves influenced Richards is clear. Graves did not always make sense for Richards, but Richards often found that there was sense enough to be recovered from what Graves said to make it worthwhile to say it again in his own words and on his own terms. Graves certainly introduced and explored topics in a fitful way, offering in On English Poetry a book divided into dozens of sections of what he called merely “notebook reflections” ( “I have dispensed with a continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather than by logical force”), but Richards found in many cases the suggestive neighbourliness of topics like “Vers Libre,” “Reading Aloud,” and “On Writing Musically” were very much worth systematic and logical exposition in chapters of his own such as “Rhythm and Metre” in Principles of Literary Criticism. In essays by Graves such as “What is Bad Poetry?” Richards found a number of points concerning poetry as communication worth much further reflection and development. And, in the essays collected in Poetic Unreason, he found many ideas close to his own, which he later communicated more simply, especially in Science and Poetry.
Although the proportion of his early work that was influenced by Graves was not as large as that of Empson’s, Richards nonetheless owed Graves a great deal, especially regarding his gradual acceptance that the ideal of a “simple explanation” for poetry, an explanation grounded in “actual sources,” needed to be supplemented by a “Theory of the Double Self.” Richards ultimately discovered that proper appreciation of poetry requires that one face “the gravest dangers” after all.
Acknowledgement of the debt that he owed Graves would not have gone amiss. But of course times were different then. And besides, Richards did not regard Graves’s ideas as proper company for a serious academic to keep.
1 Robert Graves, The Meaning of Dreams (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 20–4.
2 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 52–3.
3 Ibid., 52.
4 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 36–7.
5 I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1926), 42.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 43.
8 Ibid.
9 Graves, The Meaning of Dreams, 23, 23.
10 Richards, Science and Poetry, 43, 43–4.
11 Richards, Science and Poetry, 44.
12 Ibid., 42, 42, 42, 43.
13 Ibid., 43.
14 Ibid., 43, 45.
15 Ibid., 45.
16 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 1–2.
17 Richards, Science and Poetry, 44–5.
18 Chistopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1947, 121–2, quoted by John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 93.
19 Graves, On English Poetry, 33–4.
20 Ibid., 113.
21 Ibid., 26.
22 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 38.
23 Ibid., 39.
24 Ibid.
25 Russo, I.A. Richards, 280.
26 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 4–5.
27 Graves, On English Poetry, 14.
28 Ibid., 25.
29 Ibid., 24.
30 Ibid., 25.
31 Russo, I.A. Richards, 196–7.