14

Riding Corrects Richards (and Graves)

As a literary theorist, Richards was increasingly a force in his own right throughout the 1920s. By the end of the decade, he was more famous and more influential than Graves – at least in academic circles. Graves must have been aware of his work. Richards’s books were being reviewed in periodicals that Graves read and in which he published his own essays and reviews. Certainly his collaborator Laura Riding knew Richards’s work. In fact, her strong reaction against Richards proved frequently to be the occasion for her explicit or implicit correction of Graves’s early work. Graves was never the same afterwards. Nor, in a number of important respects, was Richards.

Graves was presumably aware that he had been singled out in Principles of Literary Criticism as representing one of “the gravest dangers” concerning the “possible applications of psychology in criticism.”¹ Reading the section on Richards in The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (1943), which Graves co-wrote with Alan Hodge, one suspects that he was not only aware of this, but also nursed a bit of a grudge about it. The sample of Richards’s writing is one of the longest of the more than fifty chosen for examination and occurs just three paragraphs after Richards ridicules Graves’s “thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught” on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”²

If Graves’s voice is the dominant one in the comments about Richards’s prose (as it seems to have been dominant in comments about writing by other contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, F.R. Leavis, C. Day-Lewis, Desmond MacCarthy, J. Middleton Murry, George Bernard Shaw, and Stephen Spender), one can certainly see what he says about Richards as payback. He rewrites Richards’s paragraph as he claims it ought to have been written, and explains that any discrepancy between his own “Fair Copy” and the original paragraph is Richards’s own fault:

If I.A. Richards really finds the communication of simple experiences so much more difficult than most people do, this is probably because he avoids defining the terms he uses: here, for example, he does not explain what “the arts” are, what “values” are, who it is who decides about “values,” or who is thought to have usurped the functions of the artist and the poet. Also, the argument is incomplete, repetitive and disordered, and the language an uneasy mixture of Victorian literary incantation … and bald modern laboratory exposition … Our alternative version may not represent exactly what I.A. Richards had in mind; but it is the nearest we can get to a coherent statement, with the materials supplied by him.³

Richards’s rhetorical excess in his dismissal of Graves in Principles of Literary Criticism is matched here by Graves’s rhetorical excess (relative to the other such comments in his book) in his dismissal of Richards. To complain that Richards neither fully defines terms nor fully explains issues in a particular paragraph found thirty pages into a book that clearly enough defines such terms and explains such issues elsewhere is not fair: certain terms appear undefined and certain issues seem unexplained only because the paragraph that Graves examines is removed from its context. No one who reads Principles of Literary Criticism would have any doubts about where in the book the answers to the questions that Graves poses are to be found.

But perhaps part of Graves’s fun comes from re-issuing in his own voice – the “Fair Copy” into which he translates Richards’s prose – a description of the nature and function of poetry that he must have believed Richards had originally borrowed from him. When Graves was reading Richards in preparation for treating him in The Reader over Your Shoulder, he actually wrote to a friend: “I had never read Richards before – not word for word – what a crook he seems to be!”⁴ The “Fair copy” that he produces from Richards’s paragraph would not have looked out of place in either On English Poetry or Poetic Unreason, which may be exactly his point:

The working out of a theory by which to reckon, account for, and compare the intrinsic values of spiritual [?] experience, implies the study of poems and works of art – no other evidence being so helpful – in an investigation both of the circumstances in which they were produced and of the communicative power which they exercise. Poems and works of art are accurate and lasting records of certain tranquil hours in the lives of exceptionally sensitive people, when their vision has been keener, their range of observation wider, their faculty for co-ordinating intricate facts and possibilities stronger, and their power of expression more felicitous than usual … The popular view that the poet’s divinatory function has been usurped by the scientist, and the artist’s priestly function by the philosopher, shows a vague understanding that, when properly consulted, poems and works of art yield the right answer to many questions about the comparative value of experiences.⁵

One recognizes here Graves’s picture of the poet as a harmonizer of diverse experiences and interests within himself and within his community; one so good at this work that his words are often mistaken for those of God.

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In this text of 1943, now that the relationship between Graves and Riding was over, Graves was free to show how little he had moved beyond his theorizing about literature in the 1920s. The first and second chapters of The Reader over Your Shoulder lift ideas and sentences right out of Impenetrability. Graves observes that “The vernacular freedom of English allows many meanings, complex and simple, to be struck from the interplay of words, which in Greek or Latin or even French would be ruled out by the formal relationships insisted on by grammatic logic.”⁶ In fact, when one compares English to other European languages, one finds that “none other admits of such poetic exquisiteness, and often the apparent chaos is only the untidiness of a workshop in which a great deal of repair and other work is in progress: the benches are crowded, the corners are piled with lumber, but the old workman can lay his hand on whatever spare parts or accessories he needs, or at least on the right tools and materials for improvising them.”⁷ “The English method,” we read, “tends to ambiguity and obscurity of expression in any but the most careful writing”; in fact, “English writers of prose and poetry find that, so soon as a gust of natural feeling snatches away the merely verbal disguise in which their phrases are dressed, the pictorial images stand out sharply and either enliven and enforce the argument or desert it and go on a digressive ramble.”⁸

Similarly, passages in the third chapter recall On English Poetry, The Meaning of Dreams, and Poetic Unreason. Graves finds occasion once more to observe that for Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci” “seems to have been a mixture of Fanny Brawne, with whom he was hopelessly in love, Consumption, which had carried off his brother Tom and was to kill him too, and the intractable spirit of poetry.”⁹ Affirming that “Poetic meaning … is contained in the complicated correspondence between the words used, regarding both as sense and as sound, and in latent meanings of the words evoked by the rhythmic spell,” he also reminds readers of his great abilities as a close reader by analyzing a stanza of the poem that “presents a simple story situation” ( “I saw pale kings and princes too, /Pale warriors, death pale were they all –/They cried ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci/Hath thee in thrall’”): “One notes how the conventional phrase ‘She has enthralled you,’ by being resolved into its original elements, recovers its metaphorical force of ‘has you in slavery’; and how the internal rhyme of merci with thee echoes in the mind and gives ‘thee’ the force of ‘thee too’; and how the variation of the vowel-sounds gives iridescence to the lines; and how well-suited to the sense the alliteration is; and what a shiver comes with the word ‘warriors.’”¹⁰

Graves also recalls in this later work the importance in the 1920s of the development of “slow reading” techniques for poetry: “while the prose writer must nowadays assume his reader to be a busy person whose eye sweeps along the page at a fairly steady rate, seldom pausing long even at key passages, the poet … still assumes his reader to have perfect leisure and patience for dwelling on each word in a poem and appreciating its relation with every other. Prose, in fact, is expected to reveal its full content at first reading; poetry only at third or fourth. The first glance at a poem takes in its prose sense as a base on which to build up the poetic sense … The unusual juxtaposition of two words may carry a weight of meaning over which a thoughtful reader will spend as much time as over a page or more of prose argument.”¹¹ As we shall see in chapters to follow, these ideas were at the heart of the conversation between the texts of Richards and those of Riding and Graves.

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The question arises, however, as to when Graves first read Principles of Literary Criticism. One presumes that he would have read at least the offending pages shortly after they were published. Surely friends and acquaintances would have drawn his attention to them. Certainly Graves was very alert to how he was treated in print during the period of his collaboration with Riding. As we have seen, at the beginning of A Pamphlet Against Anthologies the two note how many reviewers have treated Graves as the sole author of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. They retained a clipping agency to forward references to their work when they left the country for Mallorca and, even in this out-of-the-way place, it took little time for them to learn that Empson had misrepresented A Survey of Modernist Poetry as having been written by Graves alone. (Empson’s book was published in November of 1930, and by the end of January, 1931, their press clipping agency had sent them a copy of a review of Seven Types of Ambiguity in which this error was committed.)¹² Assuming that Graves was as attentive to references to his individual work as he was to references to his collaboration with Riding, and noting that he was part of the social network of both modernist writers and Oxford professors when Principles of Literary Criticism came out, news of his treatment in Richards’s book must have reached him at least as fast as news of his treatment in Empson’s, whether or not he employed a press clipping agency at this time.

Furthermore, given his growing stature as a literary theorist in the early 1920s, it is difficult to believe that Graves would not have read Richards’s widely noted book on his own initiative. Just as students like Empson mentioned Graves to Richards at Cambridge, so students at Graves’s talks at universities such as Oxford and Leeds may have asked Graves questions about Richards’s early works like The Foundation of Aesthetics and The Meaning of Meaning. And of course others were talking and writing about Richards: T.S. Eliot, Graves’s friendly acquaintance at this point, reviewed Richards’s work favourably in The Criterion, a journal to which Graves contributed, and in which he tried throughout 1926 to place some of Riding’s essays. Graves’s explanation in Poetic Unreason that “there are few particular references in the present volume to other treatises on aesthetics because the philosophical and psychological premises to which these works invariably refer are not referred to here” implies that he is familiar with such treatises on aesthetics.¹³

However, it is unlikely that Graves read Principles of Literary Criticism in time for it to have influenced Poetic Unreason, for although it was published in 1925, the original essays first appeared between 1922 and 1923, well before Richards’s book was published.¹⁴ The first chapter of Poetic Unreason is a lecture delivered at Leeds University in 1922. Other chapters appeared in whole or in part in British and American reviews and journals between 1922 and 1923.¹⁵ Arthur Clutton-Brock, who died on 8 January 1924, is referred to as having reviewed much of the book’s contents and criticized its main argument.¹⁶

By the time that Graves began writing A Survey of Modernist Poetry in 1926, however, it is clear that even if he had not yet read Principles of Literary Criticism, Riding had read it. She was well aware of Richards’s work when she was writing both Contemporaries and Snobs (published February 1928) and Anarchism is Not Enough (published May 1928). In the latter, Riding devotes extensive attention to the (mis) understanding of language generally, and of poetic language in particular, in The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, and Science and Poetry. The allusions to Richards in Contemporaries and Snobs, combined with internal evidence that indicates that she is writing the book during the fall of 1926, suggest that Riding is very familiar with Richards’s work as she and Graves begin their collaboration on A Survey of Modernist Poetry. In fact, on the basis of her explicit engagement with Richards’s work in Anarchism is Not Enough, one can see that Riding was working out her response to Richards while writing her essay “T.E. Hulme, The New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein” in 1926 – the essay that Graves revised with her so that it could serve as their concluding chapter in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.

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In Anarchism Is Not Enough, Riding scorns what she identifies as a systematic denigration of poetic language rooted in Richards’s veneration of scientific knowledge. The Meaning of Meaning is a “science-proud collation of verbal niceties,” a “confused mixture of philosophy, psychology, ethnology and literature”: “To Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards language is ideally a neutral region of literalness between reality and its human perception. Signs … being the closest the perceiving mind can come to reality, must for convenience be regarded as reality itself; the more faithfully they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent reality. There is no evidence anywhere in this book that perception is properly anything other than a slave of reality.”¹⁷ She complains that “the conclusion of this study … is that man has no right to meaning: meaning is the property of reality.”¹⁸ For Riding, Richards is an imperial agent of science and, as such, an enemy of poetry.

In the essay “Poetry and the Literary Universe,” the first of three in the slightly earlier book Contemporaries and Snobs, Riding makes the same point about how the empire of concrete fact threatens poetry, but without mentioning Richards by name: “the victorious concrete intelligence seems to have taken possession of all the facts of actual experience.”¹⁹ The language in the earlier book – “the slaves of this knowledge-material can imagine no state of activity which shall not be dependent on it” – is the same as that in Anarchism Is Not Enough.²⁰ She celebrates in the latter a “disobedient perception” that can imagine activity not dependent on the knowledge-material of science, and complains that in The Meaning of Meaning “there is no hint that individual perception, instead of making a separate approximation of the general sign conveying the object, does in fact where originality is maintained experience a revulsion from the object or event concerned.”²¹ Similarly, she argues in “Poetry and the Literary Universe” that “the slaves of this knowledge-material … cannot understand that the poet can have experience of it as an independent mind reducing authoritative mass to unauthoritative ideas.”²² Riding may not have named Richards as her representative of this possessive and apparently “victorious concrete intelligence” until she writes Anarchism Is Not Enough, but it is clear that she has begun to quarrel with him in the essays of the earlier book Contemporaries and Snobs.²³

Riding claims that it is the “snobbism” of literary critics who are “knowledge-slaves” (taking everything, and especially poetry, “with a grain of scientific salt”) that “drives poets who stand in fear of the knowledge-hierarchy to profess only the single reality of the poetic mind – what we may call the apologetic absolute. The result is poetry whose only subject is the psychology of the poet and whose final value is scientific.”²⁴ According to Riding, whether the poem is taken to refer to the collective reality of the ostensibly objective world described by the physical sciences or the individual reality of the ostensibly subjective world described by the psychological sciences, “in both cases the one belief from which the poetic mind must not disconnect itself is the belief in reality.”²⁵ Richards is her primary target in this criticism of false paradigms for understanding and interpreting poetry, but she is also explaining here the problem she finds with Graves’s conflict theory. From her point of view Graves partakes of “the apologetic absolute” of psychology, for the goal of his early books is to promote detailed analysis as a way of accommodating traditional emotional approaches to poetry to the new science of psychology. The distinction that Richards and Graves would make between their respectively behaviourist and more-or-less Freudian psychological paradigms makes no difference to her: in each case, the poem refers to a reality to be found in the psychological state of the poet at the time of composition.

Of course there is much that Riding accepts in Graves’s early criticism, and much that she appropriates from it. She agrees with the terms by which Graves distinguishes between classicism and romanticism, for instance, celebrating the latter as representing the truly poetic mind because it is not subordinated to the world of logic, knowledge, and fact. Riding effectively appropriates Graves’s characterization of the classical impulse as an Aristotelian project of establishing a knowledge-hierarchy within which poetry is subordinated to public, practical purposes. According to Graves, Aristotle “was intending to make poetry conform to an absolute system, to weed it of all the symbolic extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state from which romantic poetry has always originated, and to confine it within rational and educative limits. Drama was with him chiefly an intuitive imitation of how typical men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated; lyric poetry, apart from certain approved imitations of romantic characters, was logically harmonious and rational statement.”²⁶

She effectively accepts Graves’s characterization of English as a romantically poetic language ready at the least lapse of a writer’s attention to resist the paradigms by which the “knowledge-material” and the “knowledge-hierarchy” maintain hegemony in collective social reality and individual psychological reality.²⁷ Similarly, she agrees with Graves’s assertion of “the rule that ‘Poetry contains nothing haphazard’”: “By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate a personal significance.”²⁸ Regarding the poem’s meaning as its own self-authorizing event (and not as an allegory of the poet’s experience, or the reader’s, or the critic’s, or the scientist’s, or anything else), Riding certainly agrees that there is nothing haphazard in any real poem, but she regards Graves’s reference by rule to a foundation of “personal significance” as requiring correction: no striking detail and no juxtaposition of apparently irrelevant themes which a poem contains can be denied at any rate a poetic significance.

Riding develops as her own axiom Graves’s suggestion that “Poetry is not as some people want it to be, a condensation and rearrangement of past events, according to a preconceived logical structure, not merely a combination of historic strands, but a new entity whose past is past.”²⁹ She recognizes in statements like this what Graves does not: that he here disavows his earlier model of poetry as “a cipher that can usually be decoded from another context.”³⁰ Riding finds the grounding of Graves’s conflict theory in the psychological experience of the poet a product of “fear of the knowledge-hierarchy,” a hierarchy “by which poetry may manage to survive” in the world of scientific fact and objective knowledge if the poet is willing “to profess only the single reality of the poetic mind.”³¹ But this is “to treat poetry as if it were a science,” whereas “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. It comes to be because an individual mind is clear enough to perceive it and then to become its instrument. Criticism can only have authority over the poem if the poet’s mind was from the start not sufficiently clear, sufficiently free of criticism; if it obeyed an existing, that is, past order of reality.”³²

The work that obeys a past order of reality is a false poem: “The creative history of the false poem is the age, the author sensible of the age and the set of outer circumstances involved in his delicate adjustment to the age at a particular moment, in a particular place. Nothing remains beyond this, no life, no element, untranslatable except in the terms provided by the poem itself. In the true poem these terms form a measurement that hitherto did not exist.”³³ The true poem is not a cipher to be decoded from another context. Riding sees it as nothing or “no thing” in the way Sartre sees a person as nothing or “no thing”: in each case, existence precedes essence in such a way that to do is to be: “The word poem itself is an ever new meaning of an ever new combination of doing and making as one act, with a third inference of being perpetuating these in dynamic form. The only difference between a poem and a person is that in a poem being is the final state, in a person the preliminary state. These two kinds of realities, that of the person, that of the poem, stand at one end and the other of the poet’s mind, which is but progressive experience made into a recurrent sequence circulating between one kind of reality and the other without destroying one reality in the other.”³⁴ From Riding’s point of view, Graves’s conflict theory threatens to destroy the reality of the poem by subsuming it within the personal reality of the poet.

Richards is not the only representative of the imperialistic practical intellect. In T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot, Riding identifies two more dangerously influential contemporaries devoted to “knowledge-material” and the “knowledge-hierarchy.” She notes that “T.S. Eliot observed some time ago that ‘the conditions which may be considered to be unfavourable to the writing of good poetry are unfavourable to the writing of good criticism,’” complaining that “this implies that the reality of poetry is externally, not internally derived.”³⁵ In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, she and Graves have Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in mind when they complain that the atmosphere created by “this new primitive stage … in contemporary poetry” hampers “those who are poets by nature … with the considerations of all the poets who have ever written or may be writing or may ever write – not only in the English language but in all languages of the world under every possible social organization. It invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world tradition of poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity than it is forced to be by outside influences.”³⁶ The panopticon of tradition disciplines the individual talent by an interior colonization at the hands of the historical sense.

Similarly, Riding notes that T.E. Hulme “advocated a discipline that would control both time and the creator through the impersonal severity, the absoluteness, in which artistic forms might be conceived. The product of this ‘objective’ objectivity is therefore pure, hard, non-sympathetic. It is not intelligent: that is, it is not materialistically interpretative, but material. It is not emotional: that is, it is not imaginatively imitative but unimaginatively representational. It is a non-human object.”³⁷ Whether from Richards, or Eliot, or Hulme, Riding will have none of this subordination of the human to the non-human, especially in poetry.

One can see that Riding works out her reaction to The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, and Science and Poetry in this analysis of Hulme and Eliot in Contemporaries and Snobs. Hulme’s “unimaginatively representational … non-human object” is an example of the attitude toward language endorsed, according to Riding, by Ogden and Richards: to them, words “are certified scientific representatives of the natural objects, or constructions of objects called events … [T] he more faithfully they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent reality.”³⁸ The conclusion of Ogden and Richards, Riding finds, is that “man has no right to meaning.”³⁹ Eliot’s poetry of a “reality … externally, not internally derived” is another example of this attitude toward language according to which “meaning is the property of reality, which is to be known scientifically.”⁴⁰

According to Riding, for Richards, “evocative (poetic) speech is false by itself … it is scientifically admissible only where it shows close dependence on symbols meaningless in themselves but showing close, scientific dependence on reality.”⁴¹ In Science and Poetry, she observes, “we are returned to the assumption scattered through the pages of The Meaning of Meaning, that man has no right to meaning … [T] he one belief from which the poetic mind must not disconnect itself is the belief in reality; which proves itself … to be only the most advanced ‘contemporary background’ appreciable.”⁴²

The language of Riding’s analysis of Richards in Anarchism Is Not Enough is the same as the language of her analysis of Hulme and Eliot throughout Contemporaries and Snobs, the revised central essay of which serves as the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. The latter observes that in Hulme’s programme for a new barbarism in poetry, “Language … had to be reorganized, used as if afresh, cleansed of its experience … Words had to be reduced to their least historical value; the purer they could be made, the more eternally immediate and present they would be; they could express the absolute at the same time as they expressed the age. Or at any rate this was the logical effect of scientific barbarism if taken literally.”⁴³ This reference to “scientific barbarism” (the only time the phrase is used) certainly hints at the influence of Ogden and Richards behind the critique of Hulme and Eliot in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Ogden and Richards are invoked in Anarchism Is Not Enough as the ones who explain scientifically the theory according to which reality (whether collective or individual) is “the organ of communication and author of symbols”: “The symbolism of the individual real in its scientific aspect is best explained in C.K. Ogden’s and I.A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning,” a “confused mixture of philosophy, psychology, ethnology and literature,” a “science-proud collation of verbal niceties.”⁴⁴ They offer a scientific perspective on the vulgar artist’s belief that his language is “not symbolic, but literal, not ‘artistic’ but natural. It … makes everything it touches equally significant, physical, real” because “To Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards language is ideally a neutral region of literalness between reality and its human perception.”⁴⁵

Later in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Riding and Graves explain Hulme’s programme to achieve a poetry of “direct communication,” “direct communication referring to an immediate ideal of intelligibility,” in similar terms: “since language had been tainted by false experiences, much of the energy … had to be devoted to an attack on the ordinary language of communication.”⁴⁶ This anticipates Riding’s complaint a year later in Anarchism is Not Enough that Ogden and Richards regard language not regulated by their limited list of definitions as “disobedient”; an “Enchanted Wood of Words”; an unreformed grammar susceptible to the “treachery of words” that are liable to be “vulgar stage-players of images” rather than the reality that “man’s mind, like a dust-cloud, is assumed to obscure from himself.”⁴⁷

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It is just possible, I suppose, that before she read Richards’s early works Riding evolved a critique of Hulme and Eliot as enslaved to “knowledge-material” and “the knowledge-hierarchy,” and that she subsequently recognized that this also applied to Richards. Yet it seems much more likely that she acquired through reflection on Richards’s work the metaphysical language of her critique of others who mistook knowledge as reflecting or indicating a hierarchy of reality. And it seems equally likely that it was her reaction to Richards that allowed her to recognize a subordination of poetry to an external reality as something that was common to the criticism of Hulme and Eliot as well – and even common to the conflict theory of her collaborator Graves.

In Contemporaries and Snobs and in Survey’s revised version of the Contemporaries and Snobs essay “T.E. Hulme, the New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein,” Riding actually refers to The Meaning of Meaning indirectly. She concludes of Hulme’s “dry theory of historical objectivity” that “it shows the creator defeated by progress taking refuge in a petulant barbarism.”⁴⁸ The “barbarism” to which she refers, the “new barbarism” of her essay’s title, is a twentieth-century version of the ancient “barbaric absolute”: the identification of an absolute as “the divine source of ‘things.’”⁴⁹ She implies that Hulme and Eliot are new barbarians in their nostalgia for “the ‘things’ which are supposed to be revealed in direct communication (‘things’ in which apparently the first principle inheres).”⁵⁰

Riding’s term, “barbarism,” and her understanding of it as designating a magically logocentric attitude toward language, allude to The Meaning of Meaning, wherein Ogden and Richards devote an early chapter, “The Power of Words,” to the role of barbarism in ancient and contemporary understandings of the power and purpose of language. In particular, they review “the linguistic illusions of primitive man,” warning that since “the verbal machinery on which we so readily rely … was set up by him,” and that since “from the structure of our language we can hardly even think of escaping,” we may still be in the grip of “other illusions hardly less gross and not more easily eradicable” than those of “arboreal man.”⁵¹ Reviewing the superstitious attitude toward words and names in a wide variety of ancient sources including the religion of ancient Egypt, the thought of Greek philosophers from Heraclitus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Book of Revelation, and the fairy tales of Europe, the authors suggest that “it is clear that in the days before psychological analysis was possible the evidence for a special world of words of power, for nomina as numina, must have appeared overwhelming.”⁵² Noting that “in Frazer’s Golden Bough numerous examples of word taboos are collected to show the universality of the attitude,” they quote Frazer to the effect that this attitude is a barbarism that continues in the modern world: “Superstitions survive because, while they shock the views of enlightened members of the community, they are still in harmony with the thoughts and feelings of others, who, though they are drilled by their betters into an appearance of civilization, remain barbarians or savages at heart.”⁵³ They then point out that the most enlightened members of their own community are not immune to this barbarism: “The persistence of the primitive linguistic outlook not only throughout the whole religious world, but in the work of the profoundest thinkers, is indeed one of the most curious features of modern thought. The philosophy of the nineteenth century was dominated by an idealist tradition in which the elaboration of monstrous symbolic machinery (the Hegelian Dialectic provides a striking example) was substituted for direct research, and occupied the centre of attention. The twentieth century opened with a subtle analysis of the mysteries of mathematics on the basis of a ‘Platonism’ even more pronounced than that of certain Critical Realists of 1921.”⁵⁴

One of Riding’s pleasures by means of her phrase “the new barbarism” is to hoist Ogden and Richards with their own petard. Her point is that for all their disdain for barbarism, Ogden and Richards – even if only “for convenience” – treat signs “as reality itself,” implying that “the more faithfully they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent reality.”⁵⁵ What is this but a new barbarism? According to Riding and Graves, “Poetry in the past had found it expedient to accept barbaric philosophical or religious ‘ideas’ and to cast itself within the limits imposed by them. They were barbaric ideas because they were large but definite; infinite, yet fixed by the way that they fixed man; crude and unshaded but incontestable – such as the barbaric idea of God … A barbaric view or order depends on the underlying conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite, all-contemporaneous time, and of a humanity co-existent with this time, a humanity consolidated as a mass and not composed of individuals.”⁵⁶ In Anarchism is Not Enough, Riding rejects The Meaning of Meaning paradigm according to which “meaning is the property of reality” in favour of the “disobedient perception” of the “individual” dedicated to maintaining “originality”: “the very genesis or utterance of a sign” is not “a separate approximation of the general sign conveying the object” but rather “a revulsion from the object concerned,” “an assertion of the independence of the mind against what the authors call the sign situation.”⁵⁷

Riding and Graves characterise Hulme’s theoretical project (one endorsed by Eliot in both his critical prose and his poetic practice) as that Nietzsche attributes to Socrates: correcting existence. Since “his concept of the absolute (the search for the absolute is the chief concern … of ‘pure’ philosophy) derides any idea of relativity,” Hulme “stumbled on the need which art – painting or sculpture or poetry – had to be philosophically organized and corrected.”⁵⁸ “Entering a new artificially barbaric era,” according to Riding and Graves, “painting and sculpture merely had to revert to barbaric modes – Negroid, Oceanic, Aztec, Egyptian, Chinese, archaic Greek – creating modern forms as if in primitive times; forms primitive, obedient to the conventions which they accepted, therefore final, absolute, ‘abstract.’”⁵⁹ Riding and Graves criticize the new barbaric art in the same way Ogden and Richards criticise Bertrand Russell’s “primitive linguistic outlook” in The Principles of Mathematics: here “the world of universals” “was rehabilitated,” “a modern Platonism reconstructed” where “everything is ‘unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.’”⁶⁰ Agreeing with the criticism by Ogden and Richards of those whose outlook betrays that they love perfection more than life, Riding and Graves observe that Ogden and Richards themselves suffer from the same illusion.

However difficult the task that lies ahead, “what language already does,” Ogden and Richards suggest, “is the ground for hope that it may in time be made fully to perform its functions.”⁶¹ The problem lies with those uninterested “to pass beyond the mere exchange of accepted and familiar phrases,” those “who, having never been troubled by thought, have never found any difficulty expressing it,” those with “an uncritical reliance upon speech” despite “the fruitless questionings and bewilderment caused by the irrelevancies and the intrinsic peculiarities of words.”⁶² Whereas poetry and sculpture can “revert to barbaric modes” as if the renaissance and romanticism had never occurred, “poetry could not seemingly submit itself to an as if, because its expressive medium, language, had been intrinsically affected not only by the works in which it had been used but also by the non-poetic uses of which language is capable.”⁶³ Transposing the rhetoric of Ogden and Richards to their own characterization of the new barbarism, Riding and Graves suggest that Hulme and Eliot agree that “since language had been tainted by false experience,” poetry “had to be devoted to an attack on the ordinary language of communication” if it were to recover the possibility of “direct communication.”⁶⁴ And so “Language, therefore, had to be reorganized, used as if afresh, cleansed of its experience: to be as ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ as colour or stone. Words had to be reduced to their least historical value; the purer they could be made, the more eternally immediate and present they would be; they could express the absolute at the same time as they expressed the age. Or this was at any rate the logical effect of scientific barbarism if taken literally.”⁶⁵ The “scientific barbarism” in question is the attitude toward language of Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, which Riding and Graves find Hulme and Eliot reflecting and refracting in the theories and practices of their modernist aesthetic.

So it is clear not only that Riding and Graves know well the work of Richards as they write A Survey of Modernist Poetry, but also that they organize the book so as to conclude it with a repudiation of the “scientific barbarism” that has crept into both literary theory and modernist poetry by means of Richards, Hulme, and Eliot. Otherwise, however, Graves seems to have been content to watch Riding tackle Richards on her own. She seems to have persuaded Graves that Richards’s criticism of his psychological method of interpreting literature was an attack on a scientific barbarism from which they both suffered. To collaborate with Riding, he had to accept that defending his reading of “Kubla Khan” against Richards’s attack would be retrograde. Only after Riding and Graves had separated did Graves have a go at Richards on his own in The Reader over Your Shoulder, and by then the history between them had already been made. It simply needed to be recorded and set straight.

1 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 29, 31.

2 Ibid., 30.

3 Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (London: Cape, 1943), 405–6.

4 Robert Graves, letter to Alun Lewis (26 November 1941), in In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914-1946, ed. Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 309.

5 Graves and Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 405.

6 Ibid., 21.

7 Ibid., 10.

8 Ibid., 10, 11.

9 Ibid., 35.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 34–5.

12 See Elizabeth Friedmann, A Mannered Grace: the Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson (New York: Persea Books, 2005), 97, and recall the account of the correspondence between Empson and Riding in Chapter1 above.

13 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), v.

14 The only exception to the early date of the essays making up Poetic Unreason is the last chapter, a version of which was published as “Sensory Vehicles of Poetic Thought” in The Saturday Review of Literature, 1 (31 January 1925): 489–90.

15 Graves acknowledges this fact: “Two of these chapters have appeared in the North American Review and the Saturday Review of Literature (New York), parts of others in the Spectator, New Republic and elsewhere” (Poetic Unreason, v). A version of the first chapter was published as “What Is Bad Poetry?” The North American Review (September 1923) 218: 353–68. Parts of the sixth chapter, “The Illogical Element in Poetry,” were published as “The Illogic of Stoney Stratford and of Poetry,” The Spectator (15 July 1922) 129: 87, and “Poetic Catharsis and Modern Psychology,” The Spectator (29 July 1922) 129: 151–2. Part of the thirteenth chapter, “Succession,” was published as “Mr Hardy and the Pleated Skirt,” Nation & Athenaeum (7 July 1923) 33: 451–2 (also published in The New Republic [12 March 1924]).

16 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 85–6.

17 Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 55, 54, 54–5.

18 Ibid., 55.

19 Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1927), 46.

20 Ibid., 57.

21 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 55.

22 Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, 57.

23 Ibid., 46.

24 Ibid., 58.

25 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 57.

26 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 120–1.

27 Or as Graves puts it, there is in the English language a “rebellious tendency to form illicit assemblies that might affect the argument,” such that “for English writers of prose or verse, so soon as a gust of natural feeling snatches away the typographical disguise in which their words are dressed, the conceits appear in all freedom: at first they enliven and enforce the argument, but after a while, if the author is not wary, they desert it and begin a digressive dance of their own.” See Impenetrability; or the Proper Habit of English (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926), 11.

28 Robert Graves, On English Poetry: Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective (London: William Heinemann, 1922), 32.

29 Graves, Poetic Unreason, 124.

30 Graves, On English Poetry, 33.

31 Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, 58.

32 Ibid., 58, 60–1.

33 Ibid., 61.

34 Ibid., 62–3. See also Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), translated by P. Mairet, in Existentialism, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Modern Library, 1974), 197–8.

35 Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, 63.

36 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 263–4.

37 Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, 88.

38 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 54.

39 Ibid., 55.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 56.

42 Ibid., 57.

43 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 274.

44 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 53, 54, 54, 55.

45 Ibid., 53, 54.

46 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 278.

47 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 55, 55, 55, 54, 54.

48 Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, 88.

49 Ibid., 188.

50 Ibid., 187.

51 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), 35, 35, 35, 35, 34.

52 Ibid., 36.

53 Ibid., 37, 33. For Ogden and Richards’s quotation from Frazer, see James George Frazer, Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions (London: Macmillan, 1909).

54 Ibid., 39.

55 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 54.

56 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 266–7.

57 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 55.

58 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 272.

59 Ibid., 273.

60 Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 39, 40, 40, 40, 41. Ogden and Richards quote here Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: The Home University Library, 1912), 156.

61 Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 380.

62 Ibid.

63 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 273.

64 Ibid., 278.

65 Ibid., 274.