16
Although Riding seems to have had nothing good to say about Richards at this time, in collaboration with Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry she responds positively to a number of the points raised in Principles of Literary Criticism, without acknowledging the fact. Indeed, together they adapt many of Richards’s ideas to the purposes of their apology for modernist poetry in general, and for Riding’s own poetry in particular. Of course some of these ideas were originally appropriated from early work by Graves, so this back-and-forth influence is not surprising. In fact, we shall find not only that ideas originally worked out by Graves and Richards are modified in A Survey of Modernist Poetry according to the distinctive collaborative idioms of Riding and Graves, but also that the same ideas subsequently re-emerge in Practical Criticism. These literary theories and practices go on to shape the development of New Criticism for a long while to come.
•
Riding and Graves take up Richards’s concern about the danger for poetry, and for the larger culture, of “stock responses” and “stock feelings.” In Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards warns that bad poetry wins approval from readers because it presents them with “stock conventional attitudes.”1 These attitudes begin to inhabit us sometime after the age of ten, introduced initially “by social suggestion and by accidents,” “removing us from experience,” and becoming ever more fixed the more “we dwell in them.”2 The person in the grip of stock attitudes “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.”3 According to Richards, the stock response effectively marks the boundary in culture between reality and illusion.
In the world of art, the stock response marks the boundary between good and bad art, pure and impure writing, healthy and unhealthy reading. Although immersion in mediocre poetry can lead to “not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value,” Richards most fears the debasing influence of “the screen” and the “best-seller”: “They tend … to develop stock attitudes and stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers: attitudes and ideas which can be ‘put across’ quickly through a medium that lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive handling.”4 The impact on the most intimate aspects of life can be profound, since “Even the decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers and movie stars.”5 The artist, then, must choose for or against the stock response: “Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made.”6
Riding and Graves deploy these terms and express these values in their defence of modernist poetry. Concerned to account for “the ‘freakishness’ and abnormality of feeling with which the modernist poet is often charged,” they suggest that the modernist poet is not the problem; “the trouble is rather that ordinary modern life is full of the stock-feelings and situations with which traditional poetry has continually fed popular sentiments.”7 These stock feelings inhabit poems and readers alike. Ostensibly modernizing poets like “the Imagists” and “the Vers Librists generally,” on the one hand, or “the Georgians,” on the other, managed to avoid “archaistic diction” and, “in reaction to Victorianism,” “formally religious, philosophic or improving themes,” but none of them was “capable of writing a new poetry within these revised forms. So in both cases all that happened was that the same old stock-feelings and situations were served up again.”8 Georgianism particularly became “principally concerned” with “stock-subjects”: “Nature and love and leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other uncontroversial subjects.”9
Concentrating on poetry rather than movies and pulp fiction, Riding and Graves conclude that contemporary readers who are fed a diet of stock feelings and stock subjects often recognize in a poem only the stock feelings and stock subjects they project upon it: “The reader should enter the life of the poem and submit himself to its conditions in order to know it as it really is; instead of making it enter his life as a symbol having no private reality, only the reality it gets by reflection from his world.”10 Richards expressed a larger concern about the disconnection between the real world and the subjective world of the person in the grip of stock attitudes, the person who “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.”11 They share this same larger concern, too, observing “that modern life is full of the stock-feelings and situations with which traditional poetry has continually fed popular sentiments; that the commonplaces of everyday speech are merely the relics of past poetry.”12
The great attention that Riding and Graves paid to the chapter “Badness in Poetry” is suggested, then, not only by their attention to Richards’s criticism of H.D. but also by their attention to his concern with both the reader’s and the poet’s reliance on stock responses. Suggesting that stock responses lie at the heart of “dead movements” in poetry not only builds on Richards’s assertion that “no theory of criticism is satisfactory” that cannot explain the “wide appeal” of the stock response, but does so in language similar to Richards’s own.13 They agree that the person in the grip of the stock response is remote from genuine experience, trapped in a narcissistic hermeneutic (if projecting a stock response onto a poem that does not call for it), or trapped in a collective social fiction (if responding with the stock response actually solicited by the poem).
Furthermore, they adopt the very tropes by which Richards advances his analysis. Stock responses, says Richards, depend on “general Ideas … certain of success … if suitably advertised”: “The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent … But the written appeals which have the soundest financial prospects as estimated by the most able American advertisers are such that no critic can safely ignore them. For they do undoubtedly represent the literary ideals present and future of the people to whom they are addressed.”14
Similarly, Riding and Graves are concerned to distinguish in modern poetry “between peculiarities resulting from a deliberate attempt to improve the status of poetry by jazzing up its programme and those resulting from concentration on the poetic process itself. The first class of peculiarities are caused by a desire to improve the popularity of poetry with the public and constitute a sort of commercial advertising of poetry.”15 They present “dead movements” in poetry as part of the wasteful disorganization of life that Richards associates with the stock response and its cynical economics: “A dead movement is one which never had or can have a real place in the history of poets and poems. It occurs because some passing or hitherto unrealized psychological mood in the public offers a new field for exploitation, as sudden fashion crazes come and go, leaving no trace but waste material.”16 The dead movements of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century “were all merely modernized advertisements of the same old product of which the reader had grown tired.”17
Imagism, for instance, was “a stunt of commercial advertisers of poetry to whom poetic results meant a popular demand for their work, not the discovery of new values in poetry”18 According to Ridings and Graves, Imagists “could only go so far as to say everything that had already been said before in a slightly different way,” putting themselves in the “position of selling one’s ideas rather than of constantly submitting them to new tests.”19 In Imagism, and similar contemporary dead movements, “all that happened was that the same old stock-feelings and situations were served up again, only with a different sauce.”20
By contrast, “authentic ‘advanced’ poetry of the present day differs from such programmes for poetry in this important respect: that it is concerned with a reorganization of the matter (not in the sense of subject-matter but of poetic thought as distinguished from other kinds of thought) rather than the manner of poetry.”21 Like Richards, they present the stock response as a function of the subordination of poetic values to commercial values – evidence of the degeneration of twentieth-century Western culture.
Accepting Richards’s suggestion that “Against these stock responses the artist’s internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer’s triumphs are made,” Riding and Graves offer modernist poetry as the antidote.22 Richards points out that the disease is viciously circular, and Riding and Graves agree: “the general reading public … gets its excitement from literature and literary feelings instead of life”; “traditional poetry has continually fed popular sentiments” with “stock-feelings and situations”; literary stock feelings thus overflow literary bounds into “the commonplaces of everyday speech,” which “are the relics of past poetry.”23 In the face of such a narrowly circumscribed discursive reality, “the only way for a modern poet to have an original feeling or experience that may become literature is to have it outside of literature.”24 Consequently, “the modernist poet is often charged” with “‘freakishness’ and abnormality of feeling”: to plain readers residing in a literary world that they mistake for reality, modernist poets seem to have left both literature and reality behind in their quest to invest poetry with experience beyond stock feelings and situations.25
Like Richards, Riding and Graves recognize in authentic poetry a means of breaking the vicious commercial circle that sustains poet and reader in their exchange of de-realizing stock responses. They present modernist poetry as challenging the plain reader by means of its reorganized thought: “This is why the plain reader feels so balked by it: he must enter into the matter without expecting a cipher-code to the meaning.”26 Poetry of “cipher-code” is poetry that is to be interpreted in relation to the reality of science, a conception of poetry that Riding and Graves repudiate. Poetry that serves up stock feelings and situations to the reader – including the kind of poetry that does this in a new way (Imagism, vers libre, Georgianism), poetry thereby “designed to recapture his interest” from “other forms of social entertainment” – is poetry that depends on a stock reality as key to the cipher-code that will explain it.27
Modernist poetry, according to Riding and Graves, is as indifferent to the requirements of commerce as to the requirements of soothing stock responses, and so “The plain reader has an exaggerated antagonism toward poetry of this … sort because it is too serious to permit of a merely neutral attitude in him and because, instead of presenting him with the benefits of its improvements, the poet seems impudently intent on advertising poetry for its own sake rather than for the reader’s.”28 Yet the reader’s salvation resides in modern poetry’s challenges ( “challenges which his self-respect does not permit him to overlook”): “it would be wise to refrain from critical comments such as ‘that is incomprehensible’ unless he is willing to make the effort of criticism. If he does this, much that at first glance antagonized him will appear not incomprehensible but only perhaps difficult, or if not difficult, only different from what he has been accustomed to consider poetical.”29
This reference to the “neutral attitude” that modernist poetry prevents anticipates Riding’s language in Anarchism Is Not Enough when she charges Richards with misconceiving language as a “neutral region of literalness between reality and its human perception,” just as the representation of poetry here as existing for its own sake anticipates her upbraiding of Richards and his ilk in both Anarchism Is Not Enough and Contemporaries and Snobs.30 Nonetheless, like Richards, Riding and Graves depict recovery from the circle of stock responses as not only a possibility offered by authentic poetry but also a potential achievement by individual readers – an achievement uncertain as to its efficacy and duration. Making “the effort of criticism” in good faith, the reader “may even train himself to read certain contemporary poets with interest or, if he persists in keeping the critical process separate from the reading process, have at least a historical sense of what is happening in poetry.”31
•
Riding and Graves also seem to have followed with interest Richards’s notorious distinction between two broad uses of language: the scientific and the emotive. In Anarchism Is Not Enough, Riding summarizes what she regards as the offensive claims of The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, and Science and Poetry, quotes from each book, and opposes to them a counter-vision of her own.32 Much of this counter-vision is already evident in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.
In Anarchism Is Not Enough, Riding reviews – in order to reject – the paradigm in Science and Poetry according to which Richards accords the “stabilizing of the scientific or symbolic use of words” priority over poetry’s “deliberately unscientific use of words” whether as “evocative speech” or as “figurative speech.” She complains that, according to Richards, “Poetry as evocative speech takes its cue from external (scientific) symbols of reality rather than from internal (imaginative) symbols of reality – it means, in Mr. Richards’ words, ‘The transference from the magical view of the world to the scientific.’”33 And so, Riding concludes, “evocative speech is in fact not an independent speech of its own but a persuasive quality that may be added to symbolic speech … evocative (poetic) speech is false by itself (in opposition to symbolic speech), it is scientifically admissible only where it shows close dependence on symbols meaningless in themselves but showing a close, scientific dependence on reality”34 According to Riding, Richards sees poetry as a cipher whose value is determined by reality.
Of course Graves did not require Riding’s tutelage to work out his own opposition to the hierarchy that placed logical above illogical modes of thought. As we have seen, he addresses the problem explicitly in “The Illogical Element in Poetry,” and he does so in terms that Riding takes up in her own work:
The scholastic tradition as finally systematized in the textbooks makes no allowance for associative thinking, finds no virtue in a spoonerism or a pun suggested by the homophonic association of, say, ‘horse’ and ‘hoarse,’ or in fantastic slips either of pen or tongue; ridicules the ancient notion that medical bane and salve are always to be found growing together, or that between the crescent moon and the horseshoe nailed over the lintel a sympathy can exist by means of resemblance in shape; denies to a ghost any real existence unless the camera or barometer under the surveillance of a body of sceptics can be affected by the ghost’s entry into the haunted corridor.
Poetry of the kind which we recognize as Romantic or Fantastic or Inspired being, as Coleridge first showed, dependent on associative thought, its symbolism bound up with a vast number of logical false premises, a defiance of the ordered spatio-temporal structure which the civilized intellect has built for its habitation – this Poetry when Logic was first achieving pre-eminence under the Greeks, either had to be banned altogether from the ideal republic of the philosophers as Plato wished it banned, or had to submit itself to a severe examination and systematization – hence Aristotle’s Poetics. For centuries since, philosophical speculation about emotional poetry, dreams and phantasy has been silent or found only illogic in them.35
However partial to the method of romantic poetry he might be, Graves accepts that just as partisans of the logical method might claim that “the logical method is the only right method, and all others are useless because illogical,” so “the romantic method has a similar scorn for the logical method,” and so “both may therefore be suspect when they advance these mutually exclusive claims.”36 Graves understands himself merely to be urging the righting of an imbalance: “associative thought is as modern and reputable a mode as intellectual thought.”37 In fact, it is “a method constantly employed unknown to themselves by the most sophisticated and Aristotelian minds and of great service to them.”38 Graves therefore looks forward to a time when “the clash” between these modes of thought “can end and these terms can be used to qualify the forms of poetry alternately appearing as either one or other method of thought employed for dealing with any conflict.”39
Of course Riding not only regarded Graves’s psychoanalytical perspective on conflict in poetry as subordinating poetry to a meaning outside it, but also regarded the claim that there need not be a distinction between logical and illogical uses of language as belying the significance of the distinctive unreality of poetry. Since for Richards – and for the pre-Riding Graves – “the one belief from which the poetic mind must not disconnect itself is the belief in reality,” “Poetry is according to such criticism … a socially beneficial affirmation of reality.”40 However much Graves would have objected to Richards’s assertion that in Science and Poetry he was describing “the transference from the magical view of the world to the scientific,” since Graves regards the associational thought that underlies the magical view of the world as just “as modern and reputable as intellectual thought,” he did not recognize before his collaboration with Riding that conflict theory subordinated poetry to scientific reality in the same way.41
A Survey of Modernist Poetry, however, shows that Riding and Graves have already worked out this problem, and that they have done so in response to Richards’s scientism: “Experiment … may be interpreted in two ways. In the first sense it is a delicate and constantly alert state of expectancy directed toward the discovery of something of which some slight clue has been given … The important thing in the whole process is the initial clue, or, in old-fashioned language, the inspiration. The real scientist should have an equal power of genius with the poet.”42 To this point, the passage in A Survey of Modernist Poetry is in agreement with what Graves writes in Poetic Unreason. Yet the influence of Riding’s point of view soon becomes evident: “the real scientist should have an equal power of genius with the poet,” but there is “the difference that the scientist is inspired to discover things which already are (his results are facts), while the poet is inspired to discover things which are made by his discovery of them (his results are not statements about things already known to exist, or knowledge, but truths, things which existed before only as potential truth).”43 Riding’s sense of poetry as an existential nothing is present here.
As we have seen, according to Riding, the scientist is a slave obedient to reality; the true poet is disobedient to reality and free to experiment in unreality. Not every scientist is a “real scientist,” however, and not every poet is a true poet:
Experiment in the second sense is the use of a system for its own sake and brings about, whether in science or poetry, no results but those possible to the system. As it is only the scientific genius who is capable of using experiment in the first of these senses … experiment in the second sense is the general method of the labouring, as against the inventive, side of science … Poets, then, who need the support of a system (labourers pretending to be inventors, since in poetry, unlike science, there is no place for labourers) are obliged to not only the workshop method of science, but the whole philosophical point of view of science, which is directly opposite to the point of view of poetry.44
We find here in general terms about the relationship between poetry and science the same terms that Riding applies more particularly in Anarchism Is Not Enough to The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, and Science and Poetry.
Riding and Graves clearly impute to their “plain reader” Richards’s hierarchical distinction between “figurative” and “evocative” language: “The plain reader makes two general categories for poetry; the realistic (the true), which is supposed to put the raw poetry of life felt dumbly by him into a literary form, a register of the nobler sentiments of practical life; and the non-realistic or romantic (the untrue), which covers his life of fantasia and desires, the world he is morally obliged to treat as unreal.”45 This passage echoes Richards’s characterisation of poetry’s relationship to practical life throughout Principles of Literary Criticism, and it anticipates Riding’s complaints about his definitions of “figurative” and “evocative” uses of poetic language in Anarchism Is Not Enough: “Poetry as symbolic speech is only figurative speech; it invents a fairy-story of reality. Poetry as evocative speech takes its cue from external (scientific) symbols of reality rather than from internal (imaginative) symbols of reality – it means, in Mr. Richards’ words, ‘The transference from the magical view of the world to the scientific.’”46
•
It is clear, then, that engagement by Riding and Graves with the work of Richards shapes a number of aspects of their discussion, definition, and defence of poetry in general and of modernist poetry in particular, yet of all the insights they derive from him perhaps the most practical is his recommendation that readers of poetry read poems more slowly. Richards writes about this in Science and Poetry (1926), which was published a year before A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Believing that “in nearly all poetry the sound and feel of the words, what is often called the form of the poem in opposition to its content, get to work first, and the senses in which the words are later more explicitly taken are subtly influenced by this fact,” Richards does not here recommend the slow reading of the poem as a method of interpreting its sense or meaning, but rather as a way of mastering the sound of the poem – a necessary preliminary step on the way towards the interpretation of its sense that will follow.47 He continues: “Let us begin by reading it very slowly, preferably aloud, giving every syllable time to make its full effect upon us. And let us read it experimentally, repeating it, varying our tone of voice until we are satisfied that we have caught its rhythm as well as we are able, and … that we … are certain how it should ‘go.’”48 Just as poetry begins to communicate upon the poet’s “getting it ‘right,’” so readers begin to understand poetry once they “are certain how it should go.”49 Reading poetry slowly to get the sound right was linked from the beginning to reading slowly to get the sense right. However, Riding and Graves recognized the importance of this link before Richards did.
•
Graves would write a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1955 claiming that the analysis of Hopkins’s poem “Hurrahing in Harvest” in A Survey of Modernist Poetry began the influence of Hopkins on modern poetry, yet Richards’s earlier attention to Hopkins was at least as influential in this regard.50 Empson refers to it in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and Riding and Graves seem to have noticed it themselves.
Russo notes that “in 1927, Richards introduced Hopkins by defending poetry ‘with some slight obscurity.’ He applauded writers who ‘can compel slow reading’; the ‘effort’ and ‘heightened attention’ may ‘brace the reader’; the ‘peculiar intellectual thrill which celebrates the step-by-step conquest of understanding may irradiate and awaken other mental activities more essential to poetry’ such as intellectual inquiry, perception of the wider ‘equilibrium,’ and freedom.”51 In fact, the first version of Richards’s essay on Hopkins in which he makes these claims was actually published the year before.52 This fact is important, for it shows that Richards begins to associate slow reading with “the step-by-step conquest of understanding” even before he can have read A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Yet, as his dismissal of the slow reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet by Riding and Graves as a mere game of interpretation shows, Richards remained a long way from understanding slow reading as a close reading by which to detect a systematic overdetermination of semantic, syntactic, and tonal ambiguities.
Determined to make Richards the inventor of close reading, Russo suggests that Richards’s treatment in Practical Criticism of a poem by Luce “exemplifies the close reading method as it stood in 1929.”53 As Haffenden points out, however, Russo is both incorrect in this claim and inaccurate in his account of Richards’s writing about Luce: “Russo, intent upon proving that Richards had it in mind to illuminate an ambiguity in Luce’s line of poetry, has no compunction about supplying rather more than the gloss that Richards offered … [I] t is clear that Russo makes a different point from the original. Richards … was really not explaining the workings of ambiguity in poetry.”54 In 1929, in fact, not only was Empson well beyond any such half-hearted engagement with ambiguity as Richards shows in Practical Criticism at this time, but so were Riding and Graves.
Richards does refer to slow reading as enabling “the step-by-step conquest of understanding” what a poem means, but he never demonstrates in Principles of Literary Criticism or Science and Poetry or even Practical Criticism the step-by-step process of appreciating the competing, complementary, contradictory, and conciliating meanings of the words of a poem that we see in the work of first Graves, and then Riding-and-Graves, and finally Empson. That Riding and Graves were indeed familiar with Richards’s reading of Hopkins is implied by the fact that they demonstrate by a slow reading of six lines of a sonnet by Hopkins that the reader “must use his wits” in a step-by-step analysis of the possible meanings of the ambiguous words to be able to “appreciate the accuracy” of the poet’s use of “exactly the proper association” as “the neatest possible way of combining” effects and “reconciling the two seemingly opposed qualities” of his subject.55 Their language is very similar to that employed by Richards.
Hopkins’s editor Robert Bridges complains that there is in certain of his poems “some perversion of feeling” – in the “nostril’s relish of incense along the sanctuary side,” for instance, and in the image of “the Holy Ghost with warm breast” – that is more repellent to him than “the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness.”56 Ridings and Graves respond to this charge by arguing that the value of Hopkins’s poetry is in its “reconciling” of such “seemingly opposed qualities,” a defence that recalls Graves’s interest in the same implicitly sexual and spiritual conflict at the heart of similar imagery in poems by Herbert.57 Just as Herbert’s poem “The Bag” reconciles in language simultaneously sexual and spiritual the conflict between the two Donnes, John and Jack, so Hopkins’s poem “Hurrahing in Harvest” can be “appreciated as … reconciling the two seemingly opposed qualities of mountains, their male, animal-like roughness and strength and at the same time their ethereal quality under soft light.”58 One can take the poet’s psychological reality out of a conflict theory of poetry, it seems, but one can’t take psychological conflict out of the poetry itself – especially religious poetry.
Of course it is precisely in reaction to the claim that they presume their anonymous professional critic (Richards) would make that Riding’s poetry suffers from “so-called obscurity” that Riding and Graves recommend “increasing the time-length of reading.”59 Their prime example of a poem that needs greater attention than might customarily be given it is Riding’s “The Rugged Black of Anger,” a poem whose so-called “‘obscurity’ … would probably cause it to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary two-minute reading (for if the poet has obeyed all the rules, this is long enough to give a rough idea of what the poem is all about – and that is all that is generally wanted).”60 Of course such a rough idea will not do, for “if it were possible to give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem”: a poem is more than prose, and it is more than an idea. Reader and critic must “let it interpret itself, without introducing any new associations or, if possible, any new words.”61 They offer an example of a possible slow reading of Riding’s poem – repeating lines, inverting lines, making up transitional lines from the poem’s own words and phrases until, “as a sufficient illustration of the method of letting the poem interpret itself,” “the poem interpreted is practically itself repeated to three times its own length.”62 The time invested in reading is the key to better reading: “The important thing that would be revealed by a wide application of this method to the reading of poems … would be that much of the so-called obscurity of poems was created by the laziness of the plain reader, who wishes to hurry through poetry as quickly as he does through prose, not realizing that he is dealing with a kind of thought which, though it may have the speed of prose to the poet, he must follow with a slowness proportionate to how much he is not a poet.”63 And so “increasing the time-length of reading is one way of getting out of the prose and into the poetic state of mind, of developing a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one goes along.”64
Riding and Graves transform the literally (that is, temporally) slow reading that Richards recommends (conceiving it as something of a vocal exercise preliminary to attempting to understand the meaning of a poem) into New Criticism’s close reading. For Riding and Graves, whatever the actual time-length of the reading, the important thing in reading slowly is to develop “a capacity for minuteness, for seeing all there is to see at a given point and for taking it all with one as one goes along.”65 The phrase “capacity for minuteness” indirectly acknowledges the role of Richards in this aspect of the thinking of Riding and Graves. When Riding complains in Anarchism Is Not Enough that Richards’s “meticulous poetic” is merely an expression of “the nostalgic desire to reconstitute an illusory whole” of reality, she recalls Richards’s declaration that art deals with “minute particulars.”66 Riding and Graves are not above adapting a phrase that betrays Richards’s wrong-headed meticulousness ( “minute particulars”) into a phrase ( “capacity for minuteness”) by which they can define a proper reader’s meticulousness.67
According to Riding, there is no such whole of reality for Richards’s “minute particulars” to reconstitute beyond the one nostalgically remembered by the new barbarism. The minute particulars of “The Rugged Black of Anger” constitute a new reality that emerges from and is created by the artist’s revulsion from conventional reality. Like Foucault, who declares history a matter of chance that discourse is determined to control, Riding declares that the reality that Richards’s “meticulously poetic” instinct would make “whole” actually “has no integrity but the integrity of accident.”68
And so Riding and Graves react against Richards by defining an existentialist, rather than essentialist, understanding of poetry. Their slow reader’s “capacity for minuteness” reveals “as one goes along” just as much a dissociation of minute particulars as an association of them, for poetry is just as much a disintegration of existing reality as an integration of a new reality. Order, pattern, system: these are projections of the labouring scientific mind – projections that can become functions – functions both in the mind of the poet as labourer “who needs the support of a system” and in the mind of the professional critic who subordinates poetry to scientific reality.69 According to Riding and Graves, the proper reader must develop a capacity for minuteness because poetry creates not more of the same, but always a “more” that is ever new and never simple.
1 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace Co., 1925), 202.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 203.
4 Ibid., 230, 231, 231.
5 Ibid., 203.
6 Ibid.
7 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 89.
8 Ibid., 119.
9 Ibid., 119, 120, 119.
10 Ibid., 123.
11 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 203.
12 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 89.
13 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 115; Richards, Principle of Literary Criticism, 203, 203.
14 Ibid., 203, 203, 203, 203–4.
15 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 114–15.
16 Ibid., 115–16.
17 Ibid., 116.
18 Ibid., 117.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 119.
21 Ibid., 117–18.
22 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 203.
23 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 89.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 118.
27 Ibid., 118, 115, 110.
28 Ibid., 115.
29 Ibid., 114.
30 Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 54;
31 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 114.
32 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 54–7.
33 Ibid., 57.
34 Ibid., 56.
35 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 117–18.
36 Ibid., 118.
37 Ibid., 127.
38 Ibid., 133.
39 Ibid.
40 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 57.
41 I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1926), quoted in Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 57; Graves, Poetic Unreason, 127.
42 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 125.
43 Ibid., 125–6.
44 Ibid., 126.
45 Ibid., 106.
46 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 57.
47 Richards, Science and Poetry, 22–3.
48 Ibid.
49 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 27; Richards, Science and Poetry, 23.
50 Robert Graves, “Gerard Manley Hopkins,” letter to the editor (29 April 1955), Times Literary Supplement 2774 (29 April 1955): 209.
51 John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 278.
52 See I.A. Richards, “Gerard Hopkins,” The Dial 81 (1926): 195–203, reprinted in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 139–47.
53 Russo, I.A. Richards, 280. The poem by G.H. Luce is “The Summer Cloud.” Richards prints the poem in full in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 130.
54 John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 202.
55 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 91, 92, 93, 92, 93.
56 See Robert Bridges, “Preface to Notes,” in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey, 1918).
57 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 93.
58 Ibid., 93.
59 Ibid., 149.
60 Ibid., 138.
61 Ibid., 147.
62 Ibid., 148.
63 Ibid., 149.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, 104.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 126.