17

Taking New Stock of Stock Responses

As mentioned above, Russo argues that Richards’s early work is the most important influence on the development of New Criticism and that one can identify in the reading of Luce in Practical Criticism the most important early example of close reading. As we have also seen, Haffenden effectively refutes the latter half of this claim. Yet Practical Criticism is certainly one of the founding documents of New Criticism, if for no other reason than that it makes the case overwhelmingly, through its many examples of readings gone wrong, that a new method of reading poetry more carefully – one that attends very closely to the meaning of the words on the page – is necessary.

John Crowe Ransom makes this point about the influence of Practical Criticism in the first chapter of the book that unintentionally gave the new close-reading method its name, The New Criticism (1941): “the protocols revealed dismal deficiencies in the power of supposedly trained students to cope with poetry. In criticizing the students’ ability to read the meaning of poetry, Richards reveals himself as an astute reader. He looks much more closely at the objective poem than his theories require him to do. His most incontestable contribution to poetic discussion, in my opinion, is in developing the ideal or exemplary readings, and in provoking such readings from other scholars.”¹ Whatever the value of any of his own readings as a “contribution to intensive reading,” Richards provokes intensive reading of great value from others, especially Empson.² And so, since “a brilliant pupil is presumptive evidence of a brilliant teacher,” Ransom combines attention to Practical Criticism in his first chapter with attention to Seven Types of Ambiguity: “I believe it is the most imaginative account of readings ever printed, and Empson the closest and most resourceful reader that poetry has yet publicly had.”³

Thus conflating the work of Empson and Richards, Ransom says of Empson’s analysis of a poem by Sidney that “writings as acute and at the same time as patient and consecutive as this have not existed in English criticism, I think, before Richards and Empson. They become frequent now; Richards and Empson have spread quickly.”⁴ Yet Ransom curiously contradicts his own suggestion that no example of such analysis existed before Seven Types of Ambiguity and Practical Criticism when he notes that Empson’s “debt to Richards (and to others) is acknowledged as follows”: “Mr.I.A. Richards, then my supervisor for the first part of the English Tripos, told me to write this essay, and various things to put in it; my indebtedness to him is as great as such a thing should ever be. And I derive the method I am using from Miss Laura Riding’s and Mr. Robert Graves’ analysis of a Shakespeare sonnet.”⁵ Ransom quotes Empson in such a way as to mention also the work of Riding and Graves, although this contradicts his assertion of Empson’s uniqueness. Since he asserts that the kind of analysis that he celebrates is original to teacher Richards and student Empson, either he ought not to have mentioned Empson’s debt “to others” at all – even parenthetically – or he ought not to have asserted the uniqueness of Richards and Empson. By doing so, Ransom acknowledges that there is more to the story of this new criticism than he tells.

And there is more to the story than he knew. Second only to Seven Types of Ambiguity, I suggest, Practical Criticism is the founding document of New Criticism that is the most influenced by Riding and Graves. Richards’s report on his experiments with his Cambridge students in the practical criticism of poems takes the shape it does in part because of his reaction to A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Like Empson’s book, Practical Criticism serves as something of a Trojan Horse – an influential work welcomed by American New Critics like Ransom who either did not notice or chose not to acknowledge that it contains the influence of Riding and Graves within it. Like Seven Types of Ambiguity, Practical Criticism is thereby a tremendous multiplier of the influence of Riding and Graves on New Criticism.

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Stanley Fish observes that “Richards’s theories and his prejudices weigh heavily on his protocols.”⁶ Indeed, Richards is an informing presence in his analysis of the anonymous protocols that he received from his students. Richards not only makes of the protocols submitted by the dull and the witless a platform from which to expound his own corrective views, but he also often finds in the protocols of the brilliant and the witty a point of view with which he can agree. His selection of which protocols to discuss is guided by their usefulness in these respects. Moreover, Richards often finds aspects of his own point of view reflected back to him; some of the writers offer critiques of poetry based on their (mis) understanding of the principles and practices of his books and lectures at this time. Such protocols constitute a significant number of those he selects for discussion.

One notices in particular that many protocol writers echo Richards’s belief that “the arts are the supreme form of communicative activity.”⁷ Richards argues that whether or not the artist aims at communicating his experience to others, “the very process of getting the work ‘right’ has … immense communicative consequences … The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experience in others.”⁸ He also explains bad poetry in these terms: “sometimes art is bad because communication is defective … sometimes because the experience is worthless … It would perhaps be best to restrict the term bad art to cases in which genuine communication does to a considerable degree take place, what is communicated being worthless, and to call the other cases defective art.”⁹

In a large number of the protocols, writers offer judgments of the communicative efficacy of the poems put before the class: “communication extraordinarily successful”; “confusion in thought has failed to establish, in the reader, communication, and even comprehension”; “failure of communication”; “the whole idea is well communicated”; “The communication is not quite clear”; “The communication of this is bad”; “Perfect communication”; “The communication is excellent.”¹⁰ The comments quoted here are all from the 1925–26 class. The same thing can be observed in the 1927–28 class: “If he had anything to say it is likely that he would communicate it effectively: unfortunately he has next to nothing”; “This one seems to me a successful communication of an experience whose value is dubious.”¹¹ Presumably Richards’s gratification at finding in these protocols evidence that his students had been listening to his lectures, and perhaps even reading his books, was tempered by the lack of interpretive skills that so many of his students showed.

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One can also see in some of the protocols that students were following both the work of Graves and the work of Riding and Graves. For instance, the protocol writer that Richards describes as “on his guard” against “mnemonic irrelevance” walks a walk modeled by Graves.¹² He explains why he cannot trust himself to provide an honest, objective criticism of Christina Rossetti’s “Spring Quiet”: “I fear I am not an impartial judge, as the lines inevitably associate themselves with a scene and experience I value.”¹³ This writer seems to have taken Graves’s advice: “the time may come for him to admit honourably, ‘I cannot talk of this book dispassionately because … the poet and myself have an emotional (or intellectual) experience of an unusual character in common’” – a point that we have seen Richards adapt to his own purposes in Principles of Literary Criticism.¹⁴ The language and the logic of the student’s passage and that by Graves are interchangeable.

The member of the 1927–28 class who complains of the obscurity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “In the Churchyard at Cambridge” combines a point made by Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry with one made by Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism: “Don’t think I mind obscurity, because I don’t; but I do like to get some meaning sooner or later, and this poem seems very muddled and confused. At all events the poem is not worth much effort on the part of the reader because the underlying emotion is not of sufficient value.”¹⁵ One recognizes the influence here of Richards’s distinction between poetry that is “bad because communication is defective” and poetry that is bad “because the experience is worthless.”¹⁶ And one can see that the writer’s defensiveness about criticizing the poem as obscure has been prompted by someone’s suggestion to him that to complain of obscurity in a poem is a sign of incompetence as a critic – perhaps Riding and Graves.¹⁷ Similarly, whether or not Richards read “The Anthologist in Our Midst” by Riding and Graves when it appeared in the spring of 1927, he encountered its contempt for anthologies from at least one protocol writer in the autumn of 1927. Richards begins his analysis of the protocols about G.H. Luce’s poem “Climb, cloud, and pencil all the blue” with examples of opinions demonstrating “mnemonic and other irrelevancies”: “The poem is the type which invades school anthologies though it is a disreputable offspring of Shelley (misunderstood) and a woolly sentimental mind … It is such and not the Goths nor the classics that desolate Europe.”¹⁸ Richards supplies the italics here, indicating his suspicion as to the source of the bad memories recalled for the reader by the poem. The italics recall both his introductory point concerning the inadequate training he associates with anthology reading and his summary remark about the bewilderment experienced by protocol writers required to evaluate poetry lacking “the sanction of an anthology.”¹⁹ Yet this protocol writer does more than recall a bad personal memory from his school days. He also alludes to the analysis by Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry of disastrous contemporary methods of teaching English in British schools by modifying Blake’s line in “On Homer’s Poetry” – it is “the Classics & not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars” – so as to suggest that it is not the classics that desolate Europe, but anthology poems. Richards’s selection of this piece to reinforce his point about the dangers of anthology culture is rooted in the much more vociferous warnings of Riding and Graves from “The Anthologist in Our Midst” (April 1927) to A Survey of Modernist Poetry (November 1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (July 1928).²⁰

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The hitherto undetected influence of Riding and Graves in Practical Criticism is evident less in the particular protocols that echo their topics and views than in Richards’s own echoing of such topics and views. It would seem that in the midst of writing up the results of his experiment in interpretation by means of his practical criticism classes – an experiment he designed and implemented entirely on his own, before Riding and Graves had set collaborative pen to paper– Richards found himself investigating and supporting many of the claims made by Riding and Graves. Richards, that is, finds that the results of his serious classroom experiment support the results of work that he previously thought mere “games of interpretation.”

Although published in 1929, Practical Criticism was a long time in preparation. In a May 1928 preface to a subsequent edition of Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards explains that he is “preparing a companion volume, Practical Criticism. Extremely good and extremely bad poems were put unsigned before a large and able audience. The comments they wrote at leisure give, as it were, a stereoscopic view of the poem and of possible opinion on it. This material, when systematically analysed, provides not only interesting commentary on the state of contemporary culture but a new and powerful educational instrument.”²¹ As early as 1923, however, Richards had begun experimenting with students’ interpretation of poetry by placing unsigned poems before them for analysis. When he complains in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), for instance, that for those who have little understanding of poetry, “a defective rime – bough’s house, bush thrush, blood good – is sufficient ground for condemning a poem in neglect of all other considerations,” it is clear that he has already put Christina Rossetti’s poem “Spring Quiet” before his students and received responses just like those he later cites in Practical Criticism: “The writer has only got to find twelve rhyming words to express very trivial thoughts so why ‘thrush,’ ‘bush,’ ‘boughs,’ ‘house’”; “the rhyme ‘thrush’ with ‘bush’ is almost bearable. When ‘boughs’ and ‘house’ come next however, the attempt to enjoy the poem fails”; “I laughed at the rhyming of thrush and bush; and boughs and house.”²² He also mentions in Principles of Literary Criticism that he has put poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox before students in the same way, referring to “the response made by well-educated persons, who read it without being aware of the authorship.”²³

Richards developed this teaching strategy into a formal course called “Practical Criticism”, the work of the 1925–26 class serving as the basis of the protocols analyzed in connection with poems I to VIII of Practical Criticism. Richards was away from Cambridge (traveling in Japan and China) during the 1926–27 school year, but he taught this course one final time in 1927–28, the work of the new class serving as the basis of the protocols analyzed in connection with poems IX to XIII. He supplemented the protocols of high-achieving Cambridge undergraduates such as F.R. Leavis, Alastair Cooke, Muriel Bradbrook, Christopher Isherwood, and E.E. Phare (later Duncan-Jones) with others by eminent literary figures such as Professor Mansfield Forbes of Clare College, Cambridge, and even T.S. Eliot, by now a good friend. It is possible that certain of the protocols were written by William Empson, who recalled that when he was “a math student,” he “attended one or two of the lectures which became Practical Criticism.”²⁴

Whereas Richards had assembled in his classes over several years more than a hundred students who produced for him about a thousand protocols, from which he distilled a detailed portrait of the contemporary reader, Riding and Graves defined the contemporary “plain reader” they were commissioned to teach how to read modernist poetry by a process that seems, by comparison, rather arbitrary. The reader pictured by Riding and Graves is a composite sketch generated, on the one hand, from their assessment of the deficient literary standards evident in reviews with which they disagree and, on the other hand, from the just as deficient literary standards implied by contemporary book sales. And yet the deficient reader that Riding and Graves conjure up illustrates the most significant failings of the protocol writers that Richards analyzes and corrects. It must have been somewhat galling for Richards to find the results of his hard work anticipated by a pair of critics that he could not take seriously.

We recall that Richards’s new pupil, Empson, drew his attention to A Survey of Modernist Poetry at the beginning of the fall term at Cambridge in 1928, presumably in October. Richards probably knew of the book independently of Empson’s reference to it, yet even if he did not, he certainly would have looked it up after Empson’s enthusiastic recommendation of its interpretive methods. As Miranda Seymour points out, he was collecting all of Graves’s publications.

In fact, there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Richards read and responded to A Survey of Modernist Poetry before Empson recommended it to him. It consists, first, of the ways in Practical Criticism that he returns to topics that he first raised in Principles of Literary Criticism, for his further development here of his earlier ideas shows the influence of Riding and Graves. And it consists, second, of the new topics that he takes up in Practical Criticism – topics that Riding and Graves introduce to him.

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In the chapter of Practical Criticism that concludes with recommendation of “very slow” reading, one finds the influence of Riding and Graves on discussion of the role in poetry of the sounds of words. Although Richards declares in Science and Poetry that “a good deal of poetry and even some great poetry exists … in which the sense of the words can be almost entirely missed or neglected without loss,” his position on this question in both Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism is much less open to this possibility.²⁵ In the former, he acknowledges that there is “no such thing as the effect of a word or a sound. There is no one effect which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic literary characters”;²⁶ in the latter, he explains that “The mysterious glory which seems to inhere in the sound of certain lines is a projection of the thought and emotion they evoke, and the peculiar satisfaction they seem to give to the ear is a reflection of the adjustment of our feelings which has been momentarily achieved.”²⁷

Riding and Graves make a similar point about problems arising from the “great deal of emphasis on the phonetic sense of words” in “modern French poetic theory” generally, and in Valéry’s poetry particularly.²⁸ Denying that sounds have intrinsic values, they demonstrate their argument by a simple experiment. Taking Tennyson’s “immemorial elms /And murmur of innumerable bees,” they “improvise a line of the same musical character but with a totally different meaning”: “More ordure never will renew our midden’s pure manure.”²⁹ Richards undertakes the same experiment in Practical Criticism: if “the mere sound of verse has independently any considerable aesthetic virtue,” then “it should be possible to take some masterpiece of poetic rhythm and compose, with nonsense syllables, a double or dummy which at least comes recognizably near to possessing the same virtue.”³⁰ This Richards does, turning Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” xv, into “J. Droostan-Sussting Benn / Mill-down Leduren N.”³¹

Riding and Graves are by no means opposed to “picture-making in poetry by the help of sounds” – certain “sound-combinations may be very wittily employed” in a poem – but “musical meaning” must not “get the upper hand in a poem” over “word-meaning.”³² That “musical meaning” and “word-meaning” must work together is shown by the transformation of Tennyson’s “murmur” into “pure manure”: “This line will show how misleading to the sense letters can be, and makes us suspect that the aim of such poetry as Valéry’s is to cast a musical enchantment unallied with the meaning of a poem. The meaning becomes merely a historical setting for the music.”³³ Richards concludes his experiment with the same acknowledgment of the potential power of sound, and the same insistence that sound work with meaning: “Such arguments … do not tend to diminish the power of the sound (the inherent rhythm) when it works in conjunction with sense and feeling.”³⁴

Similarly, in Practical Criticism, Richards takes up the subject of stock responses once more, but this time in a way that shows he has been paying attention to what Riding and Graves have to say on this topic in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. He expands the approximately five-page treatment of the stock response in Principles of Literary Criticism into a discussion that begins in the Introduction, is continued thereafter on many pages throughout the book, culminates in a chapter of its own, “Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses,” and returns yet again in the Summary chapter that concludes the book. As in Principles of Literary Criticism, he attributes much of the problem to a certain kind of poem produced by a certain kind of poet: “Here … the stock response actually is in the poem.”³⁵ As an example of poems that depend on stock responses from readers, Richards points to poems that seem familiar, even on first acquaintance: “The familiarity of these poems belongs to them as we first read them, it is not an acquired familiarity but native. And it implies, I think, that the mental movements out of which they are composed have long been parts of our intellectual and emotional repertory.”³⁶ This aspect of his discussion of stock responses clearly emerges from his analysis in Principles of Literary Criticism of the responses by his protocol writers to the sonnet by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

But the focus of his analysis shifts. He emphasizes in his original treatment of the dangers of the stock response the bad effect upon the reader of the poem that the poet has built up as an invocation of stock responses. Such an emphasis is not surprising, for Richards is interested to define the role of poetry in systematizing the impulses of readers in a healthy, life-enabling equilibrium. In Practical Criticism, however, he emphasizes the bad effect upon the poem of the reader who imposes his own stock responses on it.

Richards now notices that a predisposition toward stock responses corrupts the interpretation even of poems without them: “the critical traps that surround what may be called Stock Responses … have their opportunity whenever a poem seems to, or does, involve views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader’s mind, so that what happens appears to be more of the reader’s doing than the poet’s. The button is pressed, and then … the record starts playing in quasi- (or total) independence of the poem which is supposed to be its origin or instrument.”³⁷ Falling into this trap, the reader is often “brought to object to a poem for not being quite a different poem, without regard paid to what it is as itself.”³⁸ In this case, “it is the difference between the poem and the stock poem the reader has in mind that is the objection.”³⁹ Such misreading involves “distorting the poem or setting up an irrelevant external standard.”⁴⁰

Practical Criticism argues that “Intelligent critics … realize that no poem can be judged by standards external to itself.”⁴¹ In Principles of Literary Criticism, however, Richards regards judging a poem as a question of measuring its efficiency in stimulating a “supremely fine and complete organization” in the reader.⁴² This organization, best evidenced in tragedy but not peculiar to it, consists of “balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through the force of its exclusions,” and “it is a general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences of the arts.”⁴³ Characteristic of experience of the arts, this inclusive balance of differences is a psychological property of the person, not the work of art: “We must resist the temptation to analyse its cause into sets of opposed characters in the object … The balance is not in the structure of the stimulating object, it is in the response.”⁴⁴ And so “Keats … is a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying that his works are more valuable.”⁴⁵ In Principles of Literary Criticism, that is, the poem is judged entirely by standards external to itself: its efficiency in stimulating adequate attitudes and organizing impulses in economical and useful ways.

As John Paul Russo notes, however, whereas one can trace in Richards’s earlier works such as The Foundation of Aesthetics, The Meaning of Meaning, and Principles of Literary Criticism his conception of the aesthetic experience as an equilibrium of opposed impulses in a reader, “soon he was asking not how a reader completes himself, but how the model poem … completes itself.”⁴⁶ Ransom points out that “Richards always holds … that the heart of the aesthetic experience is the affective activity,” but “in later books he will stop reiterating … this dogma.”⁴⁷ In fact, according to Ransom, Practical Criticism is the first occasion for the muting of this dogma because Richards has discovered that the best defense against stock responses – and the only cure for them once infection has set in – is precise cognition:

In this connection it will be interesting to look at Richards’ remarks on Sentimentality. For him, a sentimental reader is a person too facile, or too copious, in his affective responses to the object; his show of affections (as in those protocols which were “gushing”’) seems to exceed the object. But this must mean that it exceeds the objective occasion, which is the “communicated” one. He is adding out of his own imagination to the occasion, or in his lack of experience he is misconstruing it; his reading is off the text. A sentimental poet, similarly, must be a poet who neglects a complete communication of his occasion, and for a short-cut pronounces the affective words that the reader should pronounce for himself, and then only on the understanding that they were appropriate to a communication that had been received. Whether of reader or poet, the error seems to reduce to Richards’ idea of Stock Response: the affective activity is not grounded in precise cognition.⁴⁸

The practical result of a critic’s precise cognition of poetry, of course, is an ideal or exemplary reading.

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For all their duplication in A Survey of Modernist Poetry of Richards’s analysis of stock responses in Principles of Literary Criticism, Riding and Graves nonetheless inflect Richards’s terms and concerns with their own idiom, which allows one to trace Richards’s response to their work when he in turn adopts such idioms himself. For instance, according to Riding and Graves, the modernist poet has left the stock-feelings of literature for a psychological reality nearer to life: “it must be realized that it is always the poets who are the real psychologists, that it is they who break down antiquated literary definitions of people’s feelings and make them or try to make them self-conscious about formerly ignored or obscure mental processes; for which an entirely new vocabulary has to be invented. The appearance of freakishness generally means: poetry is not in a ‘poetical’ period, it is in a psychological period. It is not trying to say ‘Things often felt but ne’r so well expressed’ but to discover what it is we are really feeling.”⁴⁹ One recognizes Richards’s explanation in Principles of Literary Criticism that the stock response fixes in place “immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things,” with the result of “removing us from experience.”⁵⁰ He makes the case again in Practical Criticism for good poetry’s power to redeem readers from stock reality: “The only corrective [to “stock inappropriate responses”] in all cases must be a closer contact with reality, either directly, through experience of actual things, or mediately through other minds which are in closer contact. If good poetry owes its value in large measure to the closeness of its contact with reality, it may thereby become a powerful weapon for breaking up unreal ideas and responses.”⁵¹

The 1929 book seems in many ways to be taking up the argument developed in the 1924 book. Noting that even good poetry cannot prevail against stock responses “if we read into it just what we happen to have already in our minds, and do not use it as a means for reorganising ourselves,” notwithstanding the fact that “most good poetry … resists this kind of misusage,” Richards laments that today “the emotional and intellectual habits of the readers are too strong for the poet. Moreover, the official doctrine of the eighteenth century that ‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d, /What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’ is still firmly entrenched in many minds.”⁵² It may be merely a coincidence that Richards follows Riding and Graves in associating the psychological inertia induced in contemporary readers by the stock response with an eighteenth-century aesthetic that he represents by the same quotation from Pope, but it is consistent with other evidence of how thoroughly he absorbed their book.

Similarly, Richards follows Riding and Graves in suggesting that stock responses are the result of bad parenting. For Riding and Graves, the reader who makes the poem “enter his life as a symbol having no private reality, only the reality it gets by reflection from his world,” is paralleled by the poet who will not grant the poem independence, believing that “the important part of poetry is … the personality of the poet as embodied in the poem, which is its style.”⁵³ Between them, such a reader and such a poet maintain the vicious hermeneutic circle of the stock response: “Style may be defined as that old-fashioned element of sympathy with the reader which makes it possible for the poem to be used as an illustration to the text of the reader’s experience.”⁵⁴ To break this circle, the modernist poet aims at the poem’s “independence from both the reader and the poet” – a sign of proper parenting.⁵⁵ According to Riding and Graves, “a new sense has arisen of the poem’s rights comparable with the new sense in modern times of the independence of the child, and a new respect for the originality of the poem as for the originality of the child. One no longer tries to keep a child in place by suppressing its personality or laughing down its strange questions, so that it turns into a rather dull and ineffective edition of the parent; and modernist poetry is likewise freeing the poem of stringent nursery rules and, instead of telling it exactly what to do, is encouraging it to do things, even queer things, by itself … The most that the poet can do is be a wise, experimenting parent.”⁵⁶ As in modern parenting, what is needed is “a new kind of relationship between the parent and the child, the poet and the poem, a feeling of mutual respect favourable to the independent development of each and therefore to a maximum of benefit of one to the other. Of course, if the poem is left to shift entirely for itself and its independence is really only a sign of the irresponsibility of the poet, then its personality, by its wildness, is likely to be as indecisive as the personality of the formalized poem is by its reliance on discipline.”⁵⁷

According to Riding and Graves, in the attempt “to make a radical change in a tradition within the memory of that tradition,” the modern poet must not address himself in the first instance to the education of the reader: “The problem of preventing poetry from sinking into rapid decline and disuse does not seem to point … to a sense of responsibility in the poet toward the reader as shown in the use of a carefully designed ‘style’” (and so, “much modernist poetry may be said to be literally without style”).⁵⁸ The problem “points rather to the responsibility which the poet owes to the poem because of its dependence on him until it is complete, a dependence which shall not, however, be reflected as a weakness in the poem after it has been completed; as childhood should survive in a person as the element of continuous newness in him, not as the permanent bad effect of discipline that made him less, rather than more, independent as he grew.”⁵⁹ And so the modern poet must first address himself to “the education of the poem (literally, the ‘drawing out’ of it).”⁶⁰

Writing not metaphorically about the relationship between the poem as child and the poet as parent, but literally about the relationship between the child as bad reader and the parent as producer of the bad reader, Richards nonetheless traces the origin of “inappropriate stock responses” to the same source. As in Principles of Literary Criticism, so in Practical Criticism he declares that “the chief cause of ill-appropriate, stereotyped reactions is withdrawal from experience,” yet he is no longer content to pass over the process by which this happens as though it were the natural outcome of a “deliberate organization of attitudes” consequent upon “general reflection,” “social suggestion,” and “accidents.”⁶¹ Instead, he blames bad reading on the kind of parenting that creates just “such moral disasters as produce timidity” as Riding and Graves describe.⁶²

According to Richards, the “withdrawal from experience” that founds and funds the stock response “can come about in many ways. Physically, as when a London child grows up without ever seeing the country or the sea; morally, as when a particularly heavy parent deprives a child of all the adventurous expansive side of life; through convention and inculcation, as when a child being too easily persuaded what to think and to feel, develops parasitically; intellectually, as when insufficient experience is theoretically elaborated into a system that hides the real world from us.”⁶³ Richards sounds the same notes as Riding and Graves: bad discipline makes a child less, rather than more, independent; the bad parent tells a child what to think; the bad parent restricts the child’s play. The effect in a person is the same as the effect in a poem: bad parenting hinders and obstructs the proper relationship of each with reality.

Richards also traces in Practical Criticism the impact of bad pedagogy on the personality of the poem, following Riding and Graves in granting the poem a certain independence from writer and reader.⁶⁴ The more we examine the details of poems that seem familiar to us on first reading, he suggests, “the more we shall notice, I believe, their extreme impersonality – the absence of any personal individual character either in their movement as verse or in their phrasing … Such impersonality, like the familiarity, is a sign that they are composed of stock responses.”⁶⁵ Like the reader given to stock responses, the poem composed of stock responses cannot speak for itself or act on its own initiative: it thinks and feels only parasitically. The poet must not be so heavy a parent as by instilling conventional attitudes in general, and by inculcating the parent’s own attitudes in particular, to leave the poem so easily persuaded what to think and feel that “The only touches of character that anyone can point to are the echoes of other poets.”⁶⁶

Such an attribution of personality to the poem cannot be explained by reference to Principles of Literary Criticism; it can, however, be explained as the consequence of, on the one hand, a sympathetic and appreciative reading of the development and extension of his ideas as undertaken by Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry and, on the other hand, as an acknowledgment of the force of the arguments that lead Riding and Graves to a wholesale repudiation of certain other of his ideas.

In the words of Riding and Graves, the poet who produces the poem of stock feelings and situations has not only refused to grant the poem independence, but has also made it “a rather dull and ineffective edition of the parent.”⁶⁷ Riding and Graves use the word “edition” both figuratively and literally, for earlier in Survey they suggest that behind Cummings’s poem “Sunset” – “at the back of the poet’s mind,” as it were – is the conventional sunset poem that Cummings is systematically avoiding, a poem thereby recoverable from the traces left by the efforts to erase it, so “Just as the naturalist Cuvier could reconstruct an extinct animal in full anatomical detail from a single tooth, let us restore this extinct poem from what Cummings has permitted to survive.”⁶⁸ They come up with “Sunset Piece,” a poem that “it is difficult to feel respect for” because it “is full of reminiscences not only of Remy de Gourmont, but of Wordsworth … Milton … Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton … and Tagore in English translation.”⁶⁹ The poem is an abridged edition of the work of popular precursors and contemporaries – in effect, a miniature anthology.

Of course Riding and Graves have composed a poem of “reminiscences” to show how the poem of stock feelings and situations finds its stock ready-to-hand in the warehouse of literary tradition. They make the abnormal personality of the original poem by Cummings disappear into impersonality and they allow no character to the poem beyond echoes of other poets. Richards may recall this playful exercise when, after identifying four of the poems that he gave his students as “composed of stock responses,” he suggests that “Each of them might well have been written by a committee,” as was “Sunset Piece” in A Survey of Modernist Poetry.⁷⁰

In the inflection of his ideas with the idioms of Riding and Graves, I suggest, we can trace their influence in alerting Richards to the idea that what a poem means is a function of words on a page. In Practical Criticism, that is, Richards adapts a principle that Riding and Graves identify in modernist poetry into a principle applicable to all poetry: that poems must be judged by the standards that they imply. In Principles of Literary Criticism he had already accepted Graves’s suggestion that poetry must be judged by its communication of experience, but he now shows the influence of Riding and Graves’s assertion that poetry communicates an experience independent of the poet’s experience. He apparently accepts their repudiation of his claim that H.D.’s poem, her personal experience prompting the poem, and his own paraphrase of poem and experience ought to converge in an experience of equal value.

1 John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1941; repr. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979), 44–5.

2 Ibid., 45.

3 Ibid., 101, 102.

4 Ibid., 111.

5 Ibid., 102. When writing The New Criticism between 1938 and 1941, Ransom must have referred to a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity that included the erratum slip of 1931. Ransom spent the academic year 1931– 32 in England on a Guggenheim fellowship and could have purchased the book then, bringing it back to the United States with him.

6 Stanley Fish, Is There A Text in This Class?: the Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1980), 56.

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

8 Ibid., 26.

9 Ibid., 199.

10 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 37, 44, 64, 66, 66, 88, 101,115.

11 Practical Criticism, 123,163.

12 Richards, Practical Criticism, 37.

13 Ibid.

14 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason: And Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925), 29.

15 Richards, Practical Criticism, 166.

16 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 199.

17 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Maskell House, 1969).

18 Richards, Practical Criticism, 131.

19 Ibid., 315.

20 T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves had launched this criticism of anthology culture in letters to the Times Literary Supplement in 1921. See T.S. Eliot, letter to the editor (24 November 1921), Times Literary Supplement, 746, and Robert Graves, letter to the editor (1 December 1921), Times Literary Supplement, 789.

21 I.A. Richards, “Preface to Third Edition,” Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 4.

22 Richards, Practical Criticism, 133.

23 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 201.

24 Empson, “Remembering I.A. Richards,” Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 226–7. See also John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 180–1.

25 I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1926), 31.

26 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 136.

27 Richards, Practical Criticism, 229.

28 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 35.

29 Ibid., 37.

30 Richards, Practical Criticism, 232.

31 Ibid.

32 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 35, 37, 35, 37, 35.

33 Ibid., 38.

34 Richards, Practical Criticism, 233.

35 Ibid., 244.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 15–16.

38 Ibid., 243.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 244.

41 Ibid., 243.

42 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 248.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 206.

46 John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 265.

47 Ransom, The New Criticism, 51.

48 Ibid., 50–1.

49 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 89–90.

50 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 205, 204.

51 Richards, Practical Criticism, 251.

52 Ibid., 252.

53 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 123, 124.

54 Ibid., 123–4.

55 Ibid., 124.

56 Ibid., 124–5.

57 Ibid., 129.

58 Ibid., 124, 130, 124.

59 Ibid., 130.

60 Ibid., 128.

61 Richards, Practical Criticism, 246; Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 202, 202, 202.

62 Richards, Practical Criticism, 246.

63 Ibid., 245, 246, 246, 246.

64 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 58.

65 Richards, Practical Criticism, 244.

66 Ibid.

67 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 125.

68 Ibid., 13.

69 Ibid., 17.

70 Richards, Practical Criticism, 245, 244.