18
And so pedagogy’s the thing. Does it promote the stock response, the stock feeling, the stock situation, the stock poem, or does it promote the independence and the individuality of the poem, the poet, and the reader? On these fronts, Richards’s main concern in Practical Criticism is the same as that of Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry: how to educate people to become better readers of poetry, for better reading of poetry has the potential to make people better citizens of a democracy. Each book, furthermore, explores this problem in terms of its implications for classroom culture, literary culture, and political culture.
Riding and Graves trace resistance to modernist poetry back to the classroom, for the plain reader’s “introduction to poetry is generally not through personal compulsion or curiosity, but through the systematic requirements of his education.”1 The “old-fashioned” school system ( “which on the whole was preferable”), often using “poetry as a means of teaching grammar, or as so many lines to be learned by heart as a disciplinary task or penalty,” at least tended to “leave poetry alone as poetry.”2 Riding and Graves dislike the new “liberal school-system,” which “attempts to interest the child in the ‘values’ of poetry”; “‘Beauty’ is the term of approval which the schoolmaster applies to the ‘values’ of poetry; character-formation is their expressed practical end, or if not character-formation, at least a wholesome relief from its ardours.”3 In the new system, the young reader “will subscribe to these values and accept poetry through them, or he will not subscribe to these values but reject poetry through them.”4
Either way the reader is alienated from poetry as poetry. In the old system, “the reader either discounts poetry for ever as a dreary pedagogical invention or he can perhaps rediscover it as something so different from the classroom exercise as to be unaffected by the unpleasant associations attached to it as such.”5 Riding and Graves prefer “the elder system” not just because it leaves poetry alone as poetry, but also because it leaves a way for the reader to escape the system “unaffected” as a reader of poetry. As they explain in A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, “There was this to be said for the old-fashioned straight-classical education, that what corresponded in the curriculum to the modern Poetry Lesson, the making of Latin Verses on the model of Ovid and Virgil, was never felt by the child to have any connection with poetry and was rather an amusing game, like the cross-word puzzle … [S] o poetry was spared from the school-boy as he from it; and if in the play-hour he read or even wrote English poetry, the shadow of the blackboard did not darken the page.”6
Riding and Graves support their assertions by analysis of Henry Newbolt’s “official report on ‘The Teaching of English in England’ (1919).”7 The full title of the document is “The teaching of English in England, being the Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education to inquire into the position of English in the educational system of England.”8 The reference to this report by Riding and Graves is not quite accurate: the Committee was struck in 1919 but did not publish its report until 1921. It included the popular poet Sir Henry Newbolt as chairman, as well as a wide range of eminent members such as Arthur Quiller-Couch, John Dover Wilson, F.S. Boas, Caroline Spurgeon, and George Sampson, author of the almost-as-often quoted book English for the English (1921).9 Graves reviewed the Newbolt Report for The Daily Herald in December of 1921.10
It was regarded in its own time as a progressive document, for it recognized the inappropriateness of using Latin grammar as a model for teaching English grammar, the need to distinguish both in textbooks and in teaching between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar, and the fundamental role of teaching English language and literature in forming a student’s cultural knowledge and social sensibility. But the report has since been criticized for (among other things) its promotion of nationalistic cultural and moral values (to teach English literature is to teach “the native experience of men of our own race and culture,” which will “form a new element of national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes by experiences which have hitherto been the privilege of a limited section”), its promotion of the best thoughts of the best minds as a weapon in the fight against the powerful influences of evil habits of speech contracted in home and street ( “among the vast mass of the population, it is certain that if a child is not learning good English he is learning bad English, and probably bad habits of thought”), and its imperialistic celebration of the universal value of English language and literature (anticipating English’s becoming the international language post-1919, the report suggests that “the position of the English language in the world affords an argument for all English children being taught English as distinct from a dialect of English”).11
Riding and Graves identify the Newbolt Report as their prime target in their criticism of the new “liberal school-system” that has “generally superseded” the old one “in England and America.”12 They criticize its recommendations that teachers present a canon of literature espousing fundamental moral and spiritual values as a principle of selection and instruction by means of which “All poetry … tends toward the same general tone and the same general purpose.”13 Emphasis on Englishness and class in poetry also makes for sameness because “sameness is accentuated by the nationalistic element: every poet wrote as an Englishman first, bound by his very use of the language to a policy of increasing the national heritage of song rather than the development of a strictly personal idiom. He also wrote as a member of a class, the governing class.”14 After Newbolt, “The emphasis that the educational system lays on personal and literary similarities in poets makes it still more difficult to appraise them separately.”15
In the end, all poems become one poem and all poets become one poet. Just as lines from Remy de Gourmont, Wordsworth, Milton, Belloc, Chesterton, and Tagore can anonymously and impersonally combine in a collective stock sunset piece, so a selection by Riding and Graves of six “typical schoolroom passages” (by Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tupper, Wordsworth, and Coleridge) reflects such “extraordinary sameness” that one cannot ascribe them correctly to these six poets, poets who, encountered otherwise than in this universalizing schoolroom setting, are “of such entirely different personal character.”16
Furthermore, with the stock subject and the stock setting – whether a natural sunset or a natural value – working to impersonalize both the poet and the poem, the new method of teaching English also works to impersonalize the reader. In the new system, teachers are encouraged to use the student essay to ensure that stock poems and stock values receive stock treatment, and so, according to Riding and Graves, the common specimen poem celebrated by the Newbolt Report goes hand-in-hand with the “common specimen-essay” it recommends:
One of the stock essay-subjects in the schools is “The Uses of Poetry”; and when the essay comes up to be “corrected” and the humanistic teacher prepares a specimen-essay on the subject, the “uses” are found to be as follows:
1 Poetry gives the reader joy.
2 Poetry gives relief to sorrow, pain or weariness.
3 Poetry teaches the reader to love the Good.
4 Poetry is the concentrated wisdom of former ages.
5 Poetry teaches other-worldliness.
and so on until the final summing-up …
Poetry’s uses may be expressed in a single phrase: Spiritual Elevation.17
According to Riding and Graves, teaching poetry in the Newbolt way condemns poetry to sameness by conflating its value as poetry with the religious, social, and national values that it is made to represent, and such teaching condemns to sameness the people educated to read poetry in this way.
Richards observes the same totalitarian potential in the misuse of poetry to promote stock responses – the “tendency of our acquired responses to intervene in situations to which they are not appropriate,” a tendency that arises these days with “fatal facility.”18 He goes on, “If we wish for a population easy to control by suggestion we shall decide what repertory of suggestions it shall be susceptible to and encourage this tendency except in the few. But if we wish for a high and diffused civilization, with its attendant risks, we shall combat this form of mental inertia. In either case … we shall do well to recognize how much of the value of existence is daily thrust from us by our stock responses.”19
Like Riding and Graves, he refers readers who want to know how English is now being taught in school to the Newbolt Report: “Those who wish to acquaint themselves with the methods employed in the schools could hardly do better than to consult the Report of the Departmental Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education into the position of English in the educational system of England, entitled The Teaching of English in England.”20 He also notes that “George Sampson’s English for the English should on no account be overlooked. It says some things in a plain way, with passion and with point.”21 Richards repeats in his own conclusion in Practical Criticism the conclusion of the Newbolt Report that “every teacher in English is a teacher of English”22: “It is self-evident,” the Report suggests, “that until a child has acquired a certain command of the English language, no other educational development is even possible … Merely from this point of view English is plainly no matter of inferior importance, nor even one among other branches of education, but the one indispensable preliminary and foundation of all the rest.”23 He also adopts Sampson’s bolder formulation of the same idea, that “Before the English child can awaken to any creative fullness of life he must become proficient in the use of his native tongue, the universal tool of all callings and of all conditions.”24 He concurs that “English is by far the most important subject,” observing that “It is a condition of school life”; in fact, “English is really not a subject at all. It is a condition of existence rather than a subject of instruction. It is an inescapable circumstance of life, and concerns every English-speaking person from cradle to grave. The lesson in English is not merely one occasion for the inculcation of knowledge; it is part of the child’s initiation into the life of man.”25 Richards emphasizes that instruction in proper understanding of English needs to be recognized as one of the most important aspects of this subject:
The only improvements in training that can be suggested must be based upon a closer study of meaning and of the causes of unnecessary misunderstanding … However incomplete, tentative, or, indeed, speculative we may consider our present views on the subject, they are far enough advanced to justify some experimental applications, if not in the school period then certainly at the Universities. If it be replied that there is no time for an additional subject, we can answer by challenging the time at present spent in extensive reading. A very slight improvement in the capacity to understand would so immensely increase the value of this time that part of it would be exchanged with advantage for direct training in reading. This applies quite as much to such studies as economics, psychology, political theory, theology, law or philosophy, as to literature … [Q] uite as many readers blunder over intricate argumentation and exposition as poetry. And a direct study of interpretation here can be made quite as useful. The incidental training that everyone is supposed to receive in the course of studying other subjects is too fragmentary, accidental and unsystematic to serve this purpose. Sooner or later interpretation will have to be recognized as a key-subject.26
And so Richards supplements the Newbolt Report’s claim that every teacher in English is a teacher of English with the suggestion that every teacher of English is a teacher of interpretation. Richards thus justifies Practical Criticism: although “no one would pretend that the theory as it is propounded in this book is ready, as it stands, for immediate and wide application,” nonetheless “a very strong case can, I think, be made out, both for the need and the possibility of practical steps towards applying it,” and so “we ought to hesitate before deciding that a Theory of Interpretation in some slightly more advanced and simplified form … may not quite soon take the foremost place in the literary subjects of all the ordinary schools.”27
Just as Newbolt and Sampson recognize the importance of teaching English not just as a lesson but also as “an initiation into the corporate life of man,” Richards concedes that “Language is primarily a social product.”28 Yet he also recognizes, like Riding and Graves, that it is important to teach English in such a way as to enable not just corporate understanding, but also individual understanding. Like Riding and Graves, he objects to the Newbolt schoolmaster’s reduction of poetry to a simple, single, sameness: “I have not heard of any schoolmaster who may have attempted to make a systematic discussion of the forms of meaning and the psychology of understanding part of his teaching. I have met not a few, however, who would treat the suggestion with an amused or indignant contempt. ‘What! Fill the children’s heads with a lot of abstractions! It is quite hard enough already to get them to grasp one meaning – THE MEANING – let alone four or sixteen, or whatever it is! They couldn’t understand a word you were talking about.’”29
Like Riding and Graves, he refuses to accept that the plain reader must languish in the realm of the simple stock response: “the widespread inability to construe meaning” in poems is evidence that “this construing … is not nearly so easy and ‘natural’ a performance as we tend to assume. It is a craft … It can be taught … The best methods of instruction remain to be worked out … No attempt at imparting a reasoned general technique for construing has yet been made … But it is not doubtful that … this poor capacity to interpret complex and unfamiliar meanings is a source of endless loss, for those whose lives need not be narrowly standardized at a low level. If anything can be done, educationally, that is not already being done to improve it, the attempt would be worth much trouble.”30
It is not clear whether or not Richards would have directed readers to the Newbolt Report had he not recently had it recalled for him by Riding and Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. But Richards’s agreement with much that Riding and Graves say is certainly clear. He agrees with them that the political consequences of teaching a generic sameness in poetry will be disastrous. He agrees with them that good poetry’s ability to train a mind to be attentive to – and even feel at home in – ambiguity of meaning, and even ambiguity of syntax, is essential to a liberal democratic state. Riding and Graves present modernist poetry as the educational instrument that can improve the reader’s ability to interpret complex and unfamiliar meanings in the world of human experience more generally. And they do so in a way that provides Richards with the main outlines of his own model for a properly modern human consciousness. For all three, the nature of present society and the future of humankind are at stake in the question of how to interpret poetry.
•
The Chapter “Variety in Modernist Poetry” in A Survey of Modernist Poetry is dedicated to the discovery of an antidote to the “sameness” that threatens poems, poets, and readers should the attitudes toward poetry promoted in the Newbolt Report come to hold sway. Riding and Graves imply that the Newbolt Report is the latest incarnation of a regular feature of the history of poetry; one tends to find “a tacit or written critical agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any period,” and also agreement on “the necessity of having socially secure convictions.”31 In short, there has always been a poetry “of the school-room tradition”: “Poetry was to poets of the school-room tradition the instrument, the illustration of their convictions, whether … patriotic … moral … religious … ‘philosophical’ … social … ‘artistic’ … Even the decadents at the end of the last century were decadent from conviction … Decadence introduced no variety. It merely substituted self-satisfied pessimism for self-satisfied optimism; and one nationalism for another by moving the poetical center from London to Paris.”32 Agreeing with Riding and Graves that the sole aim of a poem is “becoming what in the end it has become” and that the sole aim of the reader and critic is to recognize “what it is,” Richards disavows as a poem’s aim the same list of goals and standards external to it they formulate: “I do not mean by its ‘aim’ any sociological, aesthetic, commercial or propagandistic intentions or hopes of the poet.”33
According to Riding and Graves, poetry of the school-room tradition flourishes in the marketplace of a mass society, the efficiency of its large-scale reproduction of sameness answering with appropriate supply the very demand that its miseducation of plain readers creates. “The sameness of poetry is likewise accentuated rather than diminished by the spirit of competition. Once there is a tacit or written critical agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any period, all the poets of fashion or ‘taste’ vie with each other in approximating to the perfect period manner … willing to polish away every vestige of personal eccentricity from their work. Period monotony is further increased by imitation of the most successful ‘period’ poets.”34 Acknowledging the influence of just such a marketplace upon poets, Richards half-jokingly anticipates a similar misuse of the information to be gleaned from Practical Criticism: “A strange light … is thrown upon the sources of popularity for poetry. Indeed I am not without fears that my efforts may prove of assistance to young poets (and others) desiring to increase their sales. A set of formulae for ‘nation-wide appeal’ seems to be a just possible outcome.”35
For Riding and Graves, contemporary resistance to the impersonal, commodifying, and imperial tendencies of the schoolroom tradition is centred in modernism: “The school-room may still remain the citadel of convictions … But the modernist poet does not write for the school-room: if for anything at all, for the university.”36 They celebrate “the lack of narrow schoolroom purposiveness shown by modernist poets,” arguing that for the modernist, “poetry ceases to be the maintenance of a single idealistic tone; it has a less obvious, a more complicated consistency.”37 Opposing the interest in sameness in “the old world of poetry … going on at the same time,” modernism offers “alternatives” to the “single idealistic tone”: “This refinement of conviction, this maturing of social purposiveness, contributes more than any other cause to the raising of the barriers of poetical monotony.”38
According to Riding and Graves there are three degrees of modernist poet, descending from the “free-lance modernist” to the “professional modernist,” and then finally to the “pseudo-modernist.”39 They are distinct in terms of their attitude towards one of the qualities that distinguishes modernism: “individuality.” The free-lance modernist sets the standard: “Free-lance modernists do not make ‘individuality’ their object: their object is to write each poem in the most fitting way. But the sum of their works has individuality because of their natural variousness; like the individuality of the handwriting of all independent-minded men or women, however clearly and conventionally they form their actual letters.”40 Other modernists deploy individuality purposefully: “To professional modernists individuality is the earnest of a varied social purposiveness. To pseudo-modernists individuality is the earnest of a narrow literary purposiveness.”41
The professional modernist poet purposes by his “individuality” an alternative to the schoolroom monotony of sameness in poem, poet, and reader. In such cases, “modernism is a professional conscience rather than a personal trait.”42 Pseudo-modernists are shaped by the schoolroom tradition. Ironically, “Individuality” is even more their object than it is for the professional modernists, its object being to show that they have identified and followed the “formula” of the modernist period style: “In this they are not dissimilar from those eighteenth-century poets whose sole object was to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, this conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, merely of the eccentricities of poetry that is really individual.”43
Misshaped by the schoolroom tradition, the conscience of professional and pseudo-modernist alike is further misshaped by their constant attention to their competitive position in the marketplace. In a poetic environment where “modernism is a professional conscience rather than a personal trait … the modernist poetry-producing world has the look of a complicated hierarchy,” for there will always be “a certain sifting and grading of personalities and groups,” both by the professional modernists and by the pseudo-modernists.44 And “the complication is increased by the efforts of professional modernists to enroll free-lance modernists in their socially purposive movement, and of pseudo-modernists to enroll themselves in it by literary forgery.”45
According to this valuation of genuine individuality by Riding and Graves, the free-lance modernist will try to evade imitation, even changing his signature to prevent forgery: “The only legitimate use of the word ‘style’ in poetry is as the personal handwriting in which it is written; if it can be easily imitated or defined as a formula it should be immediately suspect to the poets themselves.”46 Of course “‘Groups’ may spring up in the old style around any poet; but in general, the free-lance modernist who had by accident become popular or notorious and still retained a sense of personal dignity would shrink from being made a ‘cher maître’ … Indeed, as soon as any imitation is made of his work, and his style by imitation becomes a formula of mannerisms, he may even be inclined to change them to preserve his integrity.”47
Richards also follows Ridings and Graves in identifying the ironic modernist state of mind as the best resource for coping with an increasingly complex political future. He presents poetry like Eliot’s as a welcome incitement to the development of new methods of reading poetry that will make us better citizens of the liberal democratic state. Once upon a time, Richards observes, one could run a business or speak a language without much formal knowledge of business and without much formal knowledge of the language: “Some generations ago, when businesses were simpler and more separate, the owner could carry one on by rule of thumb or by mere routine proficiency without troubling himself much about general industrial or economic conditions. It is not so now. Similarly, when man lived in small communities, talking or reading, on the whole, only about things belonging to his own culture, and dealing only with ideas and feelings familiar to his group, the mere acquisition of his language through intercourse with his fellows was enough to give him a good command of it.”48 Of course it is not so now: “Our everyday reading and speech now handles scraps from a score of different cultures … [W] e are forced to pass from ideas and feelings that took their form in Shakespeare’s time or Dr. Johnson’s time to ideas and feelings of Edison’s time or Freud’s time and back again … The result of this heterogeneity is that for all kinds of utterances our performances, both as speakers (or writers) and listeners (or readers), are worse than those of persons of similar natural ability, leisure and reflection a few generations ago.”49
To avoid the confusion and misunderstanding that arise from the fact that words have multiple, ambiguous referents in the cosmopolitan culture of the twentieth century ( “And this threat … can only grow worse as world communications, through the wireless and otherwise, improve”), a new mind must be developed.50 This will be a “mind that can shift its view-point and still keep its orientation, that can carry over into quite a new set of definitions the results gained through experience in other frameworks, the mind that can rapidly and without strain or confusion perform the systematic transformations required by such a shift.”51 The mind that can shift from the ideas and feelings of Shakespeare’s time to those of Freud’s time and back again ( “descending from the scholar’s level to the kitchenmaid’s,” says Richards), looks a lot like the mind that composed The Waste Land, shifting from The Tempest’s “Those are pearls that were his eyes!” to Cockney gossip about Albert and Lil and then to Ophelia’s farewell, “Goodnight sweet ladies” (via a barbershop quartet’s version of a similar lyric). There are “few such minds” at present, however, because “The whole linguistic training we receive at present is in the other direction, towards supplying us with one or other of a number of frameworks of doctrine into which we are taught to force all the material we would handle.”52
The “fameworks of doctrine” into which poetry is fitted are particularly damaging to this future mind. So far as poetry is concerned, “our educational methods are glaringly at fault, creating a shibboleth situation that defeats its purpose”: “Our traditional ideas as to the values of poetry – given us automatically if poetry is set apart from life, or if poems are introduced to us from the beginning as either good or bad, as ‘poetry’ or ‘not poetry’ – misrepresent the facts and raise unnecessary difficulties. It is less important to like ‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad,’ than to be able to use them both for ordering our minds … So long as we feel that the judgment of poetry is a social ordeal, and that our real responses to it may expose us to contempt, our efforts … will not take us far. But most of our responses are not real, are not our own, and this is just the difficulty.”53
All is not lost, however, for new ways of reading poetry can lead us into the future with precisely the kind of mind that the future will require. On the one hand, “As the finer parts of our emotional tradition relax in the expansion and dissolution of our communities, and as we discover how far out of our intellectual depth the flood-tide of science is carrying us … we shall increasingly need every discipline that can be devised.”54 On the other hand, “If we are neither to swim blindly in schools under the suggestion of fashion, nor to shudder into paralysis before the inconceivable complexity of existence, we must find means of exercising our power of choice.”55 This discipline and this power of choice can be found in studying poetry. “The critical reading of poetry is an arduous discipline; fewer exercises reveal to us more clearly the limitations under which, from moment to moment, we suffer. But, equally, the immense extension of our capacities that follows a summoning of our resources is made plain. The lesson of all criticism is that we have nothing to rely upon in making our choices but ourselves. The lesson of good poetry seems to be that, when we have understood it, in the degree in which we can order ourselves, we need nothing more.”56 It is poetry that will enable the free man to choose, and teach him how to do so.
•
Richards finds in many of his protocol writers precisely the fearful, risk-averse, self-protection that contemporary educational methods promote, but once again Riding and Graves have beaten Richards to the punch. They identify the same failings in the plain reader, who is “the timid victim of orthodox criticism on the one hand, and unorthodox poetry on the other”; “His attitude toward poetry has … to be one of self-defence. He must be cautious in his choice of what he reads. He must not make a fool of himself by reading anything in which he may be called on to rely on his own critical opinion.”57 Such a reader resists the poem’s call to authentic engagement: “Poetry … in its more exacting side, makes … no demands which exceed the private intimacy of the reader and the poem … But the plain reader is … afraid of the infringements that poetry may make on his private mental and spiritual ease … And undoubtedly the way that anything can interfere most with an individual’s privacy is by demanding criticism (complete attention, complete mental intimacy and confidence) for itself from him.”58 Above all, the plain reader avoids difficult poetry, “for if it is difficult it means that he must think in unaccustomed ways, and thinking to the plain reader, beyond the range necessary for the practical purposes of living, is unsettling and dangerous; he is afraid of his own mind.”59 Consistent with these principles, “he will prefer an unoriginal but undisturbing poem to an original but disturbing one … [N] o common poetry reader could bring himself without great effort to meet the demands of thought put upon him by an authentic poem.”60
Richards generalizes about the contemporary “critical act” in similar terms: “The personality stands balanced between the particular experience which is the realized poem and the whole fabric of its past experiences and developed habits of mind. What is being settled is whether this new experience can or cannot be taken into the fabric with advantage … Often it must be the case that … too much reconstruction would be needed. The strain, the resistance, is too great, and the poem is rejected.”61 Readers of this sort frustrate Richards, and so he gives least representation among the protocols that he quotes to “that great body of readers whose first and last reaction to poetry … is bewilderment” – “the havering, non-committal, vague, sit-on-the-fence, middle-body of opinion.”62 The average reader too often “feels himself distressingly at a loss before a poem. Too sheer a challenge to his own unsupported self seems to be imposed … Without some objective criteria, by which poetry can be tested, and the good distinguished from the bad, he feels like a friendless man deprived of weapons and left naked at the mercy of a treacherous beast.”63
Richards’s metaphor is similar to the one that Riding and Graves use to depict the discomfort of the self-confronting modern poems in which the poet has abjured the tradition of writing poetry “formed with an eye to its serviceability as reading matter”: “the reader does not really want to be left alone with poetry. The mental ghosts, which only poets are supposed to have commerce with, assail him. The real discomfort to the reader in modernist poetry is the absence of the poet as his protector from the imaginative terrors lurking within it.”64 The one’s “treacherous beast” descends from the “imaginative terrors” of the others’ “mental ghosts.”
Riding and Graves declare that such a reader “is afraid of his own mind,” and so does Richards: “We decided that the treacherous beast was within him, that critical weapons … would only hurt him, that his own experience – not as represented in a formula, but in its available entirety – was his only safeguard, and that if he could rely sufficiently upon this, he could only profit from his encounter with the poem.”65 As Riding and Graves put it, “if the plain reader could conquer his initial self-consciousness … it should be possible to be on completely unembarrassed and impersonal terms with poetry.”66 Richards too depicts poetry as calling the reader to an intimate engagement with that reader’s own mind, an intimacy and an engagement in which the reader risks his sense of himself and his reality: “When we have the poem in all its minute particulars as intimately and as fully present to our minds as we can contrive … then our acceptance or rejection of it must be direct. There comes a point in all criticism where a sheer choice has to be made without the support of any arguments, principles, or general rules … [I] t is in these moments of sheer decision that the mind becomes most plastic, and selects … the direction of its future development.”67 And in the liberal capitalist democracy that Richards imagines, of course, this plastic mind’s choices will existentially found and fund collective future development of human being.
1 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 189.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 189–90.
4 Ibid., 190.
5 Ibid., 189.
6 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1970), 166–7.
7 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 190.
8 Henry Newbolt, John Bailey, K.M. Baines, F.S. Boas, H.M. Davies, D. Enright, C.H. Firth, J.H. Fowler, L.A. Lowe, Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, George Sampson, Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, G. Perrie Williams, J. Dover Wilson, The Teaching of English in England (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921).
9 George Sampson, English for the English: A Chapter on National Education (London: Cambridge University Press, 1921).
10 See Robert Graves, “How English is Taught,” The Daily Herald (14 December 1921): 7.
11 Newbolt, et al., The Teaching of English, 14, 15, 10, 67.
12 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 190.
13 Ibid., 191.
14 Ibid., 194.
15 Ibid., 192.
16 Ibid., 192, 193, 194.
17 Ibid., 190–1.
18 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 313.
19 Ibid., 314.
20 Ibid., 33.
21 Ibid., 334.
22 Newbolt, et al., The Teaching of English, 63. The same sentence appears in Sampson, English for the English, 25.
23 Ibid., 10.
24 Sampson, English for the English, 14.
25 Ibid., 16, 24, 25.
26 Richards, Practical Criticism, 337–8.
27 Ibid., 337, 337, 336–7.
28 Newbolt, et al., The Teaching of English, 60; Richards, Practical Criticism, 336.
29 Richards, Practical Criticism, 334.
30 Ibid., 312–13.
31 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 196, 197.
32 Ibid., 197.
33 Richards, Practical Criticism, 204.
34 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 196–7.
35 Richards, Practical Criticism, 19.
36 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 199.
37 Ibid., 200, 199.
38 Ibid., 199.
39 Ibid., 204.
40 Ibid., 205.
41 Ibid., 205.
42 Ibid., 206.
43 Ibid., 205–6.
44 Ibid., 206.
45 Ibid., 206–7.
46 Ibid., 205.
47 Ibid., 206.
48 Richards, Practical Criticism, 339.
49 Ibid., 339–40.
50 Ibid., 340.
51 Richards, Practical Criticism, 343.
52 Ibid., 343–4.
53 Ibid., 349.
54 Ibid., 350.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 350–1.
57 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 96.
58 Ibid., 99.
59 Ibid., 108.
60 Ibid., 97–8.
61 Richards, Practical Criticism, 303.
62 Ibid., 315, 18.
63 Ibid., 314.
64 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 135, 136.
65 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 108; Richards, Practical Criticism, 314–15.
66 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 136.
67 Richards, Practical Criticism, 302–3.