19
Another of the “chief difficulties of criticism” that Richards identifies and explains in a way that suggests the influence of Riding and Graves concerns “the effects of technical presuppositions” ( “whenever we attempt to judge poetry from outside by technical details”) and the effects of “general critical preconceptions (prior demands made upon poetry as a result of theories – conscious or unconscious – about its nature and values).”1 According to Richards, these preconceptions and preconditions are a function of anthology culture, which impedes a reader’s abilities to rely on his own wit to interpret poetry and to develop himself through the reading of poetry. By 1928, there was no issue in contemporary literary criticism more distinctly the preserve of Riding and Graves than such criticism of anthology culture.
Riding and Graves deal at length with the problems that these “theories” about the nature and value of poetry create for poetry and its readers. They suggest, on the one hand, that “No genuine poet or artist ever called himself after a theory or invented a name for a theory,” and, on the other hand, that any fairly good poet can be used to justify any practicable theory of poetry, however inadequate a theory it may be by which to write poetry.”2 Shakespeare, for instance, “was independent of poetic theory” and yet “can be used to justify … any … poetic theory simply because he was such a good poet.”3 Theories are the creation of poets who lack genius and critics who lack poetic sense: “An undue prominence is given to poetic theories either when people who are not real poets are encouraged by the low state of poetry to try to write it themselves … Or when critics without any poetic sense attempt to explain changes in poetry to themselves and to the reading public.”4 The reading public is most vulnerable to the bad effects of poetic theories because “it is surely criticism which has always stood between poetry and the plain reader, made possible the writing of so much false poetry and, by granting too much respect to theories, lost the power of distinguishing between what is false and what is true.”5
In Practical Criticism, Richards notes that “The protocols show … how entirely a matter of authority the rank of famous poets, as it is accepted and recognized by public opinion, must be.”6 For “a great body” of protocol writers, the task of judging an anonymous poem produced only “bewilderment”: “Without further clues (authorship, period, school, the sanction of an anthology, or the hint of a context) the task of ‘making up their minds about it,’ or even of working out a number of possible views from which to choose, was felt to be really beyond their powers.”7 The cause of the “despairing helplessness” that “haunts the protocols” is a dependence fostered by anthology culture.8 From the point of view of even the well-educated protocol writer, it is a “mysterious, traditional authority” that determines “the rank of famous poets.”9 And so “the sanction of an anthology” takes the place of self-reliant evaluation and effectively makes up the reader’s mind about poetry.
Richards seems to register here the argument of Riding and Graves against the lazy reading habits encouraged by anthology culture. According to Richards, the contemporary reader’s “despairing helplessness” when faced with the task of distinguishing between good and bad poetry without the unholy ghost of traditional authority to guide him “should lead us to question very closely the quality of the reading we ordinarily give to authors whose rank and character have been officially settled … Far more than we like to admit, we take a hint for our response from the poet’s reputation. Whether we assent or dissent, the traditional view runs through our response like the wire upon which a hanging plant is trained … The attempt to read without this guidance puts a strain upon us that we are little accustomed to … We learn how much we are indebted to the work of other minds that have established the tradition … And we discover what a comparatively relaxed and inattentive activity our ordinary reading of established poetry is.”10 This is precisely the point of Riding and Graves’s exercise of reading beyond the relaxed and inattentive reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet encouraged by the anthology tradition.
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In his explanation in Practical Criticism of how much time his students spent preparing their protocols, Richards suggests that “on the whole it is fairly safe to assert that the poems received much more thorough study than, shall we say, most anthology pieces get in the ordinary course.”11 The archness of his “shall we say” construction perhaps acknowledges the campaign against anthology culture waged by Riding and Graves, the culture most responsible for the plain reader’s expectation that a proper poem ought to be understandable on a first, quick reading.
The incidental sniping in A Survey of Modernist Poetry at Louis Untermeyer’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry as “an anthology whose principal aim is to soothe, not irritate” – a typical aspect of the anthology’s preference for “simplicity” – and the sustained criticism of the mangling of Shakespeare’s “Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame” by “the Oxford Book of English Verse and other popular anthologies which have apparently chosen this sonnet from all others as being particularly easy to understand” express Riding and Graves’s concern that readers have been so thoroughly trained by anthology reading to expect poetry to be comprehensible at a glance that they will not spend more than a few minutes reading a poem.12 As we have seen, they offer Riding’s “The Rugged Black of Anger” as an example of a modernist poem the difficulty of “which would probably cause it to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary two-minute reading.”13 As they note in A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, “The reader whose first approach to poetry is through anthologies usually acquires the anthology habit for life … He has never read a long poem … He cannot read any poem which presents the slightest difficulty of thought, which demands, that is, more than one reading.”14
Richards’s familiarity with A Pamphlet Against Anthologies is suggested by his discussion of “the general question of the place of the plain prose sense, or thought, in poetry.”15 Riding and Graves read Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” very closely in terms of its plain prose sense: “As a prose fancy this poem is confused and illogical … [F] rom the prose point of view … the details are even more illogical than the main argument.”16 Their point is that the poem “is not logical,” was not meant to be, and certainly ought not to have been: “It has rather a supra-logical harmony, by identity of the theme, which shows the inability of the mind to face the actual reality of death, with the expression, which shows an inability to get the right words to pair off in a logical prose manner. Had the mind been able to face lyrically the fact of Lucy’s death and had the words been illogically placed; or had the mind not been able to face the fact and had the words been logically placed – it would not have been as true a poem as it is now in its distortion.”17
Richards presents similar observations about the potential virtuosity of departing from plain prose sense. On the one hand, he offers the example of Swinburne as “a very suitable poet in whom to study the subordination, distortion and occultation of sense through the domination of verbal feeling” because in his poetry, “the argument, the interconnection of the thought, has very little to do with the proper effect of the poem, where the thought may be incoherent and confused without harm, for the very simple reason that the poet is not using the argument as an argument.”18 One notes here the word that Riding and Graves use to describe poetry’s departure from prose sense: “distortion.” On the other hand, Richards acknowledges distortion of the prose sense in a poem as a proper way of accurately depicting “desperate or sublime” feelings: “There are types of poetry … where the effect of the poem may turn upon irrationality, where the special feelings which arise from recognizing incompatibility and contradiction are essential parts of the poem.”19 This is the point that Riding and Graves make about Wordsworth’s poem.
Similarly, in his own anthological presentation to his students of poems arbitrarily grouped together for protocol analysis, Richards notes the same intertextual confusions that Riding and Graves identify in the effect of anthologies upon readers. The latter complain that anthologized poems infect readings of each other where common themes, images, settings, events, and so on, can be identified: “We could show how, in alphabetical anthologies … Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ will get somehow identified with Rogers’ ‘Lucy’ poem … and how in a subject anthology, under the heading of ‘Lost Maidens,’ the ‘Lucy of the Springs of Dove’ will get confused with Kingsley’s ‘Mary of the sands of Dee.’”20 It gets worse. “Once these confusions start, there is no checking them. Byron’s praise of his mistress … is infected by and infecting Sir Henry Wotton’s praise of his … Shirley and Shakespeare, alphabetically allied, get entangled … Through likeness of title and nearness of date poems so fundamentally unlike as Keats’ Nightingale and Shelley’s Skylark affect each other strangely.”21 Richards is similarly bemused by his students’ tendency to compare and contrast the poems in the sets of four that he has grouped together quite arbitrarily for their perusal, speculating that “the collocation of this set of four poems … may be thought to have acted rather unfairly as a trap” to induce such comparison and contrast, and yet confessing that “this mutual influence between poems that are presented together is as difficult to calculate as to avoid.”22
•
And so Richards attributes precisely the same function to poetic theories and observes precisely the same vulnerabilities in contemporary readers as Riding and Graves. He too holds that “Most critical dogmas, preconceptions of the kind that can be and are applied to poetry … rest upon our desire for explanation, our other desires, our respect for tradition, and to a slight degree upon faulty induction.”23 He traces to our desire for explanation and our “predilection” for certain experiences in poetry the same loss of power to distinguish between true and false poetry that Riding and Graves complain of: “The result of a highly ambiguous though simple-seeming doctrine, when it collaborates with our well ascertained capacity to read poems as we wish to read them, is to disable our judgment to a point well below its normal unindoctrinated level.”24 In fact, according to Richards, “All critical doctrines are attempts to convert choice into what may seem a safer activity – the reading [of] evidence and the application of rules and principles. They are an invasion into an inappropriate sphere of that modern transformation, the displacement of the will by observation and judgment.”25 “On the whole,” he concludes, critical doctrines “make us much more stupid than we would be without them.”26
In their rewriting of E.E. Cummings’s poem “Sunset” as “Sunset Piece,” Riding and Graves identify ways in which the poem fails to satisfy the plain reader’s expectations concerning proper poetic techniques and ways in which it fails to express the values expected of a poem called “Sunset”: “With so promising a title, what barriers does the poem raise between itself and the plain reader? In what respects does it seem to sin against the common intelligence? To begin with, the lines do not begin with capitals. The spacing does not suggest any regular verse form … No punctuation marks are used. There is no obvious grammar … But even overlooking these technical oddities, it still seems impossible to read the poem as a logical sequence. A great many words essential to the coherence of the ideas suggested have been deliberately omitted; and the entire effect is so sketchy that the poem might be made to mean almost anything or nothing.”27 They interpret Cummings’s poem as an attempt to avoid the kind of sunset poem by means of which anthologies “have indulged” the plain reader’s “lazy reading habits” and thereby contributed to the degradation of the common intelligence ( “our common intelligence is the mind in its least active state”).28 “Sunset” is “a case of making the lazy reader think and work along with the poet.”29
Since “stale phrases” that “have come to mean so little that they scarcely do their work” in a poem “cannot be avoided” if one is to write “the poem for the plain man,” and since in the face of the “stalenesses in traditional poetry” Cummings feels “obliged to attack them or escape from them,” the poem “Sunset” strikes Riding and Graves as itself running the danger of becoming a formulaic anti-poem.30 “Cummings’ technique, indeed, if further and more systematically developed, would become so complicated that poetry would be no more than mechanical craftsmanship, the verse patterns growing so elaborate that the principal interest in them would be mathematical.”31 Although “in their present experimental stage, and only in their experimental stage, these patterns are undoubtedly suggestive,” Cummings must beware the poem with no more than “a technical soul” because “excessive interest in the mere technique of the poem can become morbid in both the poet and the reader, like the composing and solving of cross-word puzzles.”32
As things stand, however, one of the most important ways in which this poem by Cummings is “suggestive” is pedagogically: “The important thing to recognize, in a time of popular though superficial education, is the necessity of emphasizing to the reading public the differences between good and bad poems.”33 In “Sunset,” according to Riding and Graves, Cummings accepts the obligation “in such a time … to teach the proper approach to poetry.”34 If we consider sunset poems as a whole, “we may not accept the Cummings version, but once we have understood it we cannot return with satisfaction to the standardized one.”35 An experimental poem of this sort proposes to stimulate active reading, to raise the level of common intelligence, and thereby to reduce the market for anthologies. “It is not suggested here that poets should imitate Cummings, but that poems like Cummings’ and the attention they demand should make it harder for the standardized article to pass itself off as poetry.”36
When they later set for the plain reader the task of determining who amongst contemporary poets is a free-lance modernist, a professional modernist, and a pseudo-modernist, Riding and Graves suggest that the first step is to move beyond all technical presuppositions and critical preconceptions. They claim that “Criticism in the simplest literary scenes has never been able to recognize who are authentic contemporary poets and how much of each poet is authentic.”37 Quantity overwhelms critics; the contemporary scene confronts them not just with too many poets, but more disconcertingly with too many varieties of poetry: “Criticism (even advanced criticism), reared for centuries on the faith of the technical and philosophical consistency of poetry (a faith continuously derived and revised from Aristotle), cannot cope with poetry in quantity; as it could a hundred years ago, when the possible varieties of poetical composition were countable on the fingers.”38 Critics simply know too much; “the usual type of orthodox critic is more equipped with prejudices than the plain reader, if only because his position forces him to know quantitatively more, and … he therefore has a less reliable instinct than the plain reader for determining what is genuine and what is not.”39 Paradoxically, then, an even more ignorant reader than the one castigated for his inactive intelligence offers some hope for the future of poetry: “The reader, even the critic, does not have to trouble to plot out a literary chart, to develop a carefully graded technical vocabulary. All that either of them needs is a simple and instinctive recognition of the real, which is easily discovered if all other personal or critical questions are brushed aside as irrelevant.”40
This course of analysis and argument is the same as Richards’s:
We should be better advised to acknowledge frankly that, when people put poems in our hands … what we say, in nine cases out of ten, has nothing to do with the poem … It cannot arise from the poem if the poem is not yet there in our minds, and it hardly ever, in fact, is there … It would be an excellent thing if all the critical chitchat which we produce on these occasions were universally recognized to be what it is, social gesture, “phatic communion” … [T] he sincere and innocent reader is much too easily bounced into emptying his mind by any literary highwayman who says, “I want your opinion,” and much too easily laid low because he has nothing to produce on these occasions. He might be comforted if he knew how many professionals make a point of carrying stocks of imitation currency, crisp and bright, which satisfy the highwaymen and are all that even the wealthiest critic in these emergencies can supply.41
Richards employs the colourful metaphor of the professional critic as counterfeiter where Riding and Graves simply speak of the “orthodox critic” as “more equipped with prejudices,” but the task, as Richards sees it, is to escape the preconceptions that Riding and Graves identify in favour of the personal engagement with the poem that they recommend. On the successful completion of this task depend the personal future of the reader, the future of poetry within British culture – and perhaps the future of civilization itself.42
Although in Principles of Literary Criticism the guidance of the reader’s mind towards an efficient organization of energies that the minds of poets have achieved is the greatest value that literature offers, Richards takes the position of Riding and Graves in Practical Criticism, warning of the “dangers” of the average reader’s dependence for “guidance” in reading, understanding, and valuing literature on the “other minds that have established the tradition.”43 By the experiment conducted in Practical Criticism, “we discover what a comparatively relaxed and inattentive activity our ordinary reading of established poetry is.”44 This is the common mind in its least active state, the tired mind of lazy reading habits that Riding and Graves decry. There is no hint in Principles of Literary Criticism of anger, or even impatience, towards Richards’s first students, whose inadequate readings of poems are occasionally acknowledged in this book. By their disdain for the plain reader, Riding and Graves may have emboldened Richards to take a similarly bare-knuckled approach to his protocol writers.
Richards also identifies a reader’s preoccupation with what Riding and Graves call “personal or critical questions” as the greatest impediment to what they call “a simple and instinctive recognition of the real”: “simple-seeming doctrine … collaborates with our well ascertained capacity to read poems much as we wish to read them” in a “degradation” of the reading process.45 In many of the protocols, Richards notes, “certain tests, criteria and presuppositions as to what is to be admired or despised in poetry proved their power to hide what was actually present … [A] serious … reader, unprovided with any such criteria, theories and principles, often feels himself distressingly at a loss before a poem … The desire to condense his past experience, or to invoke doughty authority, is constantly overwhelming.”46
Like Riding and Graves, Richards prefers that the reader be “left naked” before the poem, rather than clothed in the presuppositions of others. Since critical dogmas “make us much more stupid than we would be without them” (they “disable our judgment to a point well below its normal unindoctrinated level”), our task is to escape them. According to Richards, the reader’s “own experience – not as represented in a formula but in its available entirety – [is] his only safeguard, and … if he could rely sufficiently upon this, he could only profit from his encounter with the poem.”47 Once again Richards characterizes the experience as the same sort of “simple and instinctive recognition of the real” that Riding and Graves describe: “When we have the poem in all its minute particulars as intimately and as fully present to our minds as we can contrive – no general description of it but the very experience itself present as a living pulse in our biographies – 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.”48 In fact, “critical certainties, convictions as to the value, and kinds of value, of kinds of poetry, might safely and with advantage decay, provided there remained a firm sense of the critical act of choice, its difficulty, and the supreme exercise of all our faculties that it imposes.”49
Richards now conceives of a reader’s proper, authentic engagement with poetry as rather existential: no longer is it merely a vaguely evolutionary exercise in organizational efficiency, but rather it is an exercise of will in the making of human being. As “a sheer choice … made without the support of any arguments, principles, or general rules,” the critical act is for Richards “the starting-point, not the conclusion, of an argument. 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.”50
Richards here applies to the reader language that Riding and Graves apply to the poem: “Modern poetry … is groping for some principle of self-determination to be applied to the making of the poem – not lack of government, but government from within.”51 They authorize this shift by their valuation of a poem like “Sunset” by Cummings, whose “method turns the reader into a poet”: “This Sunset poem of Mr. Cummings, then, is not, strictly speaking, Mr. Cummings’ poem, but the poem of anybody who will be at pains to write it … The poet blends the subject of the poem with the feelings that the subject arouses into one expression. This unity makes the poem a living whole.”52 Reading a certain kind of modern poem properly, in other words, is an existential exercise. According to Riding and Graves, the genuinely creative poet – “the making poet” – does not repeat a method; indeed, “The making poet … has no method, but a faculty for allowing things to invent themselves.”53 It is this “‘obsession with making’ … that the reader will have to reckon with if poetry continues in its present tendency of forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat the steps by which it came to be. So that technique in the modernist definition does not refer to the method by which a poem is written but that evolutionary history of the poem which is the poem itself.”54 To read such a modernist poem in the way it requires, in other words, is for the reader to participate in the poem’s self-governed creation. The poem’s biography becomes part of the reader’s biography: a vicarious experience of self-creation, self-explanation, self-government.
Richards makes very similar points: first, that when one lives at the level where one’s impulses are most organized, life is a poem; second, that a poem’s effect on a reader can cascade over all other aspects of his life. He explains in Principles of Literary Criticism that aesthetic experiences
are the most formative experiences, because in them the development and systematization of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In our ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response … But in the “imaginative experience” these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of his life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs.55
In Practical Criticism, when discussing the opportunity for “self-completion” that the proper criticism of poetry allows, Richards expresses frustration that a number of quite formidable critics have misinterpreted his interest in poetry’s ability to organize a reader’s impulses as an interest in something like a mechanical order rather than in the unified, living whole:
I have in several other places made prolonged and determined efforts to indicate the types of mental order I have in mind, but without escaping certain large misunderstandings … Thus Mr Eliot, reviewing Science and Poetry in The Dial, describes my ideal order as “Efficiency, a perfectly-working mental Roneo Steel Cabinet System,” and Mr Read performing a similar service for Principles in The Criterion, seemed to understand that where I spoke of “the organisation of impulses” I meant that kind of deliberate planning and arrangement which the controllers of a good railway or large shop must carry out. But “organisation” for me stood for that kind of interdependence of parts which we allude to when we speak of living things as “organisms”; and the “order” which I make out to be so important is not tidiness.56
And so, although concentrating on the meaning of poetry from the perspective of the reader’s psychological experience of it, rather than from the perspective of the poem (the perspective that Riding and Graves attempt to present), Richards nonetheless describes a process similar to the one that Riding and Graves outline. Reading a poem ought to make “the very experience itself present as a living pulse in our biographies.”57 As he explains, when asserting that “the aim of the poem comes first, and is the sole justification of its means … its success in doing what it set out to do, or, if we like, in becoming what in the end it has become,” “I … mean by this the whole state of mind, the mental condition, which in another sense is the poem. Roughly the collection of impulses which shaped the poem originally, to which it gave expression, and to which, in an ideally susceptible reader it would again give rise.”58 Richards virtually paraphrases Riding and Graves, when they say: “The poet blends the subject of the poem with the feelings that the subject arouses into one expression. This unity makes the poem a living whole.”59 For Richards now, as for Riding and Graves from the beginning, good reading is for the reader to live the living whole that is the good poem.
Since the whole that the poem comprises ought to be experienced by the reader, a “blunder in all cases is the attempt to assign marks independently to details that can only be judged fairly with reference to the whole final result to which they contribute.”60 Ideally, then, we should “have the poem in all its minute particulars as intimately and as fully present to our minds as we can contrive.”61 Since “value in poetry turns nearly always upon differences and connections too minute and unobtrusive to be directly perceived,” “we recognize them only in their effects.”62 The proper response to poetry is more than an application of rules and principles, and it is more than a discretely intellectual or emotional exercise; it is the response of one living whole to another. And “so the differences between good and bad poetry may be indiscernible to direct attention yet patent in their effects upon feeling. The choice of our whole personality may be the only instrument we possess delicate enough to effect the discrimination.”63
Direct acceptance or rejection of a poem is the making of a person, literally, because “it is in these moments of sheer decision that the mind becomes most plastic, and selects, at the incessant multiple shifting cross-roads, the direction of its future development.”64 The effect of the good poem is to share its self-completing spirit with the good reader: “The critic himself, of course, in the moment of choice knows nothing about all this. He may feel the strain. He may notice the queer shifts of emotional perspective – that may affect all his other thoughts – as his mind tries, now in one way now in another, to fit itself to the poem. He will sense an obscure struggle as the poem’s secret allies and enemies manoeuvre within him … But when the conflict resolves itself … the mind clears, and new energy wells up; after the pause a collectedness supervenes; behind our rejection or acceptance (even of a minor poem) we feel the sanction and authority of the self-completing spirit.”65 And so Richard declares true of any good poem what Riding and Graves declare true of Cummings’s: it “turns the reader into a poet”; it becomes “the poem of anybody who will be at pains to write it.”66 The good reader of such a poem – a poem “forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat the steps by which it came to be” – can choose to make the poem a step in his own coming to be.67
Of course not all readers are good readers. The reader beholden to stock feelings tends to reject the good poem precisely because of its potential to transform him. According to Riding and Graves, “The chief condition the reader makes about the poetry he reads is that it shall not be difficult. 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.”68 Richards makes the same point. When, in reading, “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,” he notes, “Often it must be the case that the new modification of experience would improve the fabric if it could be taken in, but too much reconstruction would be needed. The strain, the resistance, is too great, and the poem is rejected.”69 Among the causes of this strain and resistance, according to Richards, “inadequate critical theories, withholding what we need and imposing upon us what we do not need, are sadly too frequent in our minds.”70 As Riding and Graves note, “A certain convention has existed until recently restraining the poet from troubling the public with the more unsettling forms of thought, which are vaguely known to be involved in the making of poetry but not supposed to be evident in the reading of poetry … [I] t is the shock of this contact that the plain reader cannot bear.”71
And so although Riding and Graves begin their book by proposing to investigate whether modernist poetry means “to withdraw itself from the plain reader” and “to keep the public out,” allowing that “If, after a careful examination of poems that seem to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow, they still resist all reasonable efforts, then we must conclude that such work is, after all, merely a joke at the plain reader’s expense and let him return to his newspapers,” one learns very soon that they have no intention of allowing the plain reader to return to his newspapers.72 Low-brow newspaper readers (with their “tired minds” and “lazy reading habits”) are the threat, expecting poetry to be something that “common intelligence” can understand “without difficulty.”73 Like Richards, Riding and Graves fear the degenerative influence of capitalism on literary culture, especially as realized in the reader of newspapers. According to Richards, “a decline can be noticed in perhaps every department of literature.”74 According to Riding and Graves, “the reading public insists that no poetry is clear except what it can understand at a glance.”75 Insisting “that what is called our common intelligence is the mind in its least active state” and “that poetry obviously demands a more vigorous imaginative effort than the plain reader has been willing to apply to it,” Riding and Graves assert that “the important thing to recognize, in a time of popular though superficial education, is the necessity of emphasizing to the reading public the difference between good and bad poems.”76
Richards outlines a similar context for his work in Practical Criticism and announces similar educational objectives. Overwhelmed by the “reckless, desperate character” of the protocols written by “that great body of readers whose first and last reaction to poetry (it is hardly a response) is bewilderment,” Richards plaintively suggests that “It should surely be possible, even without devoting more time or trouble to the reading of English than is given at present, to prepare them better, and make them more reasonably self-reliant.”77 This is no small matter: “It is natural to inquire how far insensitiveness, poor discrimination, and a feeble capacity to understand poetry imply a corresponding inability to apprehend and make use of the values of ordinary life.”78 To the problems of ordinary life that Richards spies, better training in the reading of poetry indeed promises help: “It is possible that the burden of information and consciousness that a growing mind has now to carry may be too much for its natural strength … Therefore, if there be any means by which we may artificially strengthen our minds’ capacity to order themselves, we must avail ourselves of them. And of all possible means, Poetry, the unique, linguistic instrument by which our minds have ordered their thoughts, emotions, desires … in the past, seems to be the most serviceable.”79
The Meaning of Meaning justifies the need to study “how words work” by reference to the fact that “New millions of participants in the control of general affairs must now attempt to form personal opinions upon matters which were once left to a few”; Principles of Literary Criticism suggests that it is “a contribution towards … choices of the future” because “The thought, ‘What shall we do with the powers, which we are so rapidly developing, and what will happen to us if we cannot learn to guide them in time?’ already marks for many people the chief interest of existence. The controversies which the world has known in the past are as nothing to those which are ahead.” For Richards, the mind educated to be at home in the ambiguities of poetry will be best placed to cope with the uncertainties of the future.80
In this regard, Richards again follows the lead of Riding and Graves, for the mind he celebrates is the mind that they suggest is both represented within modernist poetry and developed in readers by their engagement with it: “The mind that can shift its viewpoint and still keep its orientation, that can carry over into quite a new set of definitions the results gained through past experience in other frameworks, the mind that can rapidly and without strain and confusion perform the systematic transformations required by such a shift, is the mind of the future.”81
Riding and Graves point to John Crowe Ransom’s “Captain Carpenter” as exemplary of the ironic consciousness that modernist poetry demands of its readers: “to such a poem as this a variety of reactions is possible; and it is the balance of these various possible reactions that should form the reader’s critical attitude toward the poem.”82 In Ransom’s poem, “fact and fancy have equal value as truth. Captain Carpenter is both the realistic hero or knight-errant, who is bit by bit shorn of his strength until there is nothing left but his hollow boasts, and the fairy-tale hero who is actually reduced bit by bit to a tongue; and the double meaning has to be kept in mind throughout. The ordinary psychology, therefore, of the reader trained to look for a single reaction in himself is upset, and modernist poetry becomes the nightmare from which he tries to protect his sanity.”83 Riding and Graves present as the chief virtue of the poem precisely what the plain reader will advance as “the chief feeling against the poem”: “that Captain Carpenter is not an easily defined or felt subject, neither a particular historical figure nor yet a complete allegory. He confounds the emotions of the reader instead of simplifying them and provides no answer to the one question which the reader will ask himself: ‘Who or what, particularly, is Captain Carpenter?’”84
In the extensive Appendix to his book, Richards points particularly to the study of literary ambiguity as a place where the development of the flexible, plastic mind of the future can be encouraged:
A word … can equally and simultaneously represent vastly different things. It can therefore effect extraordinary combinations of feelings. A word is a point at which many very different influences may cross or unite. Hence its dangers in prose discussions and its treacherousness for careless readers of poetry, but hence at the same time the peculiar quasi-magical sway of words in the hands of a master. Certain conjunctions of words – through their history partly and through the collocations of emotional influences that by their very ambiguity they effect – have a power over our minds that nothing else can exert or perpetuate … It is easy to be mysterious about these powers, to speak of the “inexplicable” magic of words and to indulge in romantic reveries about their semantic history and immemorial past. But it is better to realize that these powers can be studied, and that what criticism most needs is less poeticizing and more detailed analysis and investigation.85
Of course Richards’s discussion of ambiguity in Practical Criticism suggests lines of influence between himself and Empson at this time on this topic. Empson recalled that during his meetings with Richards in the fall of 1928, “Two hours may have been spent on ambiguity, but not more.”86 Does this Appendix about the need for literary theorists to undertake more detailed analysis and investigation of literary ambiguity indicate Richards’s attitude before he met Empson, and so perhaps represent his advice to his student during their famous meeting? Or is what we read about ambiguity in the Appendix an echo of Empson’s view of the importance of Graves’s attitude toward ambiguity as evidenced by his 30,000-word typescript on the topic some weeks after their talk? Perhaps the Appendix emerges from a combination of the two scenarios in question.
Russo suggests that Richards’s attitude toward ambiguity develops from suspicion to celebration between 1923 and 1929 and that “in view of subsequent trends – Empson’s ambiguity, Cleanth Brooks and William Wimsatt’s wit and paradox, Allen Tate’s tension, Philip Wheelwright’s ‘plurisignifications,’ Paul De Man’s ‘free presence’ of the word, Jacques Derrida’s floating signifiers – Richards’ promotion of ambiguity from a minor to a major – the major – literary device was a historic moment in criticism.”87 As Haffenden shows, this assertion is not quite convincing, and the argument that supports it is not quite accurate. Richards’s genuine celebration of the systematic overdetermination of meaning represented by certain kinds of literary ambiguity would have to wait until The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), where he aligns himself with Freud as an explorer of this phenomenon. Russo is right, however, to say that Richards’s mind is changing during these years; he simply misses the fact that the attention bestowed on literary ambiguity by, first, Graves, then by Riding and Graves, and, finally, by Empson are important factors in a number of these important changes of mind.
1 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 16, 17, 17.
2 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 46, 43–4.
3 Ibid., 44.
4 Ibid., 46.
5 Ibid., 46.
6 Richards, Practical Criticism, 315.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 315–16.
11 Ibid., 4.
12 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 26, 11, 63. See Louis Untermeyer, Modern American Poetry: an introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1919).
13 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 138.
14 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1970), 81.
15 Richards, Practical Criticism, 64.
16 Riding and Graves, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, 128.
17 Ibid., 129–30.
18 Richards, Practical Criticism, 195, 64.
19 Ibid., 64.
20 Riding and Graves, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, 76.
21 Ibid., 77–9.
22 Richards, Practical Criticism, 93.
23 Ibid., 299–300.
24 Ibid., 301.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 300.
27 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 12–13.
28 Ibid., 10.
29 Ibid., 54.
30 Ibid., 17, 17, 17, 17, 20, 20.
31 Ibid., 20.
32 Ibid., 20, 25, 25.
33 Ibid., 19–20.
34 Ibid., 20.
35 Ibid., 22.
36 Ibid., 21–2.
37 Ibid., 209.
38 Ibid., 208.
39 Ibid., 219.
40 Ibid., 218.
41 Richards, Practical Criticism, 318.
42 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 219.
43 Richards, Practical Criticism, 316.
44 Ibid.
45 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 218, 218; Richards, Practical Criticism, 301, 301.
46 Richards, Practical Criticism, 314.
47 Ibid., 314–15.
48 Ibid., 302.
49 Ibid., 305.
50 Ibid., 303.
51 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 47.
52 Ibid., 41.
53 Ibid., 153.
54 Ibid., 134.
55 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1924; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), 237–8.
56 Richards, Practical Criticism, 285–6.
57 Ibid., 302.
58 Ibid., 204.
59 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 41.
60 Richards, Practical Criticism, 295.
61 Ibid., 302.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 303.
65 Ibid., 303–4.
66 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 41.
67 Ibid., 134.
68 Ibid., 108.
69 Richards, Practical Criticism, 303.
70 Ibid.
71 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 108–9.
72 Ibid., 9, 10, 10.
73 Ibid., 10.
74 Richards, Practical Criticism, 339.
75 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 84.
76 Ibid., 10, 10, 19–20.
77 Richards, Practical Criticism, 315.
78 Ibid., 319.
79 Ibid., 320.
80 C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1923), ix, x; Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 4, 4.
81 Richards, Practical Criticism, 343.
82 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 106.
83 Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 106–7.
84 Ibid., 107, 108.
85 Richards, Practical Criticism, 364.
86 Empson, quoted by James Jensen, “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Modern Language Quarterly, 27.3 (1966): 257–8.
87 John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 280.