Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Bibliographical note
- 1 The Definition of Literature
- 2 On Liberty of Interpreting
- 3 Evaluative Criticism, and Criticism without Evaluation
- 4 The Novel: a Critical Impasse?
- 5 The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson
- 6 On Kidnapped
- 7 On The Wind in the Willows
- 8 The Present Value of Tennyson
- 9 Robert Frost
- 10 Hopkins and Literary Criticism
- 11 T. S. Eliot: a Poet's Notebook
- 12 I. A. Richards
- 13 Yvor Winters: Counter-romantic
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Bibliographical note
- 1 The Definition of Literature
- 2 On Liberty of Interpreting
- 3 Evaluative Criticism, and Criticism without Evaluation
- 4 The Novel: a Critical Impasse?
- 5 The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson
- 6 On Kidnapped
- 7 On The Wind in the Willows
- 8 The Present Value of Tennyson
- 9 Robert Frost
- 10 Hopkins and Literary Criticism
- 11 T. S. Eliot: a Poet's Notebook
- 12 I. A. Richards
- 13 Yvor Winters: Counter-romantic
Summary
Christopher Isherwood has given in Lions and Shadows (1938) a lively description of the first impact of I. A. Richards in Cambridge:
Here, at last, was the prophet we had been waiting for…he was infinitely more than a brilliant new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning-flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World…Poets, ordered Mr. Richards, were to reflect aspects of the World Picture. Poetry wasn't a holy flame, a firebird from the moon; it was a group of interrelated stimuli acting upon the ocular nerves, the semicircular canals, the brain, the solar plexus, the digestive and sexual organs. It did you medically demonstrable good, like a dose of strychnine or salts. We became behaviourists, materialists, atheists. In our conversation we substituted the word ‘emotive’ for the word ‘beautiful’; we learnt to condemn inferior work as a ‘failure in communication’, or more crushing still, as ‘a private poem’. We talked excitedly about ‘the phantom aesthetic state’.
This well suggests the dual attraction of Richards's early writings. On the one hand, he sounded austere, clinical, disinfectant, the man in a white coat. In this respect, his criticism was a counterpart to T. S. Eliot's early verse. Eliot had administered a cold douche after the over-poetical poetry of the Georgians: Richards's dry astringent style counteracted the rhapsodical excesses of critics in a late nineteenth-century tradition, such as A. C. Bradley with his ‘Poetry is a spirit.’
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- The Definition of Literature and Other Essays , pp. 237 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982