This brief coda follows the problem of poetic automatism into twentieth-century literary criticism, focusing on I. A. Richards’s monumental study of close reading, Practical Criticism. In introducing the founding practices of New Criticism, Richards demands that we respect the “liberty and autonomy of the poem” by overcoming our own dangerous tendency toward “stock responses.” The development of this New Critical idea of a poem’s—not a poet’s—autonomy is born of the nineteenth century’s innovations in thinking about media. But Richards disentangles the autonomy of the poem from the automatism of the body, rejecting “stock responses” as valid components of poetics. If poetic automatism destabilizes the agency of the poet in favor of the poem, New Criticism steps in again and asserts critical authority over the poem. But it does so by disavowing the slipperiness, the productive instability of our interactions with poetry. The development of close reading—perhaps the critical tradition’s fullest expression of interpretive agency—can be seen to have deep roots in a nineteenth-century poetics of automatism.