I. A. Richards as a Critic

I.A. Richards as a Critic

Critic:

                The word critic comes from Greek. A critic is a professional who communicates their opinions and assessments of various forms of creative work such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture and food. Usually the word is applied to person who are publicly accepted and to a significant degree followed because of the quality of their assessments or their reputation.

                Critics are themselves subject to competing critics since critical judgements always enitial subjectivity. An established critic can play a powerful role as a public arbiter of taste or opinion.

I.A. Richards:

                “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”

                -Mark Twain

                Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the critic of English literature. He was born on 26^th February, 1893. He was an influential English critic and rhetorician. His love of English was natured by the scholar “Cabby” Spence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Richards began his career without formal training in literature at all; he studied philosophy at Cambridge University. Richards’s earliest teaching appointments were in the equivalent of what might be called “adjust” faculty “positions”; Magdalene College at Cambridge would not pay a salary to Richards to teach the new and untested field of English literature. Instead, Richards collected tuition directly from the students as they entered classroom each week.

                “The meaning of Meaning”, the book by Richards of literary Criticism, practical criticism and the philosophy of Rhetoric all proved to be founding influence for the New Criticism. The concept of “practical criticism” led in time to the practice of close reading. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English. In 1926, Richards married Dorothy Pilley Richards. They met on a climbing holidays in Wales. Richards life and influence can be directed into periods, which correspond roughly to his intellectual interests. In many of these achievements Richards found a collaborator in C.K. Ogden.

                Richards maps out the principles of aesthetic reception which lay at the Foundations of Aesthetic. Additionally, the structures of the work prefigure his work on multiple definitions in Coleridge on Imagination in Basic Ruled of Reason and Mencius on the mind.

                Ivor Armstrong Richards was the pioneer in the domain of New Criticism. He had done many major works during his career. They are like:

1.       The Meaning of Meaning (1923)

2.       The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)

3.       The Practical Criticism (1929)

4.       Science and Poetry (1926)

5.       Coleridge on Imagination (1935)

6.       Speculative Instruments (1955)

        Richards is often labelled as father of the New Criticism, largely because of the influence of his first two books of critical theory, the principle of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. As a matter of fact both T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards are pioneers in the field of New Criticism, though they differ sharply from each other in certain important respects. Richards has influenced a number of critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I.A. Richards is the first great critic since Coleridge who has formulated a systematic and complete theory of poetry and his views are highly original and illuminating.”

        Richards is a man of wide learning. He is widely read not only in literature, but also in philosophy, psychology, aesthetic, the fine arts and the broad principles of the various sciences. He has used all this stupendous learning for the compounding of an amazing new and original poetics. Principles were a major critic al breakthrough offering thirty five insightful chapters regarding various topics relevant to literary criticism including: form, value, rhythm, coenaesthesia, literary infectiousness, allusiveness, divergent readings and belief. Practical criticism was just as influential as an empirical study of inferior literary response. Richards removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems including one by Longfellow and four by decidedly marginal poets. Then he assigned their interpretations to undergraduate at Cambridge University in order to ascertain the most likely impediments to an adequate response. This approach had a starting impact at the time in demonstrating the depth and variety of misreading to be expected of otherwise intelligent college students so well as the population at large.

        In using this method, Richards did not advance a new hermeneutic. Instead, he was doing something unprecedented in the field of literary studies: he was interrogating the interpretive process itself by analyzing the self-reported interpretive work of students. To that end, his work necessitated a closer interpretation of the literary text in and of itself and provided what seems a historical opening to the work done in English Education and composition as they engage empirical studies connected with this effort were his seminal theories of metaphor, value, tone, stock, response, incipient, actions, pseudo statement and ambiguity, the letter as expounded by William Empson, his former graduate student.

        I.A. Richards is a staunch advocate of a close textual and verbal study and analysis of a work of art. His approach is pragmatic and empirical. There were their adjectives to write the Practical Criticism. The first one was to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture whether as critics, philosophers as teachers, as psychologists or merely as curious persons. The second objective was to provide new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry and why they should like or dislike it. The third objective was to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.

        Richards believed that “a poet writes to communicate, and language is the means of that communication. Language is made of words, and hence a study of words is all important if we are to understand the meaning of work of art. Words carry four kinds of meanings.” Or to be more precise, the total meaning of word depends upon four factors. Those are:

1.       Sense

2.       Feelings

3.       Tone

4.       Intention

By sense is meant something that is communicated by the plain literal meaning of the words. Feeling reflects to emotions, emotional, attitudes, will, desire, pleasure, unpleasure and the rest. When we say something, we have a feeling about it. By tone is meant the writer’s attitude to his reader. The writer chooses his words and arranges them keeping in mind, the kind of readers likely to read his work. There is a relation between the writer and his reader and the tone reflects the awareness of this relation.

                Feeling is only a state of the mind. It does not imply an object. But intention has an object. Intention is the writer’s aim which may be conscious or unconscious. It refers to the effect one tries to produce. This purpose modifies the expression. It controls the emphasis, shapes the arrangement or draws attention to something of importance. According to Richards:

                “Originally language may have been almost pearling emotive; that is to say a means of expressing feelings impersonal attitudes, and a means of bringing about concerted action.”

                Language returns to that primitive condition in poetry. Language of poetry effects feelings. “The statements in poetry are there as a means to the manipulation and expression of feelings and attitudes. Hence we must avoid an intuitive reading and also an over-literal reading of poems.” Words in poetry have an emotive value, and the figurative language used by poets conveys those emotions effectively and forcefully. According to Richards language of poetry is purely emotive in its original primitive state. This language affects feelings. The importance of context was also shown by him. Words also acquire a rich associative value different context. The context in which a word has been used is all important. Words are symbols or signs and they deliver their full meaning only in a particular context. They work in association and within a particular context is a set of entities related in a certain way; these entities have each a character such that other sets of entities occur having the same characters and related by the same relation; and these occur “nearly uniformly”. Meaning is dependent on context. But the context may not always be apparent and easily perceptible. Literary compositions are characterized by rich complexity in which certain links are suppressed for concentration or effective and forceful expression.

Practical Criticism:

                Practical criticism is like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. In practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analysed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on the words on page, rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an “organised Response”. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.

                In the work of Richards most influential student was, William Empson. Practical criticism provided the basis for an entire critical method. In seven types of Ambiguity (1930) Empson developed his undergraduate essays for Richards into a study of the complex and multiple meanings of poems. His work had a profound impact on a critical movement known as the “New Criticism” the exponents of which tended to see poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings. New critics would usually pay relatively little attention to the historical setting of the works which they analysed, treating literature as a sphere of activity of its own. In the work of I.A. Leavis the close analysis of texts became a moral activity in which a critic would bring on a literary text and test its sonority and moral seriousness.

                Practical criticism today is more usually treated as an ancillary skill rather than the foundation of a critical method. It is a part of many examinations in literature at almost all levels, and is used to test students, responsiveness to what they read, as well as their knowledge of verse forms and of the technical language for describing the way poems create their effects.

                Practical Criticism in this form has no necessary connection with, any particular theoretical approach and has shed the psychological theories which affected how people who are trained in it well respond to literature, It might be seen as encouraging readings which concentrate on the form and meaning of particular works, rather than or larger theoretical questions. The process of reading a poem in clinical isolation from historical processes also can mean that literature is treated as a sphere of activity which is separate from economic or social conditions or from the life of its author.

                The classes which follow this introduction are designed to introduce you to some of the methods and vocabulary of practical criticism, and to give some practical advice about how you can more from formal analysis of a poem and of its meaning to full critical readings of it. They are accompanied by a glossary of critical terms, to which you can refer if you want to know what any of the technical terms used in the classes mean.

                Above all, however, the classes are intended to raise questions about how practical criticism can be used. Do poems look different if they are presented in isolation from the circumstances in which they were written or circulated?

Conclusion:

                Richards was approached by the Saturday Review to write a piece for their “What I have learned” series. Richards surprisingly took this opportunity to expound upon his lesser known concept of “feed forward”. According to Richards, feed forward is the concept of anticipating the effect of one’s words by acting as our own critic. It is thought to work in the opposite direction of feedback, though it works essentially towards the same goal; to clarify unclear concept exciting in all forms of communication feed forward acts as a protest that any writer can use to anticipate the impact of their words on their audience. According to Richards, feed forward allows the writer to them engage with their text to make necessary changes to create a better effect. He believes that communications who do not use feed forward will seem dogmatic. Richards wrote more in depth about the idea and importance of feed forward in his book speculative Instruments and has claimed that feed forward was his most important learned concept.

                Richards served as mentor and teacher to other prominent critics, most notably William Empson and F.R. Leavis. He said that “A judicious balance must be struck between literalism and imaginative freedom.”

                “The chemist must not require that the poet writes like a chemist, nor the moralist nor the man of affairs, nor the logician, nor the professors, that he writes as they would. The whole trouble of literalism is that the reader forgets that the aim of the poem comes first, and is the sole justification of its means. We may quarrel, frequently we must with aim of the poem, but we have first to ascertain what it is. We cannot legitimately judge its means by external standards, which may have no relevance to its success in doing what it set out to do.”

                Ivor Armstrong Richards proved a difficult model for the New Critics. He had worked harder on New Criticism, so it was different and benchmark for new critics.