I.A. Richards and Practical Criticism.

Ivor Armstrong Richards, was born on Feb 26, 1893, in Sandbach, Cheshire, England and died on Sept 7, 1979, in Cambridge, was the most influential English critic, theoretician, rhetorician, poet, dramatist, speculative philosopher, psychologist, semanticist and a teacher. He played a significant role in the modern literary criticism better known as ‘New Criticism.' He is often referred to as the ‘critical consciousness’ of the modern age. Together with T.S.Eliot, Richards was instrumental in steering Anglo-American criticism along a new path of scientific enquiry and observation.

Richards was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a lecturer in English and moral sciences there from 1922 to 1929. In that period he wrote three of his most influential books: The Meaning of the Meaning (1923), a pioneer work on semantics; and Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929). 

In the Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Richards establishes the nature and value of poetry. According to him, the science that unearths the secrets of literature is psychology. He thought that criticism should emulate the precision of the exact sciences. Aesthetics, psychology and semantics were brought together in this new approach to criticism, Thus ‘New Criticism’ has been developed.

Richards turns criticism into a science. He believes that the making of literature is a scientifically  analyzable activity. To explain the nature of poetry, Richards first examined the working of the human mind. According to Richards, the human mind is a ‘system of impulses’ and therefore he made the distinction between the ‘two uses of language’- the referential and the emotive in his book Principles of Literary Criticism.

In the referential or scientific, the word faithfully recalls the object. In the emotive use, the word evokes emotions. The emotive use of language is used in poetry and other literary works. In the scientific use of language, the references should be correct and the relation of references should be logical. References are conditions for developing attitudes. References may be true or false. But the aim of references is only to support and develop different attitudes in human beings. Aristotle wisely said: “Better a plausible impossibility than an improbable possibility." In the emotive use of language, false (wrong) references are not harmful or dangerous. On the other hand, in the scientific use of language, false (wrong) references are very dangerous. Similarly, in the emotive use of language, any truth or logical arrangement is not necessary. 

Richards denied to poetry any truth of reference and argued that the truth as applied to a work of art could mean only the internal necessity or rightness of the work of art. Artistic truth is a matter of inner coherence. Richards goes on to consider the connotations of the word truth in criticism. In literary criticism, the common use is acceptability or probability. Poetry uses language emotively and connotatively while science uses it referentially and denotatively.

Further, Richard discusses language in the Practical Criticism and analyses the 'Four Kinds of Meaning', sense, tone, feeling and intention.

a) Sense: the state of affairs or the items presented for consideration.

b) Feeling: by feeling he meant the whole range of emotional attitudes, desire, pleasure etc; that the words evoke. Feeling does not enter into some types of discourse like, mathematics for example.

c) Tone: the attitude of the speaker to the audience.

d) Intention: the speaker's conscious or unconscious intention, the effect he is trying to promote.

In Practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analyzed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words on the 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. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions. 

This experiment was the systematic study with no adjunct materials, (such as the time period of poem, author, or any sort of background related to the art of poetry) provided to the Richard’s well prepared students, where they have to entirely depend on their own strategies and resources. Richard asked participants to record their commentaries, known as 'protocols'. Based on the close examination of these responses, Richard came up with the ‘chief difficulties’ which completely unaware readers encounter.

Those difficulties are discussed in detail below:

1) Sense: First is the difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry. A large proportion of average-to-good readers of poetry simply fail to understand it.  They fail to make out its prose sense, its plain, overt meaning. They misapprehend its feeling, its tone, and its intention.

2) Sensuous apprehension: Words have a movement and may have a rhythm even when read silently. Many a reader of poetry cannot naturally perceive this.

3) Imagery: There are difficulties presented by imagery, principally visual imagery, in poetic reading. Images aroused in one mind may not be similar to the ones stirred by the same line of poetry in another, and both may have nothing to do with the images that existed in the poet’s mind. And its an incurable fact that we widely differ in our capability of visualising and this is a troublesome source of critical deviation.

4) Mnemonics: Then comes the persuasive influence of mnemonic irrelevancies i.e, the intrusion of private and personal associations which reader experienced in the past which may have nothing to do with the text at present.

5) Stock responses: These are the critical traps based on privately established judgments. These happen when a poem seems to involve views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader’s mind.

6) Sentimentality: Excessive emotions carried by the reader, which makes reader extraneously on edge of drowning in the pool of sentiments.

7) Inhibition: Closed or hardness of heart are also perils to understanding poetry. When reader doesn’t allows him/herself to feel and capture the essence of the poem, the words on paper presents no value to the reader. Its merely a rhythmic text for the reader.

8) Doctrinal adhesions: The views and beliefs about the world contained in poetry could become a fertile source of confusion and erratic judgment.

9) Technical presuppositions: When something has once been done in a certain fashion we tend to expect similar things to be done in the future in the same fashion, and are disappointed or do not recognise them if they are done differently. This is to judge poetry from outside by technical details. We put means before ends.

10) General critical preconceptions: These results from theories about its nature and value come between the reader and the poem.

Richards concludes that the critical reading of poetry is an arduous discipline. “The lesson of all criticism is that we have nothing to rely upon in making our choices but ourselves.” The lesson of good poetry, when we have understood it, lies in the degree to which we can order ourselves. Through close analysis of poems and by responding to the emotion and meaning in them the students were to achieve what Richards called an ‘organized response.’ From this stems Richard’s ‘psychologism’ which is concerned not with the poem per se but with the responses to it. This study can be generalized for literature also and not just be limited to poetry alone.

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 originally underpinned it. The discipline does, however, have some ground rules which affect how people who are trained in it will respond to literature. It might be seen as encouraging readings which concentrate on the form and meaning of particular works, rather than on 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.

Saussure's linguistic model is dialectical and synthetic, with the two elements of the linguistic sign (signal and signification) being compared to the two sides of a sheet of paper, Ogden and Richards' is tripartite and analytic, with the three elements involved in the language situation (word, thought and thing) being represented as the three points of a triangle. 

These differences are related to differences in how the human mind is conceived: while Saussure sees thought as embedded in language, and while he invests the mind with the power to order and regulate the chaos inherent in language, Ogden and Richards, writing very much in the wake of the new psychology of stimulus–response behaviourism, separate thought from language, and divest the mind of any power to resist ‘the power of words’. Interestingly, though, Ogden and Richards show signs of an early cognitivism, which raises the question of whether contemporary cognitive science is perhaps more indebted to the stimulus–response paradigm than it would care to admit.

It is never what a poem say that matter but what it is. ~ I.A. Richards

References

[1] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New Delhi: Viva Books.

[2] MEG, IGNOU, India Study material.