Richards was that Cambridge professor of criticism who turned literary criticism upside down in the 1930’s.
He inspired the New Criticism and won the admiration of poets such as T.S. Eliot. Trained originally in
psychology, Richards penetrated into a new level of hard-headed thinking to literary criticism, pushing
through the effusive waffling of critics past. Richards’ work dealt mainly with poetry and in short, his
burning question is what makes a poem great.
Richards dismisses all visual imagery from legitimate poetic criticism. The conjuring of mental images is an
uncontrollable process. Ask 10 different people what visual images are evoked by a line and you will get 10
different answers. Such images are more often than not, biographical with respect to the reader.
Furthermore, the ability to visually associate with words varies tremendously from person to person. As
such, it is a useless criteria to judge a poem with visual imagery in a group context.
Indeed, Richards argues that for criticism to be legitimate, it must concern itself with things that can be
experienced in the same way by different people. Talk of things that vary from person to person is useless.
This point is so central that Richards literally defines a poem as a group of words that evokes a particular
experience that does not vary greatly when read by different sensitive readers. Furthermore, the experience
depends crucially on the sequential arrangement of words.
The emphasis on experience may seem to be excessively abstract. However, Richards chooses the high road
of meaning as the starting point of poetry because people would otherwise concentrate on irrelevant concrete
details such as rhythm and rhyme. Concrete technical features like rhythm are fine in a poem but it is hardly
what makes a poem interesting. As interesting thought experiments, Richards takes lines from famous
poems and substitutes them with prosaic and nonsensical lines that bears the same rhythm. As you can
imagine, the substitutes do not sound particularly poetic.
It is the meaning of the words that determine the success of rhyming and rhythm. Richards proselytises
against the schools of literary criticism that hold the form as the paragon of poetry. Without the idea behind
them, the form itself become a meaningless cage, all the more dazzling because they are empty of essence.
There is nothing particular ennobling about the sonnet form, or the iambic pentameter. The haiku is no more
mysterious than the rhyming couplet. Rather, it is what past poets have tried to say within these forms that
have made them great.
Still, this is not to say that poetic devices are unimportant. Otherwise, there would be no difference between
prose and poetry. In his definition of a poem, Richards specifies that in a poem, an invariant experience is
evoked through the use of, amongst other things, the sequential ordering of words. In prose, the sequence of
words is relative unimportant as long as the meaning is conveyed. In poetry, on the other hand, the relation
of words further back in the poem exerts an almost magical influence on later words to create new patterns
of meaning. This rich insight owes much to Richards’ training as a psychologist. Richards’ argues that
readers have an innate psychological tendency to look for patterns in a sequence of words – whether it be
patterns in rhyming, scansion or rhythm. When one is reading prose, this tendency is normally repressed
whereas in poetry, this tendency is exploited. When a line is read, one has a expectation that something
similar will occur. When something similar does follow, aural associations are made and simultaneously,
meaning associations are also made.
Richards argues that poets exploit this psychological tendency to look for patterns in order to reinforce or
create new layers of meaning in a poem. Poetic techniques are used to control the experience of the reader in
the reading of the poem. Long slow syllables will reinforce statements of doom. Sharp, clattering syllables
bolsters descriptions of actions. Other techniques create new meanings through suggestion and association
As readers automatically look for rhyming patterns, when rhymes do occur at the end of a couplet, the words
that rhyme are given new association. Such words, when appropriate, create a new web of meaning over
with the prosaic meaning of the line.
Given the subordination of technique to meaning, Richards argues that the worth of a poem lies first and
foremost in its meaning. One must first ascertain the meaning before judgement can be meted out. Once the
experience has been grasped, then judgement can be made on the worth of the experience itself – the
profundity of the thought, the originality of the thought, or the concreteness of its evocation