Practical Criticism: A Study Of Literary Judgment

by Ivor A. Richards

A landmark of twentieth-century criticism that provided new standards and new techniques for examining literature. "Richards is a master of the psychology of criticism" (Saturday Review). Index.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Poetry, Literature, Writing, Theory

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

British literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards helped to develop Basic English, a constructed language that British linguist Charles Kay Ogden introduced in 1930 and that uses a simplified form of the basic grammar and core vocabulary of English; he also founded the movement of New Criticism, a method of literary evaluation and interpretation that, practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s, emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances of its production.

Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many people who have heard of this book and are roughly familiar with its form - perhaps those who have seen it listed alongside other key works of New Criticism while studying an English degree - will know that it has one very unusual feature that has not really been repeated or matched since, to whit: the Documentation section, which collects the anonymous responses of dozens of nineteen and twenty-year-old Cambridge students who were submitted by I. A. Richards to the cruel and unusual test of having to analyse and evaluate poems without knowing their authorship or provenance. However, it actually has two very unusual features that make it difficult to categorise, except by saying that it really breaks your historical expectations and does a lot of things that the other New Critics don't even approach. This second unusual feature is Richards' turn, in chapters 7 and 8 of Part III, to the works of Confucius. The beauty of this scholarly move is that Richards does not in any way congratulate himself for drawing on the Chinese philosophical tradition, nor does he exoticise Confucius or treat him as an unfamiliarly spiritual thinker. Instead, Richards turns to Confucius as Western scholars usually turn to Kant or Aristotle. He does it with inspiring confidence and comments in detail on the translations of his works and on their relevance to the concept of "sincerity," which Richards wants to develop here as a critical and poetic category. I was not expecting this move at all, and it is one of the most interesting and fruitful outcomes of reading this book.

Richards' empirical approach in Part II, Documentation, is very humbling. One central feature which is often not given as much attention in New Critical works, and perhaps especially not in contemporary literary theory, is the problem of construing the sense of a passage. A surprising number of the 'protocols' - Richards' term for a reader's written response - fail to accurately decipher the literal meaning of the poem. The humbling part is that once you have read the first set of protocols you will - or at least I found this - probably realise that you yourself need to read the poem carefully and reflectively, a few times, and go through the protocol of careful decipherment, in order to follow Richards' comments, which assume that you have grasped the details of the poem (although Richards does not give the reader the authorship of the poems either (they are hidden away in Appendix C to facilitate our going through the same motions as the hapless protocol-writers)). The challenge of reading a poem about which you know nothing and construing it properly is quite marked, and it is not something that I have ever really been asked to do in my university education, and not even high school either, really, and yet it seems valuable and salutary precisely because of how surprisingly difficult it is.

Richards is quite catty at times, which is funny and unexpected, and he makes a fair few gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle jokes at the expense of his readers. However, I think Richards' attitude is best captured by the fact that he seemed to prefer the responses that said nice things about the poems, especially if they incorporated careful attention to detail, and it was surprising to see just how many of the readers really didn't like the poems and didn't hold back in trashing them. Even though Richards reveals later that he personally thought 4 of the 13 poems didn't quite qualify as excellent poetry, while the rest were better (and much more canonical), his comments in Part II all point towards 'generosity of spirit' and 'sympathy' as the most fundamental critical watchwords. This is quite pleasant and affirming to read.

Richards laments the "pathetic distrust of their own power to construe" that led so many of the readers to cringe away from the poems, to substitute their own prejudices and associations for the content (62). In a memorable phrase addressed to teachers and critics, he insists that readers "ought to be given more defensive techniques against the multifold bamboozlements of the world" (74). This sets him up for one of the big, controversial claims of this text, that the training of practical criticism - which begins with close attention to language and proceeds through parsing the different kinds of meaning (Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention) - constitutes the necessary and overdue cultivation of a central human faculty - language-use - that has been heretofore neglected. He writes generally that "surely systematic investigation of the uses of language may be expected to improve our actual daily use of it, at least in the same measure that the study of plant-physiology may improve agriculture or human physiology assist medicine or hygiene" (314). Here Richards has a conception of language as a kind of technology, almost, a general source of value for humanity which is neglected - one might say 'alienated' - "as world communications, through the wireless and otherwise, improve" and thereby expose us to "chaos" against which we blindly defend ourselves by "stereotyping and standardising both our utterances and our interpretations" (319).

This is a somewhat utopian vision of language's central role in generating unspecified human values, and there are a few directions in which it could be taken: in contemporary literary theory Richards is closely associated with the field known as 'cognitive stylistics,' but I think that he can also be recuperated for more politically potent theories, which is something that Joseph North gestures towards in his 2017 work Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Concomitant with his refusal to either exotically elevate or denigrate the philosophy of Confucius, Richards has few kind words to say about Western civilisation in general. In this respect he is perhaps similar to most thinkers of the first quarter of the twentieth century: fascists, liberals, and communists were united in thinking that society was somehow beset by structural problems during and about the first world war. I like to contrast Richards with certain German idealists in this connection: Lukács, for example, articulates the general impression that we have declined from the golden age of the Greek classics, which is why epics are no longer possible and instead we have novels that speak only of our 'transcendental homelessness.' Similar points that couple literary and poetic form to their sociohistorical moment can be found in Hegel and Marx.

In Richards, however, - although we have a similar and somewhat cliched fear that "mechanical inventions, with their social effects, and a too sudden diffusion of indigestible ideas, are disturbing throughout the world the whole order of human mentality, that our minds are, as it were, becoming of an inferior shape" (301) - the historical moment/poetic form determination is uncoupled. Poetry becomes a transhistorical human faculty that must be cultivated and worked upon - it is, perhaps just as creative and unalienated labour is for Marx, one of the ways we humanise ourselves and the material conditions of our existence - in connection with our very ability to order our thoughts and personality. In this sense it poses the same problems to Confucius as it does to Kant, and so even though we might shrink from such an ahistorical category I suggest that we should embrace Richards' equitable and non-stereotypical treatment of all manner of relevant thinkers.

The term 'New Criticism' I think often leads us to hypostatise the authors who come under that rubric: perhaps most frequently we tend to link the Russian Formalists, the English pre-Leavisite critics, and the American South/Yale University critics together through a shared disavowal of 'intention' as a critical concept. This disavowal is definitely characteristic of the American New Critics, but I think I would conclude this review by saying that, in addition to his groundbreaking approach to empirical work and his sophisticated incorporation of Chinese thought, Richards was ahead of his time in yet a third way insofar as he tried to critically rethink and refresh the concept of 'intention.' Specifically, intention seems to be (perhaps as it is for Paul de Man!) a higher-order governing interrelation between the first three types of meaning: whether or not you read sense as in harmony with feeling or at odds with it (in irony, for example) is a function of intention (334-335). Contrary to the criticisms laid out against this concept by, for example, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, intention for Richards is explicitly not reducible to "standards external" to the poem (230), and is instead "the whole state of mind, the mental condition, which in another sense is the poem" (195). Intention is, to put it somewhat cutely, immanent. Out of all of these formalist critics, Richards might be thought of as the most surprising, and thus I strongly recommend this rich and peculiar book.

[Sofia Mancini]

Read like 60 pages of this for my “how we close read” class and it took immense brain effort to understand this so I’m counting it on here SUCK IT

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

hysterically funny and so mean about undergrads, tempered by such an obvious love and respect for poetry, and the reading and study thereof. much, much to think about in my own readership and in any teaching I might do in the future. we literally don't teach kids how to read critically it's not their fault!

[Ada Bertelsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: este libro de, supongo, crítica y teoría de la recepción de poesía es una frikada del copón, pero es que me gustan estas cosas (¡por mucho que yo me niegue a ser profesora! Y es que con esta sola vida de por medio, me sobra con enseñarme a mí misma). Relata un experimento realizado entre alumnos de la universidad de Cambridge a principios del siglo pasado. Lo que se buscaba es, a través del barrido de un gran número de muestras, poder proponer remedios con conocimiento de causa a problemas en la comprensión de poemas.

En cuanto a los defectos y malentendidos más comunes en la comprensión del texto. Los hay muchos. No es sólo curioso el libro, sino útil; refrendo estos versos de Alexander Pope que cita el propio Richards:

Trust not yourself; but, your defects to know,
Make use of every friend—and every foe.

A los participantes se les adjudicaba unos lotes de poemas, sin autor ni título, y se les daba unos días para leerlos y releerlos y escribir luego, si querían, un comentario. En la primera mitad del libro se reproducen fragmentos de los comentarios, agrupados a menudo según problemas. Practical Criticism a veces es muy divertido, y a menudo me reconozco en él, lo dejaré en eso. La segunda trata de aclarar cuestiones básicas y no tan básicas, a modo de pequeños ensayos. Las observaciones que tiene sobre el análisis del significado me parecen bastante certeras (reconozco al discípulo en el maestro. Empson, de tal palo tal astilla).

Lamentablemente, me parece que el libro sigue muy vigente. No vendría mal encajárselo a las autoridades pertinentes por sus correspondientes orificios educativos.

(PD: Juan Carlos would be proud, menuda microreseña crítica que me he marcado. No abandono la carrera ni en mi tiempo libre, manda cojones.)

[Andy Hickmott · Rating 5 out of 5]

An empirical experiment in literary criticism. Richards' discussion of his students reviews of anonymous poems is side-splittingly funny. But of his more sober conclusions, the most notable and useful is his four-fold deconstruction of 'meaning', viz., in its aspects of sense, feeling, tone and intention. That is:

- What is actually being said by a poem?
- What attitude does the poem show towards its subject?
- What attitude to its reader?
- What is the poet's intention?

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much hierarchy & assumptions about texts being self-contained systems of language.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, humbling, and generally far more generous than any cartoon representation of New Criticism/early 20th century formalism. Richards can be brutally condescending (but quite funny) in his denigrations of student responses in Part II, but this is not to uphold some critical dogma or hierarchy, but to demonstrate how the readers themselves are beholden to stock responses and presuppositions that prevent experience of poetry on its own terms.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the only pieces of literary theory I made it through, in two years of university English. Good solid helpful stuff, not capital-t-Theory.

[Cyprien Saito · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a happy hour of reading.

[Aarif Malek]

Read

[Aliceiswondering · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long read! Remarkable ideas. Narration can be funny at times.

[Haley]

egads

[Alec · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protocols are a curious read, and the whole exercise in close reading is well conceived and does encourage and train the critical mind, but the results as presented seem to be somewhat dubious in openly begging the question. In fact, Richards' "Principles of Literary Criticism" were published 5 years earlier, and in referring to them quite often the author makes it clear that the experiment was never meant to be a real empirical test for his theories, but something of a didactic aid. The discussion of the protocols deteriorates into repetitious driving home of the main considerations about approaching poetry that are only practical in being propped by a nearly arbitrary collection of critical notes by students. More often than not Richards ends on a note of lugubrious solemnity befitting an elderly academic expatiating on the lamentable state of affairs in our schools. He expresses, however, an awful lot of reservations and shows considerable humility in constantly including himself in the bunch of feeble-minded conceits blinded by irrelevant noise they grow into or out of.
That said, the approach to poetry Richards advocates is the only sane one, and the fact that the book reads like a set of commonplace invectives is in itself Richards' own achievement, and he seems to be a chap who'd be the first to acknowledge that (he did live quite a long life after publishing this book and most probably did say a thing or two about it, but I am ignorant of his later activity, which, of course, immediately disqualifies my "review" anyway).
On the other hand, I would not assume for a moment that if such an experiment were to take place in today's academia, the ensuing "protocols" would show any difference in critical faculties of the students.
Given a hammer, one guy starts using nails to build things, another, as has been wisely observed, takes every protrusion for a nail and causes some damage, another drives a nail through his own foot, a bunch of people fight hammering each other to death, and a number of observers condemn the hammer as an instrument of doom.
I.A.Richards introduced some vast improvements in the construction of the hammer and produced a thorough manual with a lot of practical examples and caveats. The manual is tedious but well worth reading. Also, it is full of fine rhetoric and malicious wit seldom possessed by our contemporaries (alas!), who are wont to nail stuff with their iPads. Also, several of the poems used to baffle the pre-literary-theory nincompoops I will happily live with ever after.

[Janet]

Another of the odd books I stumbled on as I decommissioned my mother's library prior to house sale. My grandmother had been an English teacher, I assumed this came from her, can't see my hard-headed mother delving into such matters as close reading of fifteen poems, especially blind readings.

I.A. Richards was teaching literature at Cambridge in the '20s when he asked his students to all make "protocols"--their understandings--of fifteen anonymous poems. He was a powerhouse behind the movement for close reading--dealing with the thing itself, as opposed to biographical and thematic readings of literary works, relying largely on secondary materials.

Practical Criticism is divided into an introduction to the project, the "Documentation," ie. presentation of the fifteen poems followed by all the student comments on them, sorted into 'families' of concerns. Part III, "Analysis," then presents what Richards feels to be the basic issues faced by any close reader of poetry--not only the poetics, but also the things the reader brings to the poem ("this reminds me of...' or "i hate religious poems...")

Right now I'm still in Part II, the student protocols. I love getting to address the poem without knowing who it is--being able to ask, is this sentimental Hallmark card stuff, or is this the real deal? I assume he's mixing it up. One poem I read completely differently (he did tip his hand as to the 'correct' sense of it.) and I'm still not convinced he's right. But learning a lot about reading poetry.
*********
God, that was certainly a slog! now let's see if it pays off.
********
the slog won. Have to leave the rest for some poetry-dense later date.

[BaSila Husnain · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is the
quality
of the
reading
we
give
them that
matters,
not the
correctness with which we
classify
them. For it is
quite possible
to like the
wrong
poems
and dislike
the
right
ones for reasons which are excellent.

It is an idea, and ideas are always interesting but its put forth in a very cumbersome way or may be I am an over ambitious person when it comes to reading , read in two hours.

Summary is the Summary one can keep as a text within a list of teaching learning material. rather a must. Interesting read. Methodology is no doubt Practical but its irksome.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am amused by Richards's students! They are funny, even when misguided. I wish that modern students were as entertaining.

This book is remarkably intuitive, and is correct, I think, in many things with regard to poetry. Richards seems to be a superb reader. I am not sure, however, with regard to his stance on intentionality -- tone is perhaps not the same. Still, there's a lot to digest, especially with respect to emotionality in reading poetry

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the bulk of this very much, the collection of examples of practical criticism, the actual reactions that students in the 1920s had to a selection of poetry Richards presented them with. It made me want to recreate the experiment in the present day and see what happens. His theory -- parts of it interesting, parts merely abstruse, and parts passed already by time. All in all, very worth reading, but not fantastic.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who could think analyzing student papers could be so useful?

[Ash Giri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is more hilarious every time i read it

[Steve Clark]

Paperback