16
PARTISAN REVIEW
eloquence with which the protocol writers pursue lines of argument
wholly irrelevant to any kind of fair-minded criticism. The main
disability of Richards's readers is that they come
to
a poem with fixed
notions of what a poem ought to be, instead of attending to what is
actually there. Richards is very amusing on this tendency of his readers
'to
write substitute poems out of their own experience. which displace
the poem on the page. Richards demonstrates how "critical preconcep–
tions" and "technical presuppositions" can blind readers to the whole
point of a work, especially if it is original in form and intention. "The
blunder in all cases," says Richards, "is the attempt
to
assign marks
independently
to
details....
It
is the blunder of attempting to say how
the poet shall work without regard for what he is doing. "
This emphasis on internal form and on the totality of the individ–
ual work was Richards's chief legacy to the New Critics. Richards has a
great feeling for how poems are put together. His notion, developed in
other books, of poetic statement as "pseudo-statement," emotive and
provisional in character rather than cognitive and discursive, provided
later critics with a rationale for objectifying individual works and
isolating them from larger cultural contexts. Yet Richards himself, like
the other great practical critic who emerged from the Cambridge
English school in the 1920s, F.R. Leavis, almost never explicates.
Richards 's work, for all the uses to which it has been put, offers a good
deal which undercuts formalism and anticipates later developments,
including structuralism. With his interest in psychology, linguistics,
semantics, Basic English, literary theory, and oriental thought. Rich–
ards is very much the nineteenth century professor of Things-in–
General. Every page in
Practical Criticism
that tells us that works have
a unity of form also tells us that they have a diversity of meaning, that
people will read them in different ways, in different moods, using
different codes and assumptions.
This is especially true when they receive works without the
provenance and cultural authority of the individual author. Richards 's
experiment in anonymous reading foreshadows the structuralist inter–
est in a science of literature, as well as the dream of a literature without
authors, cut loose from the mystifying bourgeois idealization of the
individual artist, bathed in the semiological glow of a staggering
variety of semantic codes and potential meanings. Though New
Critical exegetes like Empson and Cleanth Brooks took from Richards
a sense of the inherent ambiguity of all texts, they saw these contradic–
tions as features of the object rather than aspects of its 'subjective
assimilation. Richards anticipates the recent interest in literature from
