That I. A. Richards was the progenitor of the New Criticism is now fairly well established; for the doubters [Complementaries: Uncollected Essays] will make it clear that as early as 1919, Richards thought of emotion as entering a work of art through a vehicle, a term that is now part of the critical vocabulary. These essays are important for another reason: they reveal an awesomely rational mind that is not afraid of schemata, equations or distinctions (art versus science, verifiable belief versus imaginative assent, the suggestion of poetry versus the coercion of prose). It is a mind much like Aristotle's, which also reveled in classifications and divisions … and as a result accomplished the primary task of criticism: elucidation.

The essays also include examples of practical criticism. When Richards explicates a text, he has few rivals. Serenely, he blots up all the ink that has been spilled over "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by reminding us that the urn was a burial urn and thus the poem is concerned with death and immortality. Hence the final verses, so often quoted and misinterpreted, depict Beauty and Truth as the end result of life, the culmination of Plato's ladder of ascent where Love and Knowledge become one. In a few paragraphs he solves the problem of belief in Dostoevsky by arguing that Dostoevsky had the feelings of religion without the corresponding beliefs, a tension that also recurs among his characters….

Richards's critical ideas,… even in their inchoate form, bear the hallmark of genius.