The poems [in The Screens and Other Poems] are about how the soul acts without appearing to, how it influences without seeming to, how it changes and doesn't change, how it makes us who we are without our ever knowing who we are. These are delicate themes, vastly complicated and perhaps impossible of solution, but Richards does very well by them, according his vast knowledge of semantics and the difficult interchanges between words, selves, and things to his subjects in poems which are really more like verse essays: speculative, logical, and refreshingly open-minded in the midst of their intelligent discourse-like approach. They are not by any means the work of a born poet, but rather the productions of a highly intelligent and dedicated bystander who has seen, late in life, that he holds a lifetime of poetic knowledge and information in his hands, and has wished to see what he could do with it on his own. This is understandable and commendable, and the difficult and modest successes of the poems are real successes. Nevertheless, I doubt that I shall give them the second and possibly other readings that they and their notes require, for Dr. Richards's verse is of a kind that I cannot for the life of me like very much. Its overingenuity seems to me just that, and this quality is, I strongly suspect, the main reason for the decline of the audience that Richards deplores in the long essay he appends to the poems. Too many potential readers think that it isn't worth all that trouble. The other few readers, those hardy ones who have their diplomas in the course, spend their time grimacing at each other like gymnasts, saying, "I can get more out of a poem than you can: more meanings, more possibilities of meaning, more extensions, more suggestions, more primary and secondary and tertiary ambiguities than you can." In answer, the poet says, "I can get more in, and some, even, that none of you can come at." I can't shake off the conviction that verse so written—verse like Richards's and Empson's—has done much to drive the audience underground, into the beatnik coffeehouses, with its specialized references, its recondite images from physics and semantics, its metaphors requiring knowledge of photons, tensors, and the malfunctioning of the pancreas in diabetes, all things that notes must be required to "fill the reader in" on and without which the meanings—even one of them—can't be grasped or even guessed at. It seems to me that the way to the audience Richards wants is through a poetry which makes available not endless subtleties to hash over in graduate seminars but poetry written with what Benn calls "primal vision": not many levels of meaning—though one can, from anything written in words, even advertisements, extract tangential connotations ad infinitum—but a single overwhelming one…. I don't want an intelligent, sensitive, and dedicated man like Richards to come down to the level of the man on the street, who is none of these things and couldn't care less. But I am saying that that man, who might conceivably have something to gain from poetry were he to come at it his own way through writers he could comprehend more or less quickly and then, if he wished, read later for their complexities, is likely to be and undoubtedly is repelled by an initial contact with the overrefinement of the intellect in verse, and by poetry written for only the superintelligent, super-sensitive, and nuance-haunted audience which Richards posits, but which has not yet come into being. (pp. 180-82)