Richards is not only a pre-eminent Coleridgean but is himself, in many important senses, the Coleridge of our time. Like Coleridge, he has taught us that there can be no criticism without reconsidering fundamental conceptions; that we must watch our minds as well as use them, attending especially to what we are doing when we use words like "word," "meaning," "knowledge," "truth," "belief" etc. Like Coleridge, he sees poetry as bringing the whole soul of man into activity, at the same time imposing upon it a more than usual order; and like him, he teaches that to experience poetry fully is to enjoy the bliss of "the rectified mind and the freed heart." Unlike Coleridge, he does not subordinate his critical and psychological insights to an over-riding metaphysical and religious programme; but in his impassioned defence of life-values in a world gone cold and inanimate he has more than a little of the prophetic character too. (p. 227)

Richards not only founded modern literary criticism, but supplied it with a vocabulary which has become accepted currency for so long that its origin is often forgotten. Who but he coined phrases like "stock responses," "pseudo-statements," "disguised imperatives," "storehouse of recorded values," "private poem," "bogus entities," "scientific versus emotive language," "objectless belief," "valuable experience" and many more? It is in itself a mark of genius to be capable of putting such memorable and clinching phrases into circulation; and these are in the same class as Coleridge's own "medicated atmosphere," "suspension of disbelief," "balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities," etc. But such phrases are only effective and influential when, as with Coleridge and Richards, they are condensations of a total philosophy of the arts—or, as we may say, of a coherent world-view. And this is what both these great men achieved: they altered the whole climate of thinking about what the arts are for, how they work, and why they are important.

Here I can speak from personal experience, for I was one of the lucky few who attended Richards' first course of lectures in Cambridge nearly fifty years ago—those which went to form his epoch-making Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. Never shall we forget the impression they made upon us then. Many of us were just back from the 1914–18 war, and we were unsatisfied with the woolly generalities and the vague mysticism of the accepted schools of criticism (Gosse, Symons, Saintsbury and the like). The English Tripos had only just been founded, and we wanted to feel that we were not merely going to tread the hackneyed roads leading from Aristotle to Croce, but were in at the start of an exciting new enterprise and about to break new ground. This was exactly the feeling that Ivor gave us. Here was a "subtle-souled psychologist," who, like Coleridge, was bringing scientific skills and insights to bear upon the study of literature. Here was a teacher who, before turning to literary criticism, had actually done some fundamental thinking, and grappled—as no other critic since Coleridge had done—with ultimate and basic problems: with the relations between Things, Thoughts and Words, and the Meaning of Meaning. No doubt it was at first his training in psychology which gave the new and exploratory flavour to all he said; he taught us that critical remarks were really a branch of psychological remarks, and he showed us that "a poem" was a mental event, an experience of extreme complexity, taking place within the reader. His explanations, often illustrated by blackboard diagrams, of what goes on in the mind in response to the black marks on white paper, and delivered with matchless urbanity and wit as well as a sense of discovery, came to us like a revelation. New kinds of knowledge poured in upon us in every lecture, and Richards gave us then, as often since, the sense that a dawn was breaking in which it would be bliss to be alive: a new day in which knowledge of our own minds would give us enhanced control over ourselves and our destinies; and in which poetry, as the storehouse of recorded values, would be seen as the stronghold of the spirit of man in its struggle for the good life in the face of scientific aggression.

For this was the extraordinary thing about Richards (perhaps the heart of his mystery), that though a scientist by training and habit he was always a poet by nature and temperament; he combined "judgment ever awake and steady self-possession" with "enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement." He possessed, what he himself says is indispensable for anyone trying to explain "the high place of poetry in human affairs," "both a passionate knowledge of poetry and a capacity for dispassionate psychological analysis." (Science and Poetry, 1926, p. 9; and Poetries and Sciences, 1970, p. 22) What he says of the poet is true of the critic as he conceives him, that no study of poets is of use to him "which is not an impassioned study." And he replaces Milton's description of poetry as "simple, sensuous and passionate" with another trinity of terms ("passionate" being common to both): only genuine poetry, he says, will produce in a good reader "a response which is as passionate, noble and serene as the experience of the poet."

It was exciting to be told, by one who knew the workings of the mind, that the experience called "a poem"—or any artifact—was not different in kind from any other tract of experience; that it was, indeed "life" again, but better ordered and more unified. A crowded hour of glorious life, in which all our inward conflicts were resolved and all impulses freed and integrated, would feel like—would be—the experience called "poetry." When not experiencing good poetry and when our minds are not otherwise fixed, our thoughts usually consist of "bad private poetry." The great benefit of all this lay in the wiping-out of the old artificial distinctions between Poetry and Life, Art and Morality. To those of us who were sick of the "Art for Art's Sake" doctrines then still in vogue, and all the affectations of the "phantom aesthetic state," this teaching came as a relief and a reassurance. It did not mean, of course, that poetry was again to be valued for any didactic content or avowed moral "purpose." It did mean that the effects of poetry upon the conscious and unconscious mind, and thus ultimately upon action, were of the first importance; and conversely, that "good" states of mind were akin to poetry—or one might say, were themselves lived poetry.

Richards, then, taught us vastly more than we had ever known before about what actually happens when we read a poem. He also did first-rate service—to the cause of education as well as to individuals—in his subtle analyses (in Practical Criticism and Interpretation in Teaching) of the numerous wrong ways in which poetry can be read. In all this the scientist in him was uppermost. Indeed, in his earlier work he was careful to declare himself a "materialist" or neo-Benthamite. In Principles, he propounds a Theory of Value which is meant to be "purely psychological"—i.e. to be expressed purely in quantitative terms (in "amounts" of satisfaction) without the surreptitious introduction of "ethical" concepts or judgments. It is an interesting detective exercise to try and spot just where—if at all, as I suspect happens in this argument—ethical notions ("importance") are in fact smuggled in. Again, in Coleridge on Imagination, he claims to write as a "materialist," separating Coleridge's psychology from his theology, and using his metaphysics as "machinery" only, although "Coleridge himself so often took it to be much more." (pp. 232-34)

I wonder why I could never take all [Richards'] professed Benthamism and nominalism quite au pied de la lettre? Perhaps because it reminded me of the early Coleridge declaring himself a "compleat Necessitarian" and a believer in "the corporeality of thought—namely, that it is motion." Yet we know that soon after this Coleridge said "I love Plato—his dear gorgeous Nonsense!"; and both Coleridge and Richards in their later work showed how very much Plato meant to them. The minds of both men were minds in continual growth, continual movement towards self-knowledge and self-realisation; and in their forward progress they delighted to try out one system after another to see where it might lead. Just as Coleridge proved greater than his early Hartleianism and Priestleyism, so Richards has proved greater than his early Benthamism and materialism. He always gave the impression of thinking that religion was a thing of the past: useful in former times of course, and still to be spoken of with respect, but now impossible. However, he has always wanted its vital functions to be performed and perpetuated by some other agency. The chaos of human impulses must somehow be ordered and harmonised, and it was for poetry to supply the place formerly occupied by religion. Whether or no this is a conceivable policy for the actual conduct of human affairs (I think not), there still clings, to the image one has of Richards, the quality of religious leader, prophet or guru. (pp. 234-35)