[My] purpose is to examine the role of I. A. Richards in calling attention to several important (and related) questions; the fact of disparity in poetry, the kinds of unification possible and desirable, and the positive values of a poetry that makes use of tension as its structural principle.

Richards has exerted during the last fifty years a powerful influence on our understanding of these matters—perhaps the most powerful influence of all. In the pages that follow I shall suggest some parallels between his thinking and that of other men of letters of our time, Yeats and Eliot in particular. The fact that in his stress upon a hard-won unity Richards is flanked by men who come at the same problem from quite different intellectual backgrounds makes evident that the problem is central to our culture. A concern for tensional structure does not spring from a narrow ideology or serve a special literary bias.

The concept of tension is embedded in a nexus of related concepts. Thus, as we shall see, it is impossible to talk about tension without also talking about the limits of metaphor and the possibility of (and perhaps the necessity for) incorporating the unpleasant, the ugly, and the evil into the art work. A discussion of tension must impinge on other matters also: the degree of detachment proper for the artist to adopt and its relation to the degree of his personal involvement; the whole problem of decorum and, with it, the very meaning of artistic unity.

A concern for such issues has established in our time what amounts to a new poetics. If this statement seems extravagant, the reader might look back at past theoretical criticism, particularly that written in England and America in the period from, say, 1830 to 1920. He will find that the usual formulations of poetry made during this period have little or nothing to do with a tensional element. This is not to say that the modern critic cannot discern tensional structures embodied in Victorian poetry. I have elsewhere remarked that some degree of tension is basic to any poetry, but the typical Victorian critics and those critics writing in the first years of our century reveal little awareness of the tensional element.

One may well begin with Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). In a chapter significantly entitled "The Imagination," he describes tragedy as "perhaps the most general, all-accepting, all-ordering experience known," and its special character as a "balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through the force of its exclusions…." But Richards points out that this balanced poise is not peculiar to tragedy; and it can thus become for him the norm for all the most valuable literary experience.

In this description of such valuable literary experience, the terms "inclusion" and "exclusion" prove to be pivotal; for Richards observes that there are two basic ways in which the impulses of the psyche "may be organized; by exclusion and by inclusion, by synthesis and by elimination. Although every coherent state of mind," he concedes, "depends upon both, it is permissible to contrast experiences which win stability and order through narrowing of the response with those which widen it." (pp. 135-37)

This concept was to make its fortune in critical theory, particularly in the 1930's and 1940's, and because it has meant so much to me, I shall make bold to take it out of the special context in which Richards placed it in the Principles (a psychological account of the way in which impulses are aligned within the reader's mind as he responds to a valuable literary work) and relate it more directly to the structure of the work. Richards himself was in effect to do this in 1936 in his Philosophy of Rhetoric. In any case, I do not believe that the nature of his fruitful insight will be seriously distorted in the rendering that follows. In fact, I believe that something may be gained by giving to the basic distinction some of the extensions to which it was from the beginning legitimately entitled and which it has subsequently won for itself.

I would paraphrase Richards thus: there are two basic ways in which a poet may secure unity. The first is by making us see, and accept as legitimate, connections hitherto unsuspected between various elements of our experience. Thus the poet reveals patterns where we had assumed rather haphazard mixtures of experiences. The poet is good at this sort of thing. Indeed, there is reason to believe that his right to be called a poet depends upon just such ability. The poet makes meaningful (that is, unified) what we might otherwise have taken to be meaningless (unrelated, chaotic). Even the humblest poet is able to include as parts of a unified experience elements that ordinarily seem utterly disparate. But the poet—even the poet of greatest range and most compelling imagination—excludes some aspects of experience from the pattern that he is making. He must select. He can't literally put everything into his poem. There are matters of scope and depth. Besides, there probably are real incompatibles, impossible mixtures—elements that refuse to be harmonized, at least within any poem of modest dimensions. Even the most audacious poet does not dismiss all sense of what fits with what. The unity of any conceivable poem is achieved by deciding what to put in and what to leave out—that is, through a reciprocal process of exclusion and inclusion.

Nevertheless, some poems depend much more on one method than the other. Because the obvious way to unify is simply to toss out the difficult item, the method of exclusion can be an easy way out for the careless or lazy or incompetent poet. A poem ruthlessly pruned so as to express only one fairly simple attitude or one specific theme may degenerate into sentimentality.

I call the reader's attention to the fact that I am here pressing an issue that Richards in the Principles elected to treat in a less thorough-going fashion. There he is concerned to make a rather delicate distinction between two kinds of poetry, one of which he regards as more valuable than the other, whereas I am using exclusion and inclusion as the opposite ends of a scale. Most actual poems fall somewhere between the extremes, but poems that lie near to either extreme undergo accordant risks, reveal characteristic virtues, and sometimes characteristic defects. Thus, too much dependence on exclusion will result in a trivial and anemic poem. Such poems do not provide the reader with new insights, i.e. new ways of putting into a pattern what we had usually taken to be unrelated and perhaps even irreconcilable elements. They do not sufficiently exhibit the power of the plastic imagination.

The muses who preside over a poetry heavily dependent on extreme exclusion are the bastard muses whose names are sentimentality, propaganda, and pornography. Under the inspiration of one or another of these, the poet tries to impose on his reader a specific short-term effect. He does so at the expense of emotional maturity, truth, and the fully human dimension. For maturity, truth, and full humanity require some comprehension of the complexities of human experience.

By contrast, poems that achieve their basic unity through the poet's ability to include the heterogeneous and the diverse are mature and tough-minded. They wear well. They can be viewed from various angles, for their solidity does not depend upon tricky lighting and privileged perspectives.

Yet poems founded on inclusion, it must be conceded, have their characteristic failures too. If the poet tries to include too much of the heterogeneous, if he lacks the power of imagination to reconcile the disparities, if he increases tension beyond his power to control it, then the poem simply explodes into incoherence. What happens to his overambitious metaphors will illustrate: the "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together" have been forced by sheer will power to touch momentarily, but because merely yoked by violence and not truly reconciled, they fly apart.

The unification achieved by the imagination perhaps ultimately involves a mystery—or perhaps "unification" is too bold a term. But the difference between a poem that can accommodate disparate elements—however we are to describe the process by which it does it—and a poem that conveniently forgets about or deliberately refuses to acknowledge disparities is crucial. It goes to the heart of the poetic process. We shall, in the pages that follow, be referring to various insights into this process and, not least important, to some further insights by Richards himself.

How did Richards come by his seminal view? Did he make fruitful borrowings and adaptations from earlier writers? His debt to Coleridge is too well known to require comment here except that it ought to be observed that he saw something in Coleridge's celebrated fourteenth chapter of the Biographia that most other readers, including other Coleridge enthusiasts, had not seen. He isolated, we might say, the tensional element.

Some time prior to writing the Principles Richards must have read George Santayana's The Sense of Beauty (1896). In his first book, The Foundations of Aesthetics (written in collaboration with C. K. Ogden and James Wood and published in 1922), there is a perfunctory reference to various definitions of Beauty proposed by Santayana, Croce, Clive Bell, et al., and later in the book occurs a sentence quoted from The Sense of Beauty. There seem to be no further references to Santayana in Richards' work. Yet his chapter entitled "The Imagination" in the Principles … clearly contains echoes of [Santayana]…. (pp. 137-40)

When we compare the positions of Santayana and Richards, the fact that stands out is Richards' reinterpretation of exclusion and inclusion to fit his own purposes, a reinterpretation that emphasizes tension as an essential element in the structure of our most profound literature. Moreover, whatever the value of Santayana's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, there can be no question about the superior "operational validity" of the distinction drawn by Richards between a poetry of exclusion and inclusion. The history of literary criticism after the publication of Richards' seminal books on the subject is sufficient proof. Santayana is a valuable and a still underrated literary critic, but his contributions have a different range of interests and his influence has worked at a different level.

There is another important figure of the latter part of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century whose concern with a poetics of tension bears comparison with that of Richards: William Butler Yeats. Yet it is very unlikely that Richards—particularly the Richards of the Principles—was acquainted with Yeats's critical ideas. In 1924, Richards described Yeats's poetry as "a development out of the main track," and as a "minor poetry in a sense in which Mr Hardy's best work or Mr Eliot's The Waste Land is major poetry." In view of such opinions, there would have been little inducement to look very searchingly at Yeats's literary essays.

Richards tells us that it was not until after 1928, the year in which Yeats's The Tower appeared, that he came to a due appreciation of Yeats's later poetry. The later poetry Richards took very seriously indeed. I am not aware, however, that he has ever shown much interest in Yeats as a critic. Be that as it may, at his best Yeats is a very perceptive critic and, though this may come as a surprise to many, a critic whose mature views are in some very important ways close to those of Eliot, Auden, and Richards himself.

In saying this, I have particularly in mind Yeats's celebrated remark that we make "rhetoric" out of our "quarrel with others" and that it is only out of "the quarrel with ourselves that we make poetry"; and his statement that "no mind can engender till divided into two." Both texts imply that the creation of art is a dialectical process, necessarily involving a tension between the conscious self and the buried self; between the public self that looks out on the world, and its opposite, the mask (which is the secret face of one's daimon); between the self living in the present and "that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb…." But I am thinking also of the position [Yeats] takes as early as 1907 in an essay entitled "Poetry and Tradition," where he tells us that the "nobleness of the arts is in the mingling of contraries," a phrase that locates the element of tension not only within the creative mind of the poet but in the materials out of which he makes his poem. (pp. 143-44)

I have a further reason for indicating at some length parallels between Yeats and Richards: Yeats's critical writings are a testimony to the continuing influence of the most powerful of Richards' acknowledged sources: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have, in later years, become more and more convinced that Yeats's intellectual debt to Coleridge was immense. A careful reading of Yeats's work reveals echoes and parallels far exceeding the number of direct references to Coleridge. (But plenty of such references occur and particularly in "Pages from a Diary in 1930." I have counted over a dozen such references in forty-odd pages.)

Yeats's critical pronouncements point to another influence related to my present purpose. Early in his career Yeats came heavily under the sway of Nietzsche and was especially influenced by The Birth of Tragedy (1872). In September of 1902 he wrote to Lady Gregory: "I have read [Nietzsche] so much that I have made my eyes bad again…. Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots…." Yeats's much marked and annotated copy of The Birth of Tragedy (now in the library of Northwestern University) provides additional evidence of how thoroughly he did read him. Nietzsche's contribution to the aesthetics of tension is well known, and here I need only remind the reader that for Nietzsche, great art manifests itself "in the conquest of opposites," and that the greatest artists are those who are capable of making "harmony ring out of every discord." Nietzsche insisted that the bitter facts of life had to be faced and that the artist's genuine vitality is shown in his willingness to challenge them joyfully. There is a close parallel here with Santayana's art of the sublime in which the hero rises superior to his own misfortunes and through this action achieves "liberation" and "ultimate peace."

Richards nowhere, to my knowledge, mentions Nietzsche, and there is no particular reason why he should have done so. Long before Richards' time, Nietzsche's doctrines had become absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. He had come to be regarded as the prime opponent of the timid bourgeois, of a decadent Christianity, and of academic art; he was the recognized ally of almost any criticism that attacked what was stale, artificial, and pretentious. He had not dethroned Apollo but he had compelled him to share with the dark god, Dionysus, hegemony over the realm of art. The high art of tragedy resulted from a tension between diverse energies.

Eliot's relation to a tensional poetics is perhaps best approached through his comments on the artist's detachment and the impersonality of art. Some of his most interesting comments in this area are to be found in an early essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917). There he told his reader that poetry is "not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality…." (pp. 145-47)

There is a second point to be made: though literally Eliot seems to conceive of art as escapism, his is a very peculiar kind of escapism, for it constitutes a liberation of the self through a creative act. For the suffering is not a blank waste: the artist has the satisfaction of having achieved something positive and enduring from what otherwise would be transient and merely painful. (p. 147)

[Was Richards] influenced by Eliot's account of tensional poetry? I dare say not. Richards tells us that he first met Eliot in Cambridge in 1920. Apparently their close relationship, characterized by Eliot's visits to the Richards household, did not begin until 1926. In any case, Richards has told us that "in those early days" he was not "much concerned with [Eliot's] criticism—no, only with the poetry." I see no reason to question Richards' memory of these years. Such parallels between the early criticism of the two men are more easily seen by hindsight. How many were noticed in the early 1920's? In fact, up to this time, so far as I can see, they have attracted very little comment.

My reason for calling them to the reader's attention here is to make a point that has nothing to do with influences possibly exerted upon one man by the other. My concern throughout this essay has been rather to suggest that Richards, in making us aware of the importance of tension and tensional elements in poetry, was, whether or not he was aware of it, moving in a special current of ideas, and that this fact has much to do with the importance of his achievement. The times were evidently ripe for a new emphasis on these matters, and the proof that they were ripe lies in the fact that several sensitive literary minds, some of a generation earlier than Richards and others of his own, were also moving in that direction. The true originality of a thinker does not rest in his ability simply to concoct something novel, but to discover and make fruitful exploration of something that needs to be understood—some concept that the whole culture is in travail to bring forth. If this is true, it inevitably means that when an important discovery of this sort is made, we are very likely to find analogues—some close, some distant—elsewhere in the period.

One reason why so little notice has been taken of the similarities that exist between Richards' poetry of inclusion and related formulations by people like Santayana, Yeats, and Eliot is the fact that Richards, in his earlier books, was much occupied with stating other aspects of literature which seemed to him equally, or perhaps even more, important. I have particularly in mind the special psychological terminologies in which he described his stipulated synthesis of conflicting impulses.

Now, whatever the merit or lack of merit of such descriptions, they served in fact to disguise some of the other very important contributions that Richards was making. Without going into the various criticisms made of Richards' psychological terminology, I can say that to most of us it did not prove very helpful, for the psychological machinery was, at best, irrelevant to our interests. I mention here my own early experience in reading Richards only because it is representative of what occurred in more mature and acute minds. My experience was frankly one of tantalized bafflement. The psychological machinery not only did not help; it actually got in my way. It was worse than a distraction. On the other hand, when Richards got down to cases—in the Principles as well as in that great casebook on the reading of poetry, Practical Criticism [1929]—I found him immediately rewarding, usually very exciting, and in general a powerful educative force.

I read him hard, in part because I felt that he had to be refuted, and in the process of trying to find the refutation—it was not easy, I quickly discovered—I learned a great deal about poetry and about literary theory. In fact, it dawned on me fairly early that even those concepts of Richards which seemed to my mind most outrageous could yield—often did yield, when tilted just a little, or perhaps it was simply my willingness to alter a mite my own angle of vision—observations and insights that were true and illuminating, and that, in any case, contained matter that I needed to ponder.

A few years later I was more than commonly grateful, therefore, to find in The Philosophy of Rhetoric a presentation free of what had been for me largely a distraction. I found in particular that Richards' revised definition of metaphor was the most useful and illuminating that I had ever read.

In the Principles metaphor is said to be "the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation…." In such an account we seem to be dealing with the problem of literary function at several removes, and as if this description of what metaphor does were not, shall we say, sufficiently offhand—and off the point—a few sentences later metaphor is said to serve as "an excuse by which what is needed [in the poem] may be smuggled in."

There are some special senses in which this business of "smuggling in" needful elements is evidently true, but for a young man in 1929, reading the Principles for the first time, this notion of metaphor simply made poetry more mysterious and oblique than ever.

Curiously enough, the tensional element that is so powerfully put in the key chapters of the Principles is never there clearly related to metaphor, and yet metaphor is itself perhaps the most obvious example of the necessity for tension as well as being the prime imaginative instrument by which the poet reconciles and unifies matters that seem hopelessly at odds.

In pointing out that "metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language" and that thought itself is metaphoric, Richards disposed once and for all of the old notion of metaphor as mere decoration, an inessential ornament attached to the structure of thought after the fact of its creation. Instead, he insists that metaphor is of the very substance of the utterance: "it is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts." In so defining the metaphoric process, he provided not only a proper corrective to the more one-sided traditional descriptions but also to some of his own earlier statements, or, perhaps it would be fairer and more accurate to say, an amplification and consolidation of his earlier views and one that provided a firm linguistic grounding for the concepts of tension developed in the later chapters of the Principles [and in The Philosophy of Rhetoric]. (pp. 149-51)

Cleanth Brooks, "I. A. Richards and the Concept of Tension," in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor, Reuben Brower, Helen Vendler, John Hollander, eds. (copyright © 1973 by Oxford University Press; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.), Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, pp. 135-56.