[Poetry] is the conveyance, by the imaginative use of language, of imaginative objects, the compulsion upon the reader by the poet of his own imaginative prehension of the world or of some aspect of or object within it. And it is only with poetry in this sense that criticism is concerned. Now the view of poetry as the expression of imaginative prehension is a sufficiently ordinary one, and is certainly not new. But there are grounds for believing that it is not wholly idle to repeat it. For example, [Mr. I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism] seems to be built up out of disregard for this simple and, one would have thought, obvious truth. So completely does Mr. Richards ignore it that his book is for the most part taken up by an attempt to describe the psychological and physiological conditions which he holds are necessary for the writing of great poetry. Now such an inquiry, could it be accomplished with any considerable degree of scientific precision, would have great interest. But such interest as it might have would be irrelevant to what alone is the concern of the critic, namely, poetry. Such knowledge as might be achieved by such an inquiry would have as much relevance to poetry as an attempt to inquire into the psychological and physiological condition of a scientist would have to what we call science. To know the psychology and physiology of a scientist is of no aid to a critic of his work, though it might have interest for him; it certainly would be unimportant for judgment on the adequacy of the work he is criticizing. And it is equally true that in poetry, which is the conveyance of an imagination of the world, either in whole or part, the details of psychological and physiological description are irrelevant. The primary concern of the critic, which is the only strictly literary interest, is with the degree of adequacy with which the poet has conveyed his imaginative object, and with the means he has adopted for such conveyance. There are indeed a hundred and one other matters connected with poetry, historical and perhaps scientific, with which we may busy ourselves. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that such interests are literary. (pp. 51-2)

[The essence of Mr. Richards' aesthetic as presented in Principles of Literary Criticism] is summed up by what he has to say of Coleridge's remark that the "sense of musical delight is a gift of the imagination". This, he thinks, is one of Coleridge's 'most brilliant feats'; and he goes on to say, "It is in such a resolution of a welter of disconnected impulses into a single ordered response that in all the arts imagination is most shown". The imagination is "most shown in this resolution"; but what the imagination is and how it produces this desirable result we are not told, 'for the reason that here its operation is most intricate and most inaccessible to observation'; and the remaining and bigger part of the chapter, which was intended to be a chapter on the imagination, talks of impulses and their resolutions, but not of the imagination. And this is in accordance with Mr. Richards' comparative lack of interest in the act of awareness as contrasted with its volitional and affective accompaniments (the 'attitude'); 'for a theory of knowledge', he goes on to say, 'is needed only at one point, the point at which we wish to decide whether a poem, for example, is true, or reveals reality, and if so, in what sense; admittedly a very important question. Whereas a theory of feeling, of emotion, of attitudes and desires, of the affective-volitional aspect of mental activity, is required at all points of our analyses'…. Mr. Richards' predominant interest in feelings, emotions, attitudes, is at the expense of recognition of the activity of the imagination. He holds the critic to be primarily concerned with the resultant attitudes. "It is the attitudes invoked which are the all-important part of any experiences". What is emphasized is not our awareness of an object or set of objects, but the emotional-volitional results in us of the action of a "stimulus", which acts together with certain subjective conditions. What is important is not what is present to our minds, but what is wrought in our minds in feeling and tendencies to action. The whole regard of this aesthetic is away from the object to its results; his concern is not with the beholdment of an object but with the trains of results set up by the "stimulus". Hence Mr. Richards' love of poetry may be said to be of the cupboard variety; it is a means to an experience which is valuable for life. And his interest in poetry is therefore but an interest in one particular means by which such "experiences" can be produced; for presumably a "balance and reconciliation of impulses", such as great poetry is said to afford, might conceivably be produced by a harmless drug, in which case poetry and drugs are alike stimuli productive of valuable experiences such as it is the business of the critic apparently to judge. Accordingly, what has happened in Mr. Richards' aesthetic is that poetry has simply fallen out of it, and it has become one stimulus among many which can produce desirable results. The qualifications for a poetry-critic and a drug-critic would be, on Mr. Richards' showing, identical; they both would have to be adepts at experiencing states of mind (though for one the states of mind would be "relevant" to a work of art, and for the other those "relevant" to a drug, but such states could conceivably be identical); they would both have to be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features; and they would both have to be sound judges of value.

Now there is no way in which so impossible a position can be avoided except by giving due recognition to the primacy of the imagination in poetic experience. So long as we fail to do so we necessarily look away from the imaginative object which the poet seeks to make us create, to a number of accompanying effects, emotional and volitional, which, however important, are not the central feature of poetic response. We must, on the contrary, view poetic experience as an awareness of an imaginative object; and the central "experience" is not effects wrought in us, but beholdment by the imagination of an object. It is what is present to our minds which is vital in the experience, and not the emotional-volitional effects. Such effects, of course, there will and must be. But they are attendant upon an act of apprehension which is central. The act of imaginative awareness may indeed be an 'incomprehensible ultimate', but it is a unique 'incomprehensible ultimate' which cannot be reduced to an effect in the nervous system. "To say", says Mr. Richards, "that the mental (neural) event so caused is aware of the black marks [the poem on paper] is to say that it is caused by them"…. It is to be noted that "mental" is here, for convenience, equated with "neural"; 'for convenience' because Mr. Richards, by his use of the brackets, would have us believe that we can represent mental events as 'caused' by physical stimuli in the same way as neural occurrences may be caused by physical stimuli. But in fact this is not possible. The act of awareness has a uniqueness which cannot be summarily dismissed in that fashion. And the whole purpose of Kant's work, which inspired Coleridge, was to insist that this is so, and that the act of awareness is a creative act which may require for its occurrence the presence of certain physical factors, but which cannot be reduced to them. The act of awareness is a unique and creative act, not susceptible of such a convenient reduction to neural events as Mr. Richards would have us believe. Hence the primary situation which we have to bear in mind is not our neural susceptibility to stimuli, but the imaginative synthesis of sensations which are presented to the mind on the occurrence of certain physical and neural processes. Similarly in the arts the vital factor is our imaginative activity in its awareness of an object. In perception and in poetry alike an object is present to the imagination, a presence which, of course, is accompanied by affective-volitional factors, but is nevertheless primary to such factors. In the absence of this recognition Mr. Richards is naturally at a loss to explain Coleridge's statement that a 'sense of more than musical delight' is the gift of the imagination. 'The sense of more than musical delight' Mr. Richards at once interprets as a poise of impulses; but how is it a 'gift of the imagination'? We are not told. Whereas there can be little doubt that Coleridge viewed such effective-volitional effects as incidental ('gifts') to the major fact of the imagination's activity. Mr. Richards' aesthetic concentrates on the gifts. It apparently ignores the giver. No doubt these 'gifts' are valuable, and valuable for life; but the critic, if he concentrates on them to the exclusion of the imaginative object, is simply not fulfilling his function. In the 'impulse', which is the inclusive name for the entire process from stimulus to attitude, nothing is indicated to show the creative act which is present and fundamental to the rest. We hear a great deal about sensation, tied and free imagery, references, emotions, and attitudes; but nothing of the primary activity without which sensation, imagery, and references are abstractions, and emotions and attitudes impossible. It is all Hamlet without the Prince. (pp. 56-9)