[In 1926] it was commonly understood that science was increasingly in possession of fact and truth. In Science and Poetry [1926] science gets a better press than poetry for that reason: science makes statements, poetry makes pseudo-statements. In later years, and in essays gathered now in Complementarities, Richards tried to take the harm out of this distinction. What he meant, and what his readers refused to understand, apparently, was that pseudo-statements are statements which, whether true or false, gain in the poem by being neither: they are free statements, mobile, suggestive, and they are such that the question of their truth, in that particular context, does not arise. In science, statements are made for the sake of their reference, so they are either true or false, the question of truth cannot be evaded. In poetry, language is used "for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the reference it occasions".

Richards now maintains that the distinction between statements and pseudo-statements is neutral, disinterested, and not at all invidious: it was wrongly taken to mean that science was true and that poetry was gorgeous nonsense. It might have been more prudent if he had associated the statements of science with logic and those of poetry with rhetoric, but I don't suppose that version would have deflected the wrath of his opponents. In The Meaning of Meaning [1923] poets are urged to abandon "the obsession of knowledge and symbolic truth". The real offence is there, rather than in later books by Richards: it is in The Meaning of Meaning that knowledge is handed over to the scientists and poets are told to content themselves with "evocative language".

The arguments of The Meaning of Meaning strike me as premature, a function of possibility rather than of conviction: their style protests too much. The truculence of the book probably accounts for the combative style of Richards's later essays in demolition, especially where the victim is Montgomery Belgion, Max Eastman, Herbert Read, or Middleton Murry. Richards's normal procedure was to question the precise sense in which crucial words were used, and to imply that the critic under review did not know, except in a vague respect, what he was saying. Some of his driest generalizations arise from this procedure: "In any case this sincerity doctrine—though it wins ready applause from those who are less clear about what they mean than sure that they mean it—will not bear examination." That reference to ready applause is typical of Richards's early style: the writer who receives it is sufficiently adjudged by the noise. It is not merely that Richards enjoyed a bit of rough stuff. The lucidity of his mind was premature, so he had to release himself, over the next few years after The Meaning of Meaning, from qualities which a lesser man would hold as definitive virtues. Richards's intellectual history tells of the process by which he came to distrust his merits; the logical argument, strict conclusion, aggressive style. Coleridge on Imagination (1935) is crucial in that history. By going to school with Coleridge, Richards began to construe the mind as a speculative instrument rather than an engine of war. Promoting the terminology of imagination, he restored a decent balance between poetry and science. In Coleridge on Imagination, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), Interpretation in Teaching (1938), and How to Read a Page (1942) Richards's mind is concentrated upon these questions: imagination, consciousness in its creative role, the reader's response in interpreting the words on the page, the teacher's work in removing obstacles to understanding. There is a discernible movement from dialectic or logic to rhetoric, from semantics toward the more inclusive act of the mind called poetry. Indeed, it seems likely that Richards was turned in this direction not by the conclusive force of any new argument but by his increasingly vivid response to the diversity of poetic language. Let us not introduce an Act of Uniformity against poets: it is Richards's motto now as well as Coleridge's. So we have poems and poetries rather than poetry. Besides, as Richards remarked when espousing plurals in preference to singulars, "the singular formulation may readily tempt us to suppose we are in possession of generalizations when we may be only toying with tautologies".

So far, the position is sufficiently clear; but I have a problem…. In Richards's pedagogy, elucidation is essential, but interpretation is not deemed to be in any sense a creative act, its virtues are limited to the discovery of the message. The relation between the reader's mind and the text is not represented as, at least, potentially, dynamic or productive. Mind as speculative instrument does not, in Richards's practice, enter into, contribute to, or belong with the investigation, though indeed it confines the scope of the investigation. To be specific: Richards's reader confines his mind to the elucidation of the poem, but it holds itself aloof from the active, productive engagement with the poem which we find in, say, Kenneth Burke's analysis of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"…. [Surely] it is odd that Richards chooses "our concepts" as "the most important of our [speculative] instruments". The ability to handle concepts is a fundamental skill, but it does not bring a reader of poetry very far. My impression is that in Richards's account of reading the reader's mind is too readily separated from the text: his reading is close, indeed, but locked in the terminology of elucidation.

The case is not altered by arguing that Richards's recourse to the principle of Complementarity encourages the reader to entertain a wide range of viewpoints. The principle is recommended in several later books, including Internal Colloquies, Poetries (1974), Beyond (1974), and the new Complementarities: "a multiple-viewpoint position … [would sponsor] the entertainment of as full and round a variety of views as we can compass, together with as much shrewd clarification of each view as we can undertake". An earlier Richards, shrewd, clear, and combative, would demand to know what precisely is meant by "entertainment" in that sentence. But let that pass: the point is that the shrewd clarification of each view still keeps the reader separate from the object he treats. Subject does not engage with object. This restriction in Richards's account of reading surprises me, because in other contexts his version of knowledge is more dynamic. He has quoted, in at least four books, Coleridge's sentence: "I regard that alone as genuine knowledge which, sooner or later, will reappear as power." Coleridge's passage continues: "Improvement of faculty is the true criterion, the only sure evidence of increased attainment." Genuine knowledge, presumably, becomes at some stage a definitive experience in the knower, and thereafter indistinguishable from himself: the self is enriched and the riches are felt as power. In the poem "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" Yeats refers to

         our secret discipline
         Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.

The two versions are compatible: knowledge becomes an inward experience, not the mere receipt of a message by a mind otherwise passive. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) Richards insists that language "is no mere signalling system", but in practice he often treats it as such a system, and cognition as the mind's reception of signals. Briefly: the poet is allowed to be creative, but not the reader. (p. 705)

In the later pages of Complementarities Richards points beyond the terms of reference for which his work is celebrated. I have suggested that the limitations, as well as the strengths, of his criticism issue from his commitment to the idiom of communication: a network, both liberating and restrictive, of signals, messages, addressers, and addressees. But in his recent books Richards has been pointing beyond communication. Invoking again the beloved principle of Complementarity, Richards says that our diverse ways of taking poetry may release the poet, and presumably the reader, "into larger freedoms". "Instead of having to express himself", Richards continues, "the poet finds himself serving a possibility of the language—as that has been, is, and shall be used by discriminating people." The last part of that sentence may appear to take back some of what the first part gave, but no matter. To serve a possibility of the language is to go far beyond the mere sending of messages from addressee to addressee, it is to enter into communion with the language and with the values which it embodies. This is the poet's troth; and the reader's, too, if Richards is willing to allow him to go likewise beyond communication into communion. (p. 706)