[Mr. Richards] brings into the account of poetry an unusual set of terms; and their principle seems to be that, if they are not quite physical terms, they will not be so very spiritual. I suppose they are orthodox terms in the new psychology. The analysis of a poetic experience given in Science and Poetry reads like the study of a brain. We encounter a surface—the impression of the printed words on the retina—and an agitation which goes deeper and deeper and involves images; then two streams, the bigger one composed of rushing feelings and emotions, the smaller one being the intellectual stream; then a great many "interests" clashing and balancing; and finally the attitudes, or outward-looking adjustments which complete the response to the original stimulus. Some of these terms are physical, some are physiological, and others are barely psychological. The importance of the term intellectual is played down. Mr. Richards partakes of the behavioristic aversion to the concept of thought. He writes that man "is not in any sense primarily an intelligence; he is a system of interests." (p. 149)

Mr. Richards emphasizes the complexity of a poetic experience. It is great, and he is right; his rightness is a reproach against many highly connected critics who have thought poetry was simple, and have been prepared to recite very promptly and in a few words what they define as the "meaning" of a poem. (It turns out to be only the moral meaning, or other single meaning. Mr. Richards has a valuable doctrine about the meaning of poetry which amounts to a Doctrine of Multiple Meanings.) But what is this complexity like? He is not the man to let it reside in the object experienced, he has to have the complexity in the head of the subject experiencing; that is, it is not constitutional to nature but to the mind. This is arbitrary and unnatural; it is a psychologism. It is difficult not to wonder whether he finds it all there, or puts some of it there; plants it, as they say of gentlemen with faked gold mines to sell. He starts out to show how elaborate is the experience of reading Wordsworth's "Sonnet on Westminster Bridge"; but after a good start he discovers that he is reciting not at all the detail of the reader's mind but the detail of the poem; and gives up that project and resorts to an impressive metaphor about the wonderful organization of the "interests" in the mind…. (p. 150)

Mr. Richards has a trickly explanation somewhere of the business of metaphor. It brings in a fresh object when there is not enough to the original object, feeding the interests when they are not getting their sustenance out of the given straightforward account. I wonder if that is not the purpose of Mr. Richards' own metaphor here. He cannot identify, at least he has not yet identified, as many as several of the little magnetic needles that go through such agitations and finally come to rest. They are probably not there. If in one line of [a] sonnet … Wordsworth conveys five separate objects for the mind to feed upon, does it follow that there are five separate little interests clamoring there …? I suspect that Mr. Richards' zeal on behalf of the little interests contains some pious fraud. His interests are going to very tiny, very many, and very private, and the fact is that Mr. Richards will never know they are there until a poet arrives with little details that seem pleasant, and therefore, he suppose, must be tickling some corresponding little entities inside us.

Mr. Richards will have to reduce his idea of the number of organic interests, and then name a few of them independently to show his good faith. They will be quite general and classifiable interests, and each will have an immense flexibility, enough to function over a very wide range of particulars. But he might as well refer the particularity to external nature.

What is the value of a poetic experience to Mr. Richards? He has many statements about that. Sometimes he finds a social value, being a sociologist as well as a psychologist. It is the usual one. We are all aware that poetry has charms to soothe the savage breast. The poets, says Mr. Richards, offer us their charming myths and create a Nature that is not the same as the soulless one given by the physical sciences…. [He hopes that if] the races can be persuaded by myths into programs and actions, then they should have nothing but good myths that will safely bring them to World Peace. I do not know of any objection to this. But the harder and more important question is about the value of poetry to the mind that entertains it; the intrinsic aesthetic value, not the extrinsic or utilitarian value.

It is certainly this question which Mr. Richards prefers to discuss. But he is defeated, as I think, by his characteristic rejection of the cognitive element of the poetic experience. The cognitions offered in poetry are constantly scorned, now on the ground that they are false, again on the ground that they are of no importance. He conceives that poetry, without having recourse to any knowledge, can somehow serve the emotions, or interests, or attitudes. It makes the magnetic needles oscillate, and we suppose that the oscillation makes them happy. But he emphasizes very strongly the conclusion of the experience, which is balance, poise, and peace. As if to escape from holding the experience as too cheap, he proposes that it is a gigantic feat of ordering and organizing the system of clashing interests, setting a valuable example for the human economy to follow when it has real business to pursue. But he makes no effort to show how a poem can perform this ordering. It is inevitable in his account that the poem should simply agitate the interests, and that the interests should then fight it out and order themselves automatically by the law of the survival of the strongest. (pp. 151-54)

The theory of poetry as agitation gives us a muscular or gymnastic view of poetry: the poem resembles a gymnasium with plenty of dumb-bells and parallel bars for all the member interests; and what the member interests obtain from it is pure or abstract exercise, which does not pretend to have any relation to affairs. Now emphasize the gratifications and the pleasures they receive from it, and we obtain a hedonistic view. But think how imaginary and unreal are the objects that engage them, and we come to a view of poetry as a form of self-abuse. Then talk about the inalienable right of the little interests to "function" just as freely as the big public ones, and it becomes a doctrine of expressionism. Mr. Richards does not sponsor these various views, but he is not far off; they are proper corollaries to his view.

I cannot see how the interests can function if they are not interested, and I do not believe they can be interested in something which they persuade the imagination to invent for them ad hoc, or for the express purpose of interesting them. The psychic "healer" puts his disordered patient on a chaise longue, induces relaxation, and then repeats a lot of words until some one word makes the patient jump, because it has a reference to his special or secret interest; but the rigmarole of the healer does not constitute a poem. Mr. Richards has an almost infinite number of little interests to satisfy; his problem is a good deal harder. But the one thing they would have in common is that they all are, must be, interests in external reality. Inter-esse means to be environed, and interest means sensitiveness to environment. To be interested is to try to obtain a cognition, to do what Mr. Richards wickedly denies to poetic experience and grants exclusively to science: to seek the truth. I think the biologist would justify only this conception of the function of our interests.

The imagination supplies the form of knowledge for poetry. I should hardly define imagination as Mr. Richards does, hardly even as Coleridge is represented in Mr. Richards' latest book as having done. I should say that imagination is an organ of knowledge whose technique is images. It presents to the reflective mind the particularity of nature; whereas there is quite another organ, working by a technique of universals, which gives us science. The image presented by the imagination ordinarily means to be true. The poet ordinarily is sincere and means his images to be true, and I do not think that readers of my acquaintance will put up with a poet's imagery long if it is not true. It is probably true in the commonest sense of true: verifiable; based on observation.

Mr. Richards has not stood still. His progress as an aesthetician consists in his reluctant and gradual adoption of the view that cognition is the essential element in a poetic experience. (Poetry is a form of knowledge.) He is increasingly concerned over the fact that the poet makes assertions; but unfortunately they seem to be only mythical: "pseudo-statements" which science has to reject. He comforts himself somewhere with the remark that the "greatest poets" will be found not to make many assertions. He evidently considers that when they offer only images they are not making assertions. But their images are perceptions, and perceptions are assertions; perceptions are as true and as false as propositions. Mr. Richards' readers will not suggest that he read the stock philosophers, for he has read them all, but that he ought to read them more humbly. (pp. 154-57)

Poets make plenty of assertions; if the predication is not overt, so that grammar can recognize it, it is implicit…. But these assertions … may be "mythical" ones, and what will be their status as cognition? They are supposed not to appear in science. Are we to believe them, and in what sense? It is one of the hardest problems in the theory of poetry. And no modern writer has wrestled with it more manfully and more continuously than has Mr. Richards.

We cannot believe these assertions at all, Mr. Richards says; but we can ignore them and make use of the accompanying details (or images) to feed the interests; or we can "suspend" our disbeliefs, forget them, and enjoy what is offered us. He feels that poetry can now be saved to the world only by a new and cunning technique of suspended disbelief. He does not venture to give much instruction in it, though he concedes that it will be a difficult technique for the public to acquire. It will; the public is given to taking its poetry more seriously than Mr. Richards does; in fact, the public expects not only the statements in the poetry but even the images to be true ones. (pp. 157-58)

Suspended disbelief is the formula of the writer whom I have been representing as the author of certain earlier books. But he is now the author of [Coleridge on Imagination] and voids much of the criticism which I have made of him. The new work is an attempt to recover, defend, and recommend to the modern critics the doctrine of imagination which Coleridge propounded…. [In this book Richards] has adopted what most people will call the idealist philosophy, though he himself is inclined to quibble over the term. His doubts of the truth of the poetic assertions disappear, and poetry becomes for him nearly as strong as science. (p. 163)