Discussion of the new criticism must start with Mr. Richards. The new criticism very nearly began with him. It might be said also that it began with him in the right way, because he attempted to found it on a more comprehensive basis than other critics did. (p. 3)

Richards approaches poetry as a psychologist. A psychologist, I should judge, is a thinker who invades our discussions by telling us that what we think is knowledge testifies less to any objective referent than to our own subjective emotions and desires…. [He] asserts that the cognitions we have in the arts are not autonomous, and more often than not could not stand up under the rigorous standards of science, and that the real values of art are not cognitions at all, but the affective states which art induces and expresses. Richards is a psychologist in taking just this general position. (pp. 11-12)

But there are modes of psychology much "newer" than that, and Richards began by being thoroughly up to date. He has subscribed in passing to behavioristic psychology, which did not offer much application to aesthetics, and to neurological psychology, which seemed to offer more.

His devotion to neurological psychology, following The Meaning of Meaning, was long and faithful…. The vogue of neurological "psychology" is a left-handed tribute to the prestige of the physical and mathematical sciences. Psychologists too, if neurology succeeds, may acquire the rating of regular scientists. This is a scandalous thing to say, and I record my uneasiness in saying it, but then Richards has been an almost uncritical admirer of the sciences and their methods.

Richards did not deceive himself about the fictitiousness of his neurological improvisations. He declared on many occasions, in word or effect, that the real neurological event was "at present hidden from us in the jungles of neurology." But he was loath to abandon the glittering hope that eventually the jungles would be explored and mapped and possessed. His excursions into the jungle might be said to be harmless, since he knew a jungle when he saw one, except that they took too much of his speculative attention. And whenever he abandoned the interpretation of poetic experience in the terms of consciousness for the sake of the imaginary event which he assigned to his neural entities, he was evading critical responsibility. (pp. 12-14)

Richards emphasizes the attitudes, or organized conative impulses, which are the consequences of the cognitive object, much more than the emotions, which testify about its character. He treats them on a minute or almost neural scale, and regards the activity of the units as ultimate human experience. The health of the mind depends on its ability to organize its impulses into attitudes, and then to coördinate their operation so that there may be maximum activity and minimum friction among the units, as in the atomic society imagined by Jeremy Bentham. Poetry is needed as a complement to science because it is prepared to give to the emotions, and through them to the attitudes, their daily work-out; science intends to suppress them in order to map the objective world without distraction. Science is for use in our overt or gross practical enterprises; but poetry ministers directly to the delicate needs of the organism. (p. 22)

My general objection [to this theory], as I know well, must sound very tame to Richards men; perhaps to other psychologists. I do not know anything about … tiny emotive attitudes, nor much about … big ones, nor the way of either in satisfying themselves. Richards has not identified them sufficiently for shy thinkers. I do not know even what the stimulus consists in, which they ask from the poem. (p. 40)

By this theory poetry is a conscious retreat from reality and a morbid indulgence; or at best a heroic but childish affirmation in defiance of the most conscientious revelations of science; the persistence of a last hope, which is not a hope entertained by Richards himself.

But after these objections to Richards I cannot refuse responsibility for telling briefly what hope there is in me.

I should say that old science (with gods, demons, and Ptolemaic spheres) was poetico-science, which was available to poetry, and that modern science is pure science, which is not. (p. 41)

It is as true today as yesterday that the actual world is not cleanly made like its scientific transcripts; the material components in its structures are indeed concrete and insubordinate; and it is in this respect that poetry makes its representations of the world as an alternative to the docile and virtuous world which science pictures. (pp. 42-3)

[Good] poets are not like the merely romantic ones, repeating what they would like to believe but cannot any longer believe. Rather, they are the poets who consider that the technical structures under which the scientists try to grasp the world cannot be all, since they make no provision for the local detail which goes with actual body. They would try homelier, clumsier, less rigid structures, which could better accommodate themselves to the democratic freedom of the components; and even gods, demons, and spheres again, if it should not prove that these formulations, by reason of specific historical condemnation were strategically "out." Their intention towards scientists would be not to deny the latter's structures but at the same time not to concede that these were valid under the more "realistic" kind of cognition which must be practiced in poetry.

I will take advantage of the condition of the reader's mind at this time and try a "topical" metaphor. A poem is a democratic state, hoping not to be completely ineffective, not to fail ingloriously in the business of a state, by reason of the constitutional scruple through which it restrains itself faithfully from a really imperious degree of organization. It wants its citizens to retain their personalities and enjoy their natural interests. But a scientific discourse is a totalitarian state. Its members are not regarded as citizens, and have not inalienable rights to activities of their own, but are only functions defined according as the state may need them to contribute to its effectiveness.

So much for the responsible poets. The responsible critics would be the thinkers who should consider that the most blinding of all illusions is the habit of regarding scientific discourse as comprehensive of the whole range of cognition.

In 1927 appeared Richards' important book, Practical Criticism. I think presently the historians will be rating this book as one of the documents of major influence upon the thinking of our age. (pp. 43-4)

In this book Richards devotes himself primarily to the "sense" or "thought" of eleven specimen poems. For this purpose he uses "protocols," papers turned in to him voluntarily by members of a large lecture-group at Cambridge University, recording both the authors' "understanding" of the meaning of the poems and also their critical comment…. [The] protocols revealed dismal deficiencies in the power of supposedly trained students to cope with poetry. In criticizing the students' ability to read the meaning of the poetry, Richards reveals himself as an astute reader. He looks much more closely at the objective poem than his theories require him to do. His most incontestable contribution to poetic discussion, in my opinion, is in developing the ideal or exemplary readings, and in provoking such readings from other scholars. Rather qualified in comparison would be the value of his critical discussions; they have been extremely provocative in the rise of a new criticism, but this has been often compromised by what I regard as his errors. (pp. 44-5)

The views [in Practical Criticism] are a little soberer, just as the style of the writing is less epigrammatic, and the quality of the thinking generally more sophisticated and less exciting. Mr. Richards has mellowed, and toned down, with some loss of native tang.

There are now, for Richards, four separate "meanings" which a critic must disentangle in his discussion of the poem: its Sense (or Thought, or meaning in the original sense), its Feelings, its Tone, and its Intention. (pp. 45-6)

Richards always holds—though in later books he will stop reiterating it—that the heart of the aesthetic experience is the affective activity. One of the considerations which seem to me to have had weight in driving him to this dogma is his failure to find any objective correlative for the sense of "beauty." (p. 51)

The affections are involved by a poem, but the important thing for theory to see is that they attach spontaneously to the items of context. And since they attach spontaneously, they scarcely need to enter into critical discussion. We need only to say that the poem develops its local particularities while it progresses towards its functional completion.

The other characters of a poem that Richards recommends for critical study are Tone and Intention. It is valuable to have our attention called to them. But I think his analysis is not quite decisive. (p. 58)

Connection is noted between tone and style, between tone and manners, and between tone and the person addressed. I think all these connections are realized more explicitly under another term to which Richards comes close at several points: Dramatic Situation. (p. 61)

As to the fourth character of poetry, Intention, I confess that I do not always feel sure I understand precisely what Richards has in mind. (p. 63)

I conclude that Richards means Intention as equivalent to the poet's logical thesis, or argument; the structural principle proper. It requires the critic's study especially in those poems which do not expressly state their arguments, and whose paraphrase is therefore especially a matter of our own responsible composition. (p. 64)

Richards has several favorite topics which interest him because he is a suggestible and ingenious reader of poetry; they do not necessarily have any relation to his psychological preconception about the essential values of poetry. They are important because they are about uses habitual to poetry and not to prose, and bear powerfully upon the distinction between poetry and prose as feats of structure that are different in kind; at any rate that is why they are of particular interest to me. I wish to look in conclusion at three of these topics, Metaphor, Tragedy, and Irony; and then to pass finally to a topic for which he is responsible though he is not the one who has treated it the most extensively, and which is the most interesting, novel, and difficult at all, namely, Ambiguity. (p. 65)

[It is in The Philosophy of Rhetoric] that Richards gives the fullest account of metaphor. There he seems no longer trying by constant reiteration to enforce his subjectivist aesthetic upon us, and his discussion of metaphor lapses into the language of ordinary usage: it is a discussion of the logic of metaphor.

Now as much as ever he views metaphor as a device for bringing in new and, I think, surely, irrelevant content. He makes what is in effect a very valuable testimony that few apologists for poetry have cared to make. And his analysis results in a pair of terms that already, within four years, have gone into the language of criticism; for now we meet them frequently in print. He distinguishes the tenor from the vehicle, the tenor being the original context, the given discourse, and the vehicle being the importation or foreign content. I do not quite follow him as to the importance of keeping metaphor for the whole resultant meaning, the tenor-as-modified-by-vehicle thing; to keep a word for it is not to arrange more unity for it than there would be otherwise. Richards likes to speculate upon the "interaction" of tenor and vehicle, but I find myself asking whether the dizzy logical structures that result for Mr. Richards really exist. (pp. 67-8)

[Another] topic which Richards has put before the critics in a new light is Tragedy. For his argument I have to go back to the Principles; that is because his novel interpretation of tragedy looks like the consequence of his old theory of equilibrated impulses, which occupied him then, as the ultimate reduction of poetic experience by analysis. He conceived the total value of the experience as measured by the total displacement (and re-assemblage) of impulses. A profound poetic experience would probably involve both many impulses and great ones; and might reach down and involve some which were carefully insulated from everyday expression as being dangerous, or forbidden. The name of this experience must be tragedy; for tragedy is everywhere conceded to be profound, and to involve great conflicts, and to give vent to some impulses (or emotions) that ordinarily do not participate in literary experience. (pp. 85-6)

Associated with tragedy, as producing morally unsatisfactory or mixed effects … is Irony, along with some other forms of wit. On this topic the influence of Richards has been enormous. The most conspicuous example would be Mr. Cleanth Brooks's much discussed and able book, Modern Poetry and the Tradition. (p. 94)

Tragedy suggests Irony, and Irony leads easily to Ambiguity. If Mr. Richards has not offered an extensive treatment of Ambiguity it is because he has got Mr. William Empson, at Cambridge, to offer one. A brilliant pupil is presumptive evidence of the brilliant teacher, and Richards' fame would be secure if he had done nothing but inspire Empson. (p. 101)

Writings as acute and at the same time as patient and consecutive as [Empson's] have not existed in English criticism, I think, before Richards and Empson. They become frequent now; Richards and Empson have spread quickly. That is a principal reason why I think it is time to identify a powerful intellectual movement that deserves to be called a new criticism. (p. 111)

John Crowe Ransom, "I. A. Richards: The Psychological Critic," in his The New Criticism (copyright 1941 by New Directions Publishing Corporation; reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation), New Directions, 1941, pp. 3-131.