In two books, Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry, Mr. I. A. Richards had advanced the theory that the reading of poetry could and should replace for us the holding of religious and other fundamental beliefs.

He has now published [Practical Criticism], and, apart from a desire to restate his views, his reason for doing so is, I presume, that people had protested that they did not find reading poetry could be for them equivalent to holding fundamental beliefs, for in it he seeks to show to such people that the fault lies not with poetry, but with their way of appreciating or criticizing it.

The burden of the book is that we do not know how to appreciate or criticize poetry. (p. 97)

[Mr. Richards] provides directions for what would be, according to him, the proper appreciation or criticism of poetry. When we read a poem we should, he declares, 'respond' to it, and our 'response' ought to be sincere and independent…. In our dealing with a poem, we are, he insists further …, to disregard 'presuppositions and critical preconceptions': 'our acceptance or rejection of it must be direct'.

The view of appreciation or criticism, which appears to be disclosed by these statements, cannot be very different from the popular view. Most people, to judge from what is implied by the statements of the people one has met—most people believe that they, if not their neighbours, have been gifted from birth with a 'sensibility', which, when they are in contact with a work of art, intuitively decides for them whether the work is 'good' or 'bad'. Most people read a poem, for instance, and then they say whether they like it or dislike it, and that for them is appreciation or criticism. The peculiarity of Mr. Richards is that he is rather more mystical.

We must not be satisfied with 'acquiescent immersion' in poetry, he tells us. Again, he says that we must not, in discerning whether a poem is good or bad, exercise an arbitrary choice, 'not a random gust of desire, or the obstructing capacity of a dead member', but an essential choice, one expressing 'the needs of the being as a whole'…. 'The choice of our whole personality may,' he adds, 'be the only instrument we possess delicate enough to effect the discrimination.'

The first question which these assertions raise is the question of what, if anything, they can mean…. [Mr. Richards considers his students' inability to fathom the meaning of words contained in poems to be a common failing.] One gathers that if we have not been able to find in the reading of poetry a substitute for holding religious or other fundamental beliefs, the trouble is, in his view, that we all have this failing. Accordingly, he volunteers suggestions for increasing the efficiency of the educational methods now used 'in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read'. Let 'an inquiry into language be regarded as a vital branch of research', he says …, and let the fruits of such an inquiry be inculcated upon us in either school or university. Whether or not this would assist people in general to become competent critics of poetry is a question with which I deal later. But, meanwhile, this demand for a clearer understanding of how language is used issues queerly from one who, without supplying elucidation, can speak of, for example, 'The needs of the being as a whole' and of 'Our whole personality'. For, even if language had already been investigated as he desiderates, how could we fathom the meaning of these vague expressions? To us, handicapped by the fact that we are alive in advance of the proposed linguistic inquiry, they are certainly meaningless. Hence his directions for the appreciation or criticism of poetry cannot be followed.

All that is intelligible, in his conception of how that appreciation or criticism should be undertaken, is what, as I say, most people already believe: that to appreciate or criticize a poem is to see whether or not the poem moves one individually.

But men who undoubtedly understand art hold a different view. Joshua Reynolds, for instance, speaking from his own experience, says that good taste must be acquired, and, like all other good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the best models. Moreover—and this bears particularly on [Mr. Richards' experiment of submitting anonymous poems to his students] for criticism—Coleridge, from whom I quote the above words, adds: 'If it be asked, "But what shall I deem"' [the best models]? 'the answer is: presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages. For wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence.'

More recently, Mr. T. S. Eliot has remarked, 'The bad criticism is that which is nothing but an expression of emotion.' In my opinion, one may go further. One may say, that to express the emotion which a poem has directly aroused in us is not to appreciate or criticize that poem at all. (pp. 98-100)