Even as Richards inadvertently paved the way for the study of poems as independent structures,… he created, as he meant to, several obstacles which his followers had to overcome in order to earn this position. It is impossible to conceive of the work itself as a self-contained entity when it is relegated to being a shadowy middleman that merely reflects the psychology of the two people who have to do with it, the poet and the reader. And it is reduced precisely to this status when Richards defines it solely in terms of the experiences of its readers and the experience of its author. So long as Richards maintains his concept of the interaction of contexts, so that the reader's life outside the poem is as crucial a factor in his aesthetic experience as is the life he discovers in the poem, he has left us a good distance from a consideration of the poem as a separate world. And if the poem is allowed to be no more than an almost featureless stimulus—which is all it can be if irony is not consistently treated as a characteristic of the poem rather than of the reader and if "a carpet or a pot or … a gesture" can be adequate substitutes for the poem—then any attempt at criticism, organic or otherwise, seems pointless. Certainly many transformations had to be worked in the theory if its useful features were to be applied soundly.

As an aid in these needed transformations, fortunately, the later critics had available a second kind of influence which accompanied that of Richards. It was the sense of absolutistic orthodoxy and traditionalism which, stemming from Hulme through Eliot, allowed them to fashion the alien positivism of Richards into workable objective criticism.

Although it was Richards who made familiar the concept of irony as such, it is implicit also in Eliot's early work in which he asks that poetry be once again the product of those who have a "unity of sensibility."… Eliot seems clearly to be calling for serious subjects to be understated, and "wittily" understated, in order for the fullest degree of their true seriousness to be exploited…. Now of course [the] idea of poetry as being difficult, as requiring tremendous effort on the part of the reader, is a new one in criticism and one that would clearly lend itself to incorporation with Richards' claims about irony. Thus, as the work of Cleanth Brooks testifies, the divergent positions of Richards and Eliot meet at several crucial points.

While absorbing the more traditionalistic claims of Eliot, the modern critics who have been influenced by Richards have continued to distinguish between science and poetry on the linguistic level. However, in order to perform the act of rigorous criticism which they proposed to themselves, they had to free themselves from the critical paralysis which the logical extension of Richards' affective psychologism would force upon them. Thus they had to consider aesthetic qualities as objectively structured. But, once freed from defining poetry in terms of impulses, they had to find a new function for it, one that would still keep it distinct from science or the purely referential and yet be based on language, since they had to utilize the valuable linguistic tools given them by Richards. Therefore they began to think of poetry ontologically, as Ransom might put it, to regard the poem as an objective structure which is a separate world of meanings, which has its own mode of existence.

In a critic like Cleanth Brooks and to a lesser degree, in William Empson, particularly in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, the fusion of the opposed metaphysics of Eliot and Richards into a methodology which, strangely, is at once heterogeneous and effective, can best be observed…. [Despite] the extremely antithetic philosophical positions of Richards and Eliot, they somehow have several points of contact on the critical level. And since modern critics for the most part are content to theorize without too much thought about philosophic and aesthetic presuppositions, such amalgamations as these are to be expected, and, indeed, despite the contradictions on the philosophical level these amalgamations have done much to further the value of modern criticism.

Irony, paradox, and ambiguity are as valuable to Brooks as they are to Richards, from whom he seems to have inherited them. But Brooks' interest is literary rather than psychological and his value-theory objective rather than subjectivistic. Thus irony for him is a quality which is structured in the poem and which makes the poem valuable objectively. But if Brooks' interest is not psychological, how does irony come to be valuable for him? For Richards justified irony in terms of the greater number of impulses that could be organized. The value of irony arises for him out of the belief that such ambivalences of attitudes lead to the satisfaction of many impulses with a minimum of frustration. (pp. 123-25)

Brooks justifies irony in two ways. First, in terms of the relation between the poem and the reader—the relation about which Richards talks—Brooks invokes Hulme's insistence on freshness in poetic expression, on the avoidance of stock expressions which produce stock responses. But, secondly, he justifies irony even more significantly by transferring Richards' discussion from the relation between the poem and the reader to one between the poem and reality, a relation which Richards was forced to deny…. Brooks considers our actual experience in the world to be infinitely complex. No single abstract moral or scientific system can do justice to all the data. No one position can preclude, on the level of abstraction, other possible interpretations which also have their merits. Only the poet is able to handle this complexity, the complete texture of reality, with any real fairness. Like Ransom, Brooks would claim that poetry restores "the world's body" which more purely referential discourse, using only its skeleton, must ignore. The poet may begin by expressing one viewpoint, but by various devices like irony he should imply the equal tenability of conflicting viewpoints (and, as with Richards, one must assume the more viewpoints and the more conflicting they are, the better). The poet must not choose among these positions but rather must continue to see all around the problem without sacrificing the total view to a partial insight. Only the poet's "unity of sensibility," given him by his tradition, can struggle with all these recalcitrant elements and lose none of them in the organism which is the created poem. As Brooks points out, this "balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" is precisely Coleridge's definition of imagination. (pp. 125-26)

It is clear, then, that Brooks, who has done the most with the concept of irony, so as to make more useful to practical criticism Richards' concept of equilibrium, was forced to tear this insight from the physiological context given it by Richards; in order to make it critically workable, Brooks had to free irony from its bondage to the reader's mechanism and make it part of the structure of the work itself. (p. 126)

[Despite] the fact that Brooks confers upon poetry a real and important relationship to the structure of reality, he remains at one with Richards in keeping the distinction between science and poetry and keeping it on the linguistic level…. In transferring irony from the reader's mind to the poem so that he can talk of the freshness and complexity of the poetic phrase, how can Brooks arrive at a theory of context that allows the successful poem to be an inescapable and fully realized world of meanings and values and consequently to control the reader's attention completely? For Brooks may seem to have negated the force of Richards' referential-emotive dichotomy by insisting that poetry does tell us about experience. How, then, is poetry kept from becoming, in its nature and in its function, as referential as is science and therefore from leading us, in our experience of it, as immediately away from itself as does scientific discourse?

Fairly uniform answers to these questions are given us by Brooks; by Allen Tate, who holds a somewhat similar, if less extreme, theory; and by Robert Penn Warren, who has theorized in writing less often. The transformation of Richards' formulas is clear in all of these. To begin with, they all assume a distinction between science and poetry on the level of language. But while all of them classify scientific language as immediately referential, none would restrict poetic language to the emotive. Since poetry, like science, consists of verbal symbols, what allows poetic languge to be more than simply referential in the relation between symbol and thing symbolized? For these writers the answer is found in poetry's formally controlled complexity. (pp. 127-28)

Here some of the tools given these critics by Richards are put to effective use. Such insights as Richards' introduction of irony serve to bring them to the doctrine of contextual complexity…. So completely have these critics absorbed what they could use of Richards that we find Brooks putting forth this demand in the words of Richards by calling for a "poetry of inclusion" rather than a "poetry of exclusion." He even proposes a scale of poetic value which is to move from the low or exclusion end to the high or inclusion end. Of course, as Brooks makes clear, he means by this something quite different from what Richards could mean, restricted as the latter was by his physiological assumptions. (pp. 131-32)