RENÉ WELLEK

There is something gallant but also quixotic in Richards' great faith in the power of a general theory of language and poetry from which he expects "new powers over our minds comparable to those which systematic physical inquiries are giving us over our environment."… Nothing seems to point to such a future. Richards' theory of poetry as long as it is entangled in his psychology and operates with the simple concept of emotive language seems to me an impasse in criticism. But where he managed to look at texts, gave an account of misreadings, analyzed observable traits of a work of art, Richards found his way back to the organistic tradition of poetic theory descending from Aristotle through the Germans to Coleridge. But emphasizing these insights we assimilate him to something known before and deny what, after all, however extravagantly, was the stimulating novelty of his theory: the radical rejection of aesthetics, the resolute reduction of the work of art to a mental state, the denial of truth-value to poetry and the defense of poetry as emotive language ordering our mind and giving us equilibrium and mental health.

"Perhaps," says Stanley Hyman, "more than any man since Bacon, Richards has taken all knowledge as his province, and his field the entire mind of man." But this seems wildly exaggerated: Richards is, on the contrary, not a Bacon or a Hegel, or even a Dilthey or Croce but a specialist obsessed with one central idea, the critique of language which he has applied to many subject matters and which has led him into Basic English, How to Read a Page, Mencius on the Mind, etc. He is not [as Hyman has stated], "the greatest and most important of practising literary critics."… There is of course no reason why he should have gone outside of his chosen field of interest: still, he has not written on contemporary literature, has never attempted literary history or the characterization of any individual writer and has not done any technical analysis of style. One could argue that Richards' lack of interest in the kind of stylistics practised on the Continent … has rather widened the gulf of English and American criticism toward developments on the Continent. Richards' few critical pronouncements on individual works are often demonstrably mistaken: the analysis of Hopkins' "Windhover," while meritorious as one of the first serious discussions of Hopkins, does not read the poem rightly as it ignores the address to Christ. The discussion of The Waste Land is refuted by the text and by Eliot's later development. The references to "Kubla Khan" seem quite unsound. The early article on "The God of Dostoyevsky" [Forum, LXXVIII (1927), 97] misinterprets the thought completely when Richards concludes that Dostoyevsky considered belief in a deity "inessential." But all of this hardly matters: the stimulus that Richards gave to English and American criticism (particularly Empson and Cleanth Brooks) by turning it resolutely to the question of language, its meaning and function in poetry, will always insure his position in any history of modern criticism. (pp. 553-54)