Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment

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ISBN: 9780765808431 | 0765808439
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Copyright: 9/30/2004

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Linguist, critic, poet, and psychologist, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) was one of the great polymaths of the twentieth century. He is best known, however, as one of the founders of modern literary critical theory. Richards revolutionized criticism by turning away from biographical and historical readings as well as from the aesthetic impressionism. Seeking a more exacting approach, he analyzed literary texts as syntactical structures that could be broken down into smaller interacting verbal units of meaning. Practical Criticism, first published in 1929, remains a landmark and classic volume in demonstrating this method.

Introduction to the Transaction Edition

xiii

Preface

xvii

PART I. INTRODUCTORY

(18)

The conditions of the experiment; Its aims; Field-work in comparative ideology,

(2)

The theory of interpretation,

(2)

Intellectual and emotional navigation,

(1)

Critical principles: The indemonstrability of values,

(2)

The ten difficulties of criticism,

(7)

PART II. DOCUMENTATION

POEM 1

(11)

Doctrine in poetry. Its expression,

(1)

Noble thoughts,

(1)

Metrical movements,

(1)

Flabby thoughts,

(1)

Truth: temporal perception,

(2)

Mnemonic irrelevancies: eternity, socialism, the heart,

(2)

American idiom: "an inspirational bit,"

(1)

Suggestion as falling in love,

(2)

POEM 2

(10)

Rhyming,

(1)

Other tests for poetry,

(2)

"Messages,"

(1)

Moral qualms,

(1)

Renderings,

(2)

Correspondences of sound and sense,

(1)

Japanese gardening,

(2)

POEM 3

(9)

Misunderstanding,

(2)

Anti-religious reaction,

(1)

Stock responses and metre,

(1)

Moral objections,

(1)

Technical presuppositions and arbitrary renderings,

(3)

The sound alone: pictures in poetry,

(1)

Mixed metaphor,

(1)

POEM 4

(10)

Mental prisms,

(1)

One man's meat another's poison,

(1)

The correspondence of form and content,

(2)

Alternating personalities,

(1)

"Difference in taste,"

(1)

The ascribed rhythm,

(3)

Stock responses,

(2)

POEM 5

(18)

Obscurity,

(1)

Incoherence in poetry,

(1)

A splendid thought impossible to grasp,

(1)

The "atmosphere of approach,"

(1)

Timidity,

(1)

Immortal beauty,

(1)

The stock subject,

(2)

Beliefs in poetry,

(2)

Tricks of style,

(3)

Sonnet form,

(1)

Incapacity to construe,

(1)

Sincerity and date,

(2)

Vacuous resonances,

(1)

POEM 6

(11)

Mental cleavage,

(1)

Alternative readings,

(4)

Blank incomprehension,

(1)

Excuses,

(1)

The "family constellation,"

(3)

Analysis,

(2)

POEM 7

(11)

Two-way prejudices,

(1)

Sincerity,

(1)

"Pathetic fallacies,"

(1)

The Cathedral feeling,

(2)

Sententiousness,

(1)

Uplift,

(1)

Unity and associations,

(1)

Nature-poetry,

(2)

POEM 8

(14)

Sentimentality and nauseation,

(1)

Music in poetry,

100

(2)

Metaphor,

102

(1)

Popular songs,

102

(1)

Preconceptions,

103

(1)

Stock rhythms,

104

(2)

Verse form,

106

(1)

Closeness of reading,

107

(1)

"Appalling risk of sentimentality,"

108

(1)

Carelessness v. insincerity,

109

(1)

The acceptance struggle,

109

(2)

Private poetry,

111

(2)

POEM 9

113

(12)

Occasional poetry,

114

(1)

Irrelevancies:

royalism,

114

(2)

republicanism,

116

(1)

The drink problem,

117

(2)

Matter and movement: communicative efficiency,

119

(1)

Colour,

119

(2)

Exhilaration,

121

(1)

Metaphor,

122

(1)

Drama,

122

(2)

A problem of stock responses,

124

(1)

POEM 10

125

(15)

Mnemonic pulls,

126

(1)

Visualisation,

126

(2)

Unpleasant images,

128

(1)

Inhumanity,

129

(1)

Technical presuppositions: ugly and delicate words,

129

(1)

Cacophony,

130

(1)

Onomatopoeia,

131

(1)

Represented motion,

131

(2)

Prosaicisms,

133

(1)

Romanticism,

134

(1)

Nonsense,

135

(1)

Change of tone,

136

(3)

Shallow moralising,

139

(1)

POEM 11

140

(8)

Rapture,

141

(1)

Personal emotion,

141

(1)

Illicit expectations,

141

(1)

Logic,

142

(1)

Obscurity,

143

(1)

Poetic diction,

143

(1)

Strained trash,

144

(1)

Bareness and balanced sanity,

145

(1)

The middle kind of writing,

146

(2)

POEM 12

148

(8)

Rumbling clouds,

148

(1)

Symbolists,

149

(1)

"Crystallisation": falling in love,

149

(2)

Pathetic fallacy,

151

(1)

Chemist's poetry,

151

(1)

Prosody,

152

(2)

Hypnotic movement,

154

(1)

Swoon-reading,

155

(1)

POEM 13

156

(17)

Double action of stock responses,

157

(1)

Death the leveller,

158

(1)

"Was what Christian charity?"

159

(1)

The mystery of the slaves,

160

(1)

Conjectures,

161

(1)

The monument problem,

162

(1)

Joanna Southcott's Glad-stone bag,

163

(1)

Impudent sentimentality,

164

(1)

Prosody,

165

(1)

Sense and sound,

166

(1)

Sanctimonious clichés

167

(1)

"Rude" in what sense?

168

(1)

Fatuous solemnity,

168

(2)

Urbanity,

170

(1)

Humour,

170

(3)

PART III. ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 1. THE FOUR KINDS OF MEANING

173

(9)

The ten difficulties of criticism. The fundamental difficulty: making out the meaning,

174

(1)

Four aspects of- meaning: sense, feeling, tone, intention,

175

(2)

Relative subordinations of these:

in scientific writings,

177

(1)

in popularisation,

177

(1)

in political speeches,

178

(1)

in conversation,

179

(1)

Statements in poetry,

180

(1)

Emotion criticism,

181

(1)

CHAPTER 2. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

182

(14)

Causes of misunderstanding,

182

(1)

The distraction of metre,

183

(1)

Intuitive versus over-literal reading,

184

(1)

Literalism and metaphor,

185

(1)

Poetic liberty,

186

(2)

Mixture in metaphor,

188

(1)

Personification,

189

(4)

reasons for,

191

(1)

advantages of,

192

(1)

dangers of,

193

(1)

Critical comparisons,

193

(2)

The diversity of aims in poetry,

195

(1)

CHAPTER 3. SENSE AND FEELING

196

(18)

Interferences between kinds of meaning,

196

(1)

Tone in poetry,

197

(4)

as an index to "sense of proportion,"

198

(3)

Sense and feeling: three types of interrelation,

201

(2)

The pull of the context,

203

(1)

exerted in two ways: directly between feelings, indirectly through sense,

203

(1)

Pre-analytic apprehension,

204

(2)

Methods of improving apprehension,

206

(1)

Verbal means of analysis for sense and feeling,

207

(1)

The dictionary,

208

(1)

Definition technique for sense,

209

(1)

Our comparative helplessness with feeling,

209

(1)

Projectile adjectives,

209

(1)

Metaphor: sense metaphors and emotive metaphors,

210

(2)

Possibilities of training,

212

(2)

CHAPTER 4. POETIC FORM

214

(9)

Difficulty of apprehending form due partly to bad assumptions,

214

(1)

The regularity myth,

215

(1)

Variation about a norm,

216

(1)

But rhythm goes deeper than the ear,

216

(1)

Inherent rhythm and ascribed rhythm,

217

(1)

Inherent rhythm as a necessary and important skeleton,

218

(1)

Damage done by the regularity myth and by the independence notion,

219

(1)

The danger of neglecting sound,

220

(2)

Reading aloud,

222

(1)

CHAPTER 5. IRRELEVANT ASSOCIATIONS AND STOCK RESPONSES

223

(18)

Erratic imagery,

223

(1)

Visualisers,

224

(1)

Irrelevance in general,

224

(2)

Associations with other poems,

226

(1)

The personal situation of the reader,

227

(1)

Stock responses: their omnipresence,

228

(1)

Their utility,

228

(1)

Demarcation of their proper field,

228

(1)

As systems of energy,

229

(1)

As distorting agents,

230

(1)

As ground for complaint against variation,

230

(1)

The stock response as the poem itself,

231

(1)

Resultant popularity,

232

(1)

Good and bad stock responses: their origins,

232

(1)

Withdrawal from experience by deprivation, moral disaster, convention, intellectuality,

232

(2)

Loss in transmission of ideas,

234

(2)

Home-made notions and genius,

236

(1)

And silliness,

237

(2)

The poet and stock ideas,

239

(2)

CHAPTER 6. SENTIMENTALITY AND INHIBITION

241

(14)

"Sentimental" as an abusive gesture,

241

(1)

As uttering a vague thought,

242

(1)

As uttering a precise thought:

over-facility of emotion,

242

(2)

as equivalent to "crude,"

244

(1)

as deriving from "sentiment,"

245

(1)

Sentiments,

245

(1)

Their over-persistence and warping,

246

(1)

Definition of "sentimental" in the third sense,

246

(1)

Sentimentality in readers and in poetry,

247

(1)

Causes of,

247

(1)

Subject and treatment,

248

(1)

The justification of the response,

249

(1)

Conventional metaphors and sentimentality,

249

(2)

Autogenous emotions,

251

(1)

Inhibition as the complement of sentimentality,

252

(1)

Necessity of,

252

(1)

Causes of,

253

(1)

Cure of,

254

(1)

CHAPTER 7. DOCTRINE IN POETRY

255

(20)

Opposition between readers' and poets' beliefs,

255

(1)

Difficulty the same whether the belief is important or not,

256

(1)

Insufficiency of the "poetic fiction" solution,

257

(1)

Assumptions: intellectual and emotional,

258

(1)

Distinction between them,

258

(1)

"Justification" for each kind,

259

(1)

Logic and choice,

260

(1)

Adjustment of emotional and intellectual claims,

261

(1)

Appearance of insincerity,

262

(1)

Sincerity as absense of self-deception,

263

(1)

As genuineness,

264

(1)

Spontaneity and sophistication,

265

(2)

Sincerity as self-completion,

267

(2)

Dependent upon a fundamental need,

269

(1)

Sincerity and intuition,

270

(2)

Improvement in sincerity,

272

(2)

Poetry as an exercise in sincerity,

274

(1)

CHAPTER 8. TECHNICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND CRITICAL PRECONCEPTIONS

275

(17)

Our expectations from poetry,

275

(1)

Confusions between means and ends,

276

(1)

Encouraged by the language of criticism,

277

(1)

The Summation of details blunder,

277

(2)

No critical theory is directly useful,

279

(1)

Examples: the subject and message tests,

279

(1)

The "lilt" quest,

280

(2)

Critical dogmas as primitive superstitions,

282

(1)

Their duplicity,

282

(1)

The disablement of judgment,

283

(1)

The rule of choice,

283

(1)

Principles only protective,

284

(2)

Critical infallibility,

286

(6)

PART IV. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

I. CULTURE IN THE PROTOCOLS

292

(10)

§ 1. Standing of writers.

§ 2. Immaturity.

§ 3. Lack of reading.

§ 4. Inability to construe.

§ 5. Stock responses.

§ 6. Preconceptions.

§ 7. Bewilderment.

§ 8. Authority.

§ 9. Variability.

§ 10. General values.

II. THE SERVICES OF PSYCHOLOGY

302

(11)

§ 11. Abuse of psychology.

§ 12. Profanation.

§ 13. Prudential speech.

§ 14. Understanding.

§ 15. Con-fusions.

§ 16. Further dissection.

§ 17. Order.

III. SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS A REMEDY

313

(18)

§ 18. The teaching of English.

§ 19. Practical suggestions.

§ 20. The decline in speech.

§ 21. Prose.

§ 22. Critical fog.

§ 23. Subjectivity.

§ 24. Humility.

APPENDIX A

331

(16)

1. Further notes on meaning.

2. Intention.

3. Aesthetic adjectives.

4. Rhythm and Prosody.

5. Visual images.

APPENDIX B

347

(2)

The relative popularity of the poems.

APPENDIX C

349

(2)

Authorship of the poems.

The reader is recommended not to consult this Appendix until he has read through Part II.

APPENDIX D

351

(8)

The Poems as originally set before the readers.

INDEX

359

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Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment

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