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“... the claim made here by Fiona Stafford that Blair addresses the central questions later put by I.A. Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism with the ‘zealous optimism of a pioneer’ is certainly plausible, and his sense of criticism as an active dialogic process in which the ability to persuade and converse was of the greatest importance, goes some way ...”

“... were assured to good literature by the ‘instinct of self-preservation in humanity’; I.A. Richards had echoed him in describing poetry as being ‘capable of saving us’. Eagleton’s new book ends on the same note of orthodox Eng Lit revivalism. Criticism, he says once more, ‘might contribute in a modest way to our very survival’. A fairly ...”

“... similarly ahistorical, for to be so was part of the Modernist reaction against Victorianism. I.A. Richards took the view to an extreme in his Practical Criticism, with its premise that the reader of a poem needed knowledge of neither the author nor his milieu. T.S. Eliot seemed to acknowledge the role of culture, but his account of the evolution of culture ...”

“... religion and Christianity, the interpretation of history, and the value of industrialism’. I.A. Richards, on the other hand, was a humanist engaged in a quest for objective standards of criticism, which, rejecting religion, he could never find: hence his ‘ghastly atheistic nonsense’. However, a few years later, applying for a job, McLuhan claimed to be ...”

“... of ‘insidious enchantment’ that the stern Eliot-schooled modern reader ought to resist. I.A. Richards, one of the earliest proponents of the sort of close reading that Wootten so skilfully applies to de la Mare’s lyrics, was also scathing in Science and Poetry (1926) but, some fifty years later, recanted in an essay that praised de la Mare’s rhythms ...”

“... we now know the unpublished verse. After all, as Eliot says in one of the poems collected here,... I am put together with a pot and scissorsOut of old clippingsNo one took the trouble to make an article.In case after case, Ricks’s learning makes an article out of an invisibly allusive and often disjointed poem; and, in addition to his excellent Introduction ...”

“... kill me with the sight of your tears; do not cry for me as for a man already dead, when, in fact, I am in your arms,’ and, with a different sort of feeling, ‘do not exert your power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic magic’; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being ...”

“... audience. It also pioneered a direction which social analysis was to take by focusing like I.A. Richards on problems of communication and reception. Leavis himself wrote a PhD thesis on the emergence of magazines like the Spectator and the Tatler which inspired the ideal of the educated or ‘Common Reader’. Modern critical prose was founded by their ...”

“... for the Criterion’ would probably top any phrase-search of these pages (closely followed by ‘I am sorry that I had to hold over your article’). There are a number of more substantial, or more revealing, or just more personal, letters, but they are few and far between. Eliot scholars will no doubt find much grist for their finely grinding mills ...”

“... bunch above the arch of the foot, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this new purpose.’ I.A. Richards loved to climb with his wife Dorothy Pilley and both wrote eloquently about it: in a Borrowdale climbing hut the other day I found the handwritten note of what may have been their last mountain walk in England, in the same logbook as my eldest son’s ...”

“... was one word to me,” he used to say, emphasising his poverty. Bored with this repetition, I am said to have responded, at the age of six or so: “Well, ice cream and cake are one word to me.” ’ Not only is this a precociously Wildean remark and just the sort of thing that one writes a memoir in order to record, but it was a perfectly apt ...”

“... and implication and hidden argument of a text, what he calls, in a letter to his mentor I.A. Richards, any word’s ‘liability to be used in preference to other words’, in which ‘liability’ brings rightly into question our agency in relation to language. What close reading supposedly got you closer to was the complexity of a writer’s ...”

“... he was 22, and had begun as an undergraduate essay, written for his Cambridge supervisor, I.A. Richards.Cats may look at kings. It was certainly possible to learn from Empson (‘Kill Your Speed,’ as the traffic signs say). But it would be fatal to make any attempt to mimic his precocious scholarship, his eccentric brilliance, or his quirky and ...”

“... It is a commonplace that among I.A. Richards’s first achievements was a modern defence of poetry. In the years following the Great War, he saw the world as entering an unprecedented historical crisis. He believed that the collapse of the old ‘Magical View’ of the world had left us in a condition of bewilderment, of deep privation, of affective destitution ...”

“... poetry and the truth of science. He rejected the ‘pseudo-statement’ theory of his mentor I.A. Richards, and as time went on had many tussles with the problem of figurative language, which often apparently says the thing that is not. He came to think of most contemporary literary criticism as a dreary professional attempt to avoid decisions about ...”