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William Empson remembers I.A. Richards

William Empson, 5 June 1980

... The death of I.A. Richards has at least endangered an opportunity which he had accepted with eager energy. In 1937, the Chinese Ministry of Education had decided to use Basic English in the schools, for the first years of English there, but just as the details were being fixed up the Japanese launched an all-out attack and captured Peking ...

The Wizard of Finella

E.E. Duncan-Jones, 24 January 1985

Mansfield Forbes and his Cambridge 
by Hugh Carey.
Cambridge, 154 pp., £15, October 1984, 0 521 25680 1
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... Enchanter, Manny Forbes ... spell-binding ... the most saintly spirit ... very bizarre’. So I.A. Richards, in 1973, of his old Cambridge colleague, nearly forty years dead. Today, even in Cambridge, the name of Forbes is no longer one to conjure with, except among the dwindling band who remember his performances in Clare as one of the two high points of the ...

A Good Reason to Murder Your Landlady

Terry Eagleton: I.A. Richards, 25 April 2002

I.A. RichardsSelected Works 1919-38 
edited by John Constable.
Routledge, 595 pp., December 2001, 0 415 21731 8
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... Of all the great 20th-century critics, I.A. Richards is perhaps the most neglected. There is a crankish, hobbyhorsical quality to his work, an air of taxonomies and technical agendas which befits the son of a chemical engineer. His transatlantic counterpart in this respect is Kenneth Burke. Some of Richards’s work smacks of the laboratory, and isn’t helped by his charmless, bloodless prose style, laced as it is with briskly self-satisfied flourishes which his opponents saw as insufferable arrogance ...

Nohow, Worstward, Withersoever

Patrick Parrinder, 9 November 1989

Stirrings Still 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 25 pp., £1,000, March 1989, 0 7145 4142 7
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Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 128 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 7145 4111 7
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‘Make sense who may’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works 
edited by Robin Davis and Lance Butler.
Smythe, 175 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 86140 286 3
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... Stirrings’ are, among many other things, what poetry can cause in us, as I.A. Richards once noted. In a notorious passage in Practical Criticism, Richards suggested that a good test of a poem’s sincerity would be to meditate for a while on the following topics: 1. Man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human situation ...

A Pride of Footnotes

Robert M. Adams, 17 November 1983

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. VII: ‘Biographia Literaria’ 
edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate.
Routledge/Princeton, 306 pp., £50, May 1983, 0 691 09874 3
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... become an active component in much modern critical thinking. From George Saintsbury through I.A. Richards to Kenneth Burke, it has exercised the active stimulus, not of a privileged book, but of one which in each generation earns afresh its own authority. For all its oddities – and certainly it is the oddest volume ever dictated by the mouth of man – it ...

Inventor

Richard Luckett, 21 December 1989

I.A. RichardsHis Life and Work 
by John Paul Russo.
Routledge, 843 pp., £40, May 1989, 0 415 03134 6
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... Bless you’ was Ivor Richards’s characteristic farewell in his last years, an envoi which never failed to convey the careful omission of ‘God’. Yet it also recalled, because what he said, though not what he wrote, was often highly allusive, his choice in life of                     Whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: A journey to citizenship, 16 November 2006

... that seems to be inscribed between the plain-speaking lines of the manual. One need hardly be I.A. Richards to spot the workings of this, but it often jars with the guide’s larger message of tolerance and live and let live. At times one could easily imagine the work had been authored by Bertie Wooster dressed as Johnny Citizen, but this might be inevitable ...

Darwin Won’t Help

Terry Eagleton: Evocriticism, 24 September 2009

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction 
by Brian Boyd.
Harvard, 540 pp., £25.95, May 2009, 978 0 674 03357 3
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... the world was like, while art told us what it felt like. Literary propositions, according to I.A. Richards, were really ‘pseudo-propositions’, which looked like descriptions of the world but were secretly accounts of the way we felt about it. Kant had come up with a similar doctrine a century or so earlier. By brandishing their non-cognitive ...

Adjusting the Mechanism

Colin Burrow: Robert Graves, 11 October 2018

Robert Graves: From a Great War Poet to ‘Goodbye to All That’, 1895-1929 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 461 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 4729 2914 3
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The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose 
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge.
Seven Stories, 613 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 60980 733 7
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... prose is flogged as ‘wilfully loose’ and as a ‘yawp for yawp’s sake’. The critic I.A. Richards is subjected to a sliding studs-up tackle: ‘If I.A. Richards really finds the communication of simple experiences so much more difficult than most people do, this is probably because he avoids defining the terms he ...

What’s your story?

Terry Eagleton, 16 February 2023

Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative 
by Peter Brooks.
NYRB, 173 pp., £13.99, October 2022, 978 1 68137 663 9
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... condition must be dire indeed. Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury ...

A Lot to Be Said

Stefan Collini: Literary Criticism, 2 November 2017

Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History 
by Joseph North.
Harvard, 272 pp., £31.95, May 2017, 978 0 674 96773 1
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... origins of the discipline’ are to be found in the 1920s: he repeatedly asserts that it was I.A. Richards who ‘founded the discipline’. But Richards, according to North, did not develop practical criticism for the purposes of identifying the aesthetic quality of a work of literature and then ranking such works, as some ...

I am a Cretan

Patrick Parrinder, 21 April 1988

On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day 
by Thomas Docherty.
Harvester, 310 pp., £25, May 1987, 0 7108 1017 2
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The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert 
by Christopher Prendergast.
Cambridge, 288 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 521 23789 0
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... in his luggage. Empson received his marching orders, and the best that his mentor I.A. Richards, also a fellow of Magdalene, could do was to fix him up with a hastily-arranged professorship in Tokyo. The point of this (surely apocryphal?) story is not to present Empson as a worthy forerunner of our current morality, even though the ...

Under threat

Frank Kermode, 21 June 1984

Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition 
by E.H. Gombrich.
Phaidon, 270 pp., £17.50, April 1984, 0 7148 2338 4
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... from voicing his criticisms. There is also a lecture on Freud, and another associated with I.A. Richards, though somewhat loosely tethered to that scholar. All these people, and Lord Leverhulme by courtesy, were ‘humanists’, however various their interests; ‘in what used to be called the Republic of Learning there are as many mansions as there are in ...

Having one’s Kant and eating it

Terry Eagleton: Northrop Frye, 19 April 2001

Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume One 
edited by Robert Denham.
Toronto, 418 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 8020 4751 3
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Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume Two 
edited by Robert Denham.
Toronto, 531 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 8020 4752 1
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... force names like ‘power’, ‘difference’ or ‘desire’. Leavis’s colleague I.A. Richards announced with stunning self-assurance that poetry ‘was perfectly capable of saving us’, while an English lineage from Henry James to Iris Murdoch discovered in the novel the quintessentially ethical form which would transfigure the whole concept of ...

Raymond and Saxon and Maynard and …

Penelope Lively, 19 February 1981

Memories 
by Frances Partridge.
Gollancz, 238 pp., £9.95, January 1981, 0 575 02912 9
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Notes from Sick Rooms 
by Leslie Stephen.
Puckerbrush, 52 pp., £1.50, March 1981, 0 913006 16 5
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... the war, the atmosphere of an Edwardian upbringing. At Cambridge she read English (taught by I.A. Richards) and switched to Moral Sciences for Part Two of the Tripos, and she conveys to the reader a sense of that curious mixture of boarding-school mores and intellectual adventurousness which characterised the women’s colleges in their early days. I wanted ...

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