I have set three aims before me, in constructing this book.

First, to introduce a new kind of

documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture … Secondly, to
provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel
about poetry (and cognate matters) and why they should like or dislike it. Thirdly, to prepare the
way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination
and the power to understand what we hear and read.

– I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism

The technique of Practical Criticism and the name originates in I.A. Richards’ book Practical
Criticism (1929), in which he described an experiment wherein undergraduate students of
English were given unfamiliar poems, and were asked to read and to submit written comments
upon them. With these student documentations or ‘protocols’, Richards theorized a model of
literary criticism that would do two things. First, it would treat literary texts as behaviours, as
external phenomena without reference to internal mental states. Second, it would record how the
stimuli of poems affected readers physiologically and use these results to ground analyses of
meaning and form. Practical Criticism, as conceived by Richards, pays attention to very small
units of language in short lyric poems in a way that leads directly to the New Critics’ emphasis
on ‘the poem in itself’, and their associated rejection of the analysis of any kind of historical or
political context.

The objective of Richards’ experiment was to encourage students to concentrate on ‘the words
on the page’, rather than relying on preconceived ideas about a text. Richards classified the
student-responses into the following categories: inability to understand the author’s meaning –
sense, feeling, tone and intention; problems with the capacity to visualize and therefore
understand imagery; dependence on stock or sentimental response; confusion when a reader’s
beliefs conflict with those in a poem; being misled by personal associations: confusion resulting
from a reliance on critical preconception and technical prejudgments. For Richards, the chief
cause of these “ill-appropriate, stereotyped reactions is withdrawal from experience”. The
 students did not read the poem, but understood the poem based on what others had told them.
Following this, Practical Criticism may be defined as a close textual, verbal analysis of a work of
art. The study is pragmatic and empirical, and makes literary criticism factual and scientific
analysis.

As against to a teacher reading a poem and lecturing on the verses, Richards devised an
alternative method that encouraged independent reading and thinking of students. He was
preoccupied with the following questions – how does a piece of writing communicate to the
reader? How is the reader able to explain what is communicated? Can this type of
communication be done in a precise way? Do poems look different if they are presented in
isolation from the circumstances in which they were written or circulated? Do critical responses
change if the reader is aware of some contextual information? How do we read a literary work
without knowing its context — a period, a chronology, a social, political, religious, and
intellectual background, a body of similar and contrasting works, works by the same and by
related authors, linguistic and stylistic conventions, the relevant conceptions of art and literature
and their role in the world.

Richards is critical of the framework of literature-classrooms and argues that “The idle hours
of most lives are filled with reveries that are simply bad private poetry” (320). For Richards,
practical criticism — the close and attentive reading of the words of the poem — is “an opening
up of the poem for what it can really be for us: a unique and fascinating experience, carefully
wrought by its maker, and fully available only to those with the patience, as well as the
sensibility, to recreate”. However, the results of Richards’ experiment “was horrifying. Magazine
poetasters were extravagantly praised, Donne, Hopkins, and Christina Rossetti firmly damned;
every felicity was ridiculed, and every absurdity praised, by large minorities and even
majorities.” Without the intellectual history, the opinion and background of a literary work, the
ideal meeting of an isolated mind with an isolated text, then, does not happen. Richards’ project,
practical criticism, is a means to train the literary community and create conditions favourable to
commune effectively with the poem.

Theoretical framework of Practical Criticism

 Richards lists three aims for Practical Criticism:
 to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary
state culture whether as critics, as philosophers, as teachers, as psychologists, or merely
as curious persons.
 to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think
and feel about poetry, and why should like or dislike it
 to prepare way for educational methods more efficient than those who use now in
developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.

The heart of Richards’ framework of Practical Criticism is the idea that poetry is essentially a
private experience. Practical Criticism as a technique of reading appears in Richards’ earlier
work Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). Richards’ practical criticism is an exercise that is
presupposed on the working of a mind as part of the nervous system, as part of impulses.
In Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards defines a poet is one who can order his experiences
and connect his disconnected impulses into “a single ordered response”. Language has to be used
in a special “emotive” way so that the poet’s experiences can be stimulated in the mind of the
reader. Reading a poem, then, is a process that will culminate in stimulating “equilibrium of
opposed impulses”. There is no need of any context. The words of the poem ought to produce
these impulses in the mind of the reader. The reader must understand the meaning based on the
immediate impulses produced.

Meaning is of four kinds – sense is the state/object to which the words direct the reader’s
attention; feeling is the way the author sees these objects/states; tone is the author’s attitude
towards the reader; intention is the effect which the author is trying to bring about by his words.
“Understanding meaning”, therefore, is a complicated process, requiring a grasp not only of each
of the four kinds of meaning, but also of their interrelations in the text. Also, a poem must
produce in the reader appropriate responses to meter, rhythm, and the visual and aural character
of words. Richards claims in Practical Criticism: “The only proper attitude is to look upon a
successful interpretation, a correct understanding, as a triumph against odds. We must cease to
regard a misinterpretation as a mere unlucky accident. We must treat it as the normal and
probable event”.

Richards sees a poem and the poetic experience as an isolated subjective experience. The
poem is not an object in its own right, but an experience. Ideally it is an experience first of the
speaker, and then communicated and induced in the reader. In either case, the poem is not an
object existing outside of and independently of the mind. Richards suggests in Principles of
Literary Criticism: “Let us mean by Westminster Bridge not the actual experience which led
Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but the class
composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not differ within certain
limits from that experience”. A mind is part of the nervous system, and a mind can influence
other minds through the mediation of the stimuli. Then, the experience of reading a poem is a
private process which is produced in a particular state of mind — a state of equilibrium. Reading
and interpreting the poem induces a similar state of stimulus in the minds of the readers. Reading
a poem becomes a private experience, part of transient equilibrium state of the nervous system,
as Richards puts it, “the most delicate of all possible undertakings”:

We have to gather millions of fleeting semi-independent impulses into a momentary structure of

fabulous complexity, whose core or germ only is given us in the words. What we ‘make up’, that
momentary trembling order in our minds, is exposed to countless irrelevant influences.

It has to be noted that Richards does not negate the social character of a literary work.
Richards stresses that the purpose of this training in practical criticism is not to acquire a heritage
of literary wisdom, but to get rid of the preconceptions and stock responses; not to acquire
membership of a literary community, but to commune with poetry – “Our feelings … are in the
end the whole matter”. A poetic experience is conducted in the privacy of an individual mind; a
discourse on poetry is merely an adjunct and not integral to the understanding of the poem.

Richards rejects the existence of a special ‘aesthetic state’— a mode of experience radically
divorced from practical matters such as inquiring and desiring:
 When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we are not doing something
quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the gallery or when we dressed in the morning.
The fashion in which the experience is caused in us is different, and as a rule the experience is
more complex and, if we are successful, more unified. But our activity is not of a fundamentally
different kind. To assume that it is, puts difficulties in the way of describing and explaining it,
which are unnecessary and which no one has yet succeeded in overcoming.

Richards’s theoretical project was to insert the aesthetic into the everyday material experience.
Without the poems’ titles, dates of publication, the poets’ names, Richards ‘close reading’ was a
way to intervene in the context of reception, which is to say, the minds of actual, living readers.
Criticism, as Richards saw it, was to be a project of aesthetic education.

Key ideas in Richards’ Practical Criticism

Richards argues that the relation of text to the author, to cultural roots and background, to
other texts are not relational properties of the poem, but only of its stimulus. Knowledge of
context merely helps the stimuli to stimulate the minds of the readers and enables the poem to
come into existence. Knowledge of context helps the poem to become an experience in the
reader’s mind, but is not itself part of that experience. The historical and biographical data are
not intrinsic to the meaning of the poem. The words of the poem are its individual units of
meaning.

Following this, a poem ceases to be a public document, and can be experienced in isolation.
The words of the poem may have references, but these references only serve as conditions for
provoking the correct response in the reader’s mind. Richards denies that poems have an
objective existence, or that there is an objective truth embodied in literature. There is no correct
interpretation of a poem, and poems are private reveries. Richards considers the correct
interpretation of poetry to be difficult and rare. Poetic experiences are a transient event in the
individual consciousness, private and isolated, and always threatened by distractions.
 Richards departs from the earlier critical method of reading literature, and sees texts less as an
example of the primacy of consciousness than as an illusion of language use. As Richards wrote
in Practical Criticism, language-use is frequently mistaken for introspective self- knowledge:

We do somehow manage to discuss our feelings, sometimes with remarkable facility and
success. We say things that seem to be subtle and recondite, and yet true. We do this in spite of
our feebleness in introspection and our ignorance of the general nature of feelings. How do we
come to be so knowledgeable and clever? . . . Put shortly, the answer seems to be that this
knowledge is lying dormant in the dictionary. Language has become its repository, a record, a
reflection, as it were, human nature.

Richards critiques the idea that a poem is a public object, and its vocabulary and syntax are
part of a common literary heritage. Richards dissuades reading poetry as a social and cognitive
enterprise. By emphasising that a literary work is a stimulant of personal feeling, Richards
dissociates literature from its context. The meaning of a poem is determined by its reader. In this
sense, the reader need not be rooted in the intellectual and spiritual concerns of the poet and his
society. In Richards’ scheme of reading, the reader’s encounter with a poem requires him to ‘see’
the words of the poem, and not listen to the mediators who introduce an author to him. Richards
envisions a literary practise where students read the poem, and are trained to realise the fullest
potential of a literary work based on the words of the given text.

A work of literature is important for its aesthetic potential. For Richards, aesthetic beauty is
not formal beauty as an end in itself, but in its ability to act as means by which readers can
develop their practical faculties: “It is less important to like ‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad,’ than
to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds” (327). The work of literature, for
Richards, was to be therapeutic. It was on the basis of this kind of aesthetic thinking, which sees
the aesthetic as a mode of instrumental, rather than final value that Richards develops the
methodological innovations of reading practises. Richards seeks to answer the fundamental
question – “What is the value of the arts, why are they worth the devotions of the keenest hours
of the best minds, and what is their place in the system of human endeavours?”
Afterlife of Practical Criticism

It is never what a poem says which matters but what it is. Richards has been extraordinarily
influential both on literary theory and on critical practice. Richards’ dissociation of the poem and
the context eventually emerge as the intentional fallacy; and his separation of readers from one
another emerge as the affective fallacy. Following Richards’ critical methodology, introspection
becomes an unreliable literary tool of reading; there is a need to analyse overt behaviours rather
than covert mental states of readers; a literary consciousness is seen irrelevant to psychological
study of a literary work; and the mental states of poets and readers are seen as neurological
actions and conditioning. Richards has an indelible mark on literary concepts such as genre,
form, structure, and meaning.

First, when Richards rejects the need of knowing an author’s mind, he inaugurates a critical
methodology that abnegates the authorial consciousness. The critic’s knowledge of the poet’s
mind is unnecessary. Any attempt to ascertain the mind of the author would compromise the
critic’s objectivity. Second, Richards describes the cognitive mechanisms by which humans infer
semantic meaning. According to Richards, readers “overlook the mind” behind the utterance
unless “some very special circumstance calls us back” (6–7). This approach to language based on
behavioural psychology reduces the readers’ consciousness to reflexes and automatic behaviours.
Third, for Richards, poetry cannot be a public text because poetic form transmits data that cannot
be logically abstracted. Poetry comprises a range of physiological stimuli. This approach to
reading poetic language, production and perception of poetic meaning, becomes a prototype of
the literary technique of ‘close-reading’. Finally, Richards’ translation of poetic language into an
aesthetic experience provides a neurological perspective of literary experience – a reading that is
enormously critiqued in 1930s.

Critique of Practical Criticism

Allen Tate argued in “The Present Function of Criticism” (1940) that Richards’s bore “the
elaborate charts of nerves and nerve-systems that purport to show how the ‘stimuli’ of poems
elicit ‘responses’…. How many innocent young men—myself among them—thought, in 1924,
 that laboratory jargon meant laboratory demonstration!” (24) Even William Empson, Richards’s
most influential student, argued in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) that literary criticism should
remain separate from science and psychology. One of the central flaws of Richards’s project,
Empson explained, was that it understood itself as illuminating psychology through the analysis
of literature. Poetry could not be studied as behaviour. Empson explains –

It would be tempting to say I was concerned with science rather than with beauty; to treat
poetry as a branch of applied psychology. But, so far as poetry can be regarded altogether
dispassionately, so far as it is an external object for examination, it is dead poetry and not worth
examining; further, so far as a critic has made himself dispassionate about it, so far as he has
repressed sympathy in favour of curiosity, he has made himself incapable of examining it.

Cleanth Brooks, William Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley borrow Richards’ methodology to
develop New Criticism, but critique Richards’ reliance on literature’s cognitive effects to the
neuro-physiological composition of the human body. These New Critics attributed these same
effects to poetic language and form.

Practical Criticism to New Criticism

Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 essay “The
Intentional Fallacy” borrow Richards’ subjective and experiential model of reading poetry.

These critics, however, accused Richards’s physio-affective poetics of perpetuating an affective

or genetic fallacy. Richards’s attempt to make literary criticism more objective, they concluded,
had made the path to objectivity more difficult. Unlike Richards, they argued that literature
cannot posit any objective knowledge. While Richards deploys a physiological understanding of
language, these critics develop a theory of poetic language that is exclusively semantic, non-
affective and wholly removed from Richards’s behaviourism. It is poetry not of feeling but of
meaning. This eventually becomes a critical movement called the New Criticism.
 Richards’ identification of a poem with the experience of it, and the distinction of poem from
text, William Empson argues, provided the basis for an entire critical method. In Seven Types of
Ambiguity (1930) Empson developed his undergraduate essays for Richards into a study of the
complex and multiple meanings of poems. His work had a profound impact on the ‘New
Criticism’, the exponents of which tended to see poems as elaborate structures of complex
meanings. New Critics would usually pay relatively little attention to the historical setting of the
works which they analysed, treating literature as a sphere of activity of its own. In the work of
F.R. Leavis the close analysis of texts became a moral activity, in which a critic would bring the
whole of his sensibility to bear on a literary text and test its sincerity and moral seriousness. For
New Critics, to speak of experience and effect was to distort the nature of poetic language.
Poetry induced emotions in the minds of the readers, but it did so through the transmission of
semantic meaning. Poetic language is not affective, nor does it elicit a physiological response.
Rather, for New Critics, poetry is a formal composition that is a semantic phenomenon.

Conclusion

The ‘practical’ in Practical Criticism meant technique that is directed towards the practical end
of training readers. With the New Criticism, it becomes a method directed towards the ‘practical’
end of assessing the value of poems against that of other poems. The latter became a critical
method used, not to educate the reader, but to adulate the text. For the New Critics, aesthetic
value resided in the text. For Richards, aesthetics and poetic experience was a function of the
mind of the reader.

Practical criticism today is treated more as an ancillary skill rather than the foundation of a
critical method. It is a part of many examinations in literature at almost all levels, and is used to
test students’ responsiveness to what they read, as well as their knowledge of verse forms and of
the technical language for describing the way poems create their effects. The technique of close
reading, which is the default method of teaching literature at present, originates in Richards’
method of Practical Criticism