Practical Criticism

IA Richards’ Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment comprised something of a departure from Richards’ earlier pieces of literary theory, including The Meaning of Meaning, with C.K. Ogden) and Principles of Literary Criticism. Where these earlier works were concerned with more hypothetical examples of interpretation, Richards wanted Practical Criticism to focus on actual readings done by actual readers. Practical Criticism, Richards wrote, was “the record of a piece of field-work in comparative ideology.” He set three goals for this work:

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 Thirdly, to prepare the way for education methods more efficient than those we use now to understand what we hear and read.

The method Richards employed to achieve these goals was fairly straightforward but unprecedented in literary criticism. Richards hope was to move literary criticism away from historical and psychological studies of authors and reconvene it around the cognitive processes of “the general reader.” Practical Criticism is a catalogue of these readers’ interpretations, along with Richards’ comments about their interpretations and conclusions about his study’s findings.

Richards’ approach in Practical Criticism proved to be enormously influential—not just in its methodological approach but also in its cognitivist approach to literary form and aesthetic experience. “There is no gap,” Richards wrote, “between our everyday emotional life and the material of poetry. The verbal expression of this life, at its finest, is forced to use the technique of poetry; that is the only essential difference”.