I. A. Richards

Abstract

Ivor Armstrong Richards (b. 26 February 1893; d. 7 September 1979) is among the most and influential theorists and critics of literature in the 20th century. A student of Moral Science at Cambridge University (1911–1915), he was the intellectual offspring of the Age of Principia. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead, among others, were completing a philosophical revolution by rejecting varieties of 19th-century idealism, seeking to ground philosophy in first principles, and reasserting a native empiricism with an emphasis on language, logic, and analysis. The Newtonian term is apropos because there had been nothing so sweeping in British philosophy since the 17th century. Richards taught in the new English School at Cambridge from 1919 to 1939, where he developed his ideas and conducted his famous experiments in reading, resulting in Practical Criticism, thereby becoming one of the founders of New Criticism. The interdisciplinary play of his writings has led to his being labeled a linguist, a psychologist, or a philosopher. Yet the deepest vein of his interest lay in the theory and practice of criticism. He best belongs in an anthology together with Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot; not in one with De Saussure, Jakobson, or Chomsky; nor in one with Skinner, Piaget, and Allport; nor in one with Dewey, Ayer, and Quine. The peaks of his achievement in the 1920s are The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden) (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929). His ideas were widely disseminated in his compendium Science and Poetry (1926). Richards’s involvement with Basic English, which was the creation of C. K. Ogden, grew throughout the 1930s, becoming almost a second career. Basic English is a technique of learning the language based on 850 key words, the ones that could do the most work with the least effort (there are only sixteen verbs). He wrote four books on Basic in the 1930s alone, spending three years in China in the hope of creating a national experiment. Meanwhile, these studies in language learning (and second-language learning) alternated with theory of criticism: Coleridge on Imagination; The Philosophy of Rhetoric, with its revolutionary theory of metaphor; and Interpretation in Teaching, which attempted to perform for prose what he had done with poetry in Practical Criticism. Thus, there were the two careers, like parallel corridors, at times crossing each other’s path, or at the least with windows open between them. From 1939 to 1974 he taught at Harvard University, becoming University Professor in 1944. Basic English and Its Uses (1943) remains his most useful introduction to the subject. The Pocket Book of Basic English: A Self-Teaching Way into English (1945), coauthored by Christine M. Gibson, led to his Language through Pictures series, eventually including eight languages, some of which went into film-strip and other media as the technology became available. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1964 and was awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal in 1971. His testamentary Beyond (1974) explores the Book of Job, Plato, Dante, and Shelley.