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This Special Issue marks the centenary of the publication in December 1924 of IA Richards’ first sole-authored book, Principles of Literary Criticism, which he wrote while a young lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge shortly after the War. Why should the book interest readers of Language and Literature? What does it have to do with stylistics? Why is it still important enough to warrant a Special Issue a century later? What relevance does the book still have? These are the questions that I want to pursue in this Introduction, while the aim of the Special Issue as a whole is to encourage stylisticians, and especially cognitive stylisticians, to engage with Principles of Literary Criticism and with Richards’ work more generally. My central argument is that, though somewhat schematic, the theory of poetic experience and value that Richards built from the psychological and biological models then available to him was revolutionary at the time, and that a century later it still has much to tell us as scholars interested in the interconnections of mind, language and literature (see also West, 2013).
Richards wrote Principles of Literary Criticism from his lecture notes for a course in ‘Theory of Criticism’ that he began offering for the new English degree at Cambridge in October 1919. Then aged 26, he began his very first lecture to a university audience by telling the handful of students before him: You can either think of the literature of criticism as an assemblage of disconnected conflicting opinions to which if you write criticism yourself you can only add another such opinion. Or, you can think of it as a science, a body of coherent knowledge with many provinces (Quoted in Constable, 2001: ix-x).
For Richards, then, literary criticism stood at a crossroads. It could either continue assembling disconnected and conflicting opinions, none of which, in the absence of a set of explicit criteria, could be deemed any better or worse than any other. Or it could go back to basics and create a science of criticism, a set of coherent principles that would enable the discipline to advance in knowledge. Richards clearly favoured the latter path, not least because most of the students before him, having fought in the War, were now tired, as one former student and ex-soldier would remember, of ‘mere gossip, metaphorical vapourings and woolly mysticism’ (Willey, 1968: 15); they wanted something new, coherent and meaningful.
Richards’ desire to set out a scientific approach to literature (and the arts more generally: there are also chapters on music, sculpture and the visual arts) was part of a more general conviction at the time that science had the means to explain the mysteries of human existence, such as why works of art should affect us so strongly. This positivism had arisen in the wake of the publication in the latter half of the 19th century of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), but also the later and perhaps even more important The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), the latter two being the founding texts of evolutionary psychology. It was in response to Darwin’s work that the great US psychologist William James had written The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), which sought to explain religious experience from within the framework of evolutionary psychology. Why do we have religion? What is the nature of our experience of religion? What is its function or value in human life? Richards sought to do exactly the same for literature in Principles of Literary Criticism, defining ‘criticism’ in the preface to the book’s second edition (published in 1926) as ‘the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them’ (Richards, 2001 [1926]: viii). Thus, the science of criticism that Richards outlines in Principles of Literary Criticism is perhaps best understood as the first – and, until the publication of Gottschall’s Literature, Science, and a New Humanities in (2008), the last – attempt to understand literature in explicitly Darwinist terms. It is nothing if not an evolutionary explanation as to how we experience poetry and the value that poetry has for us both individually and as a species.
To build his set of principles of poetic experience and poetic value, Richards drew on the various models that had recently been developed in the nascent discipline of psychology and its allied sciences. First, the philosophical psychology associated with James, whose The Principles of Psychology (1890) may have suggested to Richards the title for his own Principles of Literary Criticism, as well as with his teacher Ward, the author of Psychological Principles (1918). Second, the stimulus-response psychology of behaviourism that JB Watson had derived from Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex. Launched in (1913) with Watson’s article ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It’, behaviourism was the dominant paradigm in psychology during the 1920s and 1930s. Third, the neurology of CS Sherrington, as outlined in his The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906), which set out explicitly to prove ‘the Darwinian doctrine of evolution’ (Sherrington, 1906: 1) by demonstrating experimentally how the organism’s nervous system integrates stimuli and turns them into appropriate responses. Speaking in 1973, Richards remembered these as being ‘the real formative things’ for him in the early 1920s, and that at the time he was ‘someone really saturated in psychology and neurology making up a book about the literary approaches’ (Richards, 1973: 28). Although very different and often mutually incompatible, these theories were all recognisably Darwinist in their focus on the dynamic relationship or interaction between object (stimulus or environment) and subject (response or organism), which they each conceived in terms of ‘adaptation’. Drawing on these theories, Richards therefore understands poetic experience dynamically, as an interplay between reader and poem, arguing that how we experience a poem ‘depends entirely upon the condition of the mind’, which, in turn, ‘depends upon the impulses which have previously been active in it’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 111). He also sees the value of poetic experience as lying in the way that it adapts the mind to its environment, which includes its capacity to gain value from poetic experience. What gives such experience its value, Richards writes, is ‘the organisation of its impulses for freedom and fullness of life’ (2001 [1924]: 117).
Principles of Literary Criticism comprises 35 short chapters, which combine to create that ‘body of coherent knowledge with many provinces’ (Quoted in Constable, 2001: ix-x). As well as chapters on our experience of music, sculpture and the visual arts, there are also chapters on the artist, creativity and imagination; on value, communication and the mind; on ‘Badness in Poetry’ and its negative effects; on the distinction between ‘The Two Uses of Language’, the referential or scientific and the emotive or poetic. But it is the chapter located almost at the book’s literal centre that is the most important: namely, chapter 16, ‘The Analysis of a Poem’, which had originally appeared as an essay in the Psyche journal in 1923 under the more appropriate title ‘Psychology and the Reading of Poetry’. It is here that Richards provides his most explicit and comprehensive account of poetic experience and value, and where he presents his well-known diagram or ‘hieroglyph’ depicting ‘the mental events which make up the experience of […] “reading” a poem’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 102). 1 For Richards, there are ‘six distinct kinds of events’ that contribute to ‘the whole reaction’ or ‘full response’ that ‘arises’ in the interaction between poem and reader, these ‘events’ beginning in ‘[t]he visual sensations of the printed words’ and ending in ‘[e]motions’ and ‘[a]ffective-volitional attitudes’ (2001 [1924]: 105).
The contributors to this Special Issue deal with Richards’ diagram and his account of poetic experience in depth, and I do not wish merely to repeat their insights. Instead, I want to focus briefly on one particular event in the poetic experience: namely, the event involving the reader’s experience of the sound patterns in the poem. Richards labels this event ‘tied imagery’, ‘free images’ or ‘verbal images’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 105). Such images, he writes, are ‘images of words’ rather than ‘of things words stand for’; they are called ‘tied’ because they have a ‘very close connection with the visual sensations of printed words’ (2001 [1924]: 105). What Richards has in mind here is what we would today call ‘sound symbolism’, and his account anticipates – and, in a sense, goes beyond – those accounts of sound symbolism outlined more recently by cognitive stylisticians such as Tsur (see, for example, Tsur, 1992, 2012).
Like Tsur, Richards assigns ‘great importance’ to the dimension of sound in the whole poetic experience (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 111), which is the reason that he places ‘tied imagery’ near the top of his diagram, its effects resonating downwards and shaping every other mental event. Its location in the diagram, Richards writes, is intended ‘to show how much’ the ‘further course’ taken by ‘streams of impulses flowing through in the mind’ when we read a poem is ‘due to’ tied imagery (2001 [1924]: 110). It is through tied images, for example, ‘that most of the emotional effects’ of a poem ‘are produced’ (2001 [1924]: 111). Unlike Tsur, though, Richards identifies not one but ‘two forms of tied imagery’ (2001 [1924]: 108). The first, which Tsur also identifies, is ‘the auditory image’, or ‘the sound of the words in the mind’s ear’. Richards explains that ‘[a]ny line of verse or prose slowly read, will, for most people, sound mutely in the imagination somewhat as it would if read aloud’ (2001 [1924]: 106). The second, ‘intimately connected’ to the first (2001 [1924]: 108), is more interesting, though: this is ‘the image of articulation’, by which Richards means ‘the feel in the lips, mouth, and throat, of what the words would be like to speak’ (2001 [1924]: 106). In other words, when we read a poem, we imagine how our mouth would articulate the sounds, our lips, mouth and throat working together to produce the sounds silently. This form is missing from Tsur’s account. For example, while acknowledging that ‘articulatory gestures do have a crucial kinaesthetic effect on how speech sounds feel’, Tsur then comments that ‘we are dealing here with an auditory phenomenon: the perceived size of speech sounds’ (Tsur, 2012: 213).
But, as I have argued elsewhere (West, 2016: 116–117), sounds are not only – or even primarily – an aural or auditory phenomenon; they are also oral or articulatory, haptic, with the reader feeling the texture of the sounds on their lips and in their mouth and throat. Thus, being closely tied to ‘visual sensations’ (the eye) and combining the aural (ear) and the oral (mouth), ‘tied images’ make poetic experience something deeply bodily and multisensorial. It is this that explains why Richards assigns such importance to sound in our experience of poetry, and why, despite the ‘literary’ in his book’s title, he focuses exclusively on poetry, which differs from other literary forms (such as plays and prose) in its foregrounding of sound patterns. Finally, it is the corporeality of tied images that enables Richards to invest poetic experience with such value: tied images have such a powerful, immediate effect precisely because they affect us physically.
Although Richards shared the belief widespread at the time that psychology was in a position to illuminate all aspects of human existence, writing in a 1921 article, ‘First Steps in Psychology’, that ‘it is hard to find any branch of human activity upon which psychology cannot throw fresh light’ (Richards, 2001 [1921]: 78), he was also aware that the discipline was indeed taking its first steps, and that his own science of criticism was also therefore in its infancy, too. Thus, Richards ends his preface to Principles of Literary Criticism with typical humility. ‘It should be borne in mind’, he writes, ‘that the knowledge which the men of AD 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our aesthetics, all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful’. ‘Poor indeed’, he continues, ‘would be the prospect if this were not so’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 5). Whether the science of criticism for which Richards laid the foundations in Principles of Literary Criticism really is already ‘pitiful’ from today’s perspective (and will be truly ‘pitiful’ at the beginning of the next millennium) is a moot question. The articles in this Special Issue suggest that it is not.
In his article, Davide Castiglione addresses some key issues that Principles of Literary Criticism raises for contemporary stylistics, including the frequent mismatch between feature (or stimulus) and effect (or response). The article’s central focus is on Richards’ diagram of poetic experience and Castiglione suggests that the stages depicted in the diagram grow in autonomy from the stimulus (the poem), thereby cueing a parallel increase in subjective appropriation and depth of processing. Craig Hamilton’s article then focuses on three key issues that Richards explores in Principles of Literary Criticism: value, experience and communication. Hamilton argues that Richards links these three issues in unique ways that might interest stylisticians today, and he focuses in particular on Richards’ notion of value, which he argues is largely missing from contemporary stylistics. Roi Tartakovsky’s article addresses Richards’ claim in Principles of Literary Criticism that the sound ‘is the key to the effects of poetry’. Comparing Richards’ theory of the role of sound in poetic experience with similar theories that both predate and postdate Richards’ work, the article argues that sound derives its power from its link to emotion. Tartakovsky illustrates Richards’ position with a close reading of Keats’ poem ‘On the Sea’. In their article, Aleksandra Violana and Michael Burke explore the specific cognitivist inclinations in Principles of Literary Criticism and evaluate the extent to which Richards’ work is in consonance with, and can contribute to, cognitivist scholarship. In particular, the article traces the similarities between a number of notions in Principles of Literary Criticism (including ‘experience of forms’, ‘muscular images’, ‘poise’, ‘texture’ and ‘rhythm’) and some key cognitivist concepts (such as ‘embodied cognition’, ‘image schemata’, ‘affordances’ and ‘texture’). Finally, Mick Short, who has done much to create the discipline of stylistics, provides an Epilogue in which he reflects on the influence that Principles of Literary Criticism and Richards’ work more generally had on him when he first began exploring the language of literature in the 1960s.
Richards begins Principles of Literary Criticism with an echo of the architect Le Corbusier’s ‘A house is a machine for living in’: ‘A book’, Richards writes, ‘is a machine to think with’ (Richards, 2001 [1924]: 3). The articles in this Special Issue devoted to Richards’ book are designed as a machine for stylisticians, and especially cognitive stylisticians, to think through some of the theoretical issues that our discipline faces.