Practical Criticism: A Study Of Literary Judgment

Excellent reading if you need to learn and research literary criticism.

A USEFUL CLASSIC.

Similar as a historical document to The ABC of Writing, or How To Read A Sentence. But beyond that, useless.

In PRACTICAL CRITICISM, I. A. Richards develops a theory of poetic criticism that would later be termed the New Criticism. At the time of its publication in 1929, his ideas were not terribly new but for the first time he formalized a set of rules that allowed a reader of poetry to deconstruct a poem using nothing more than the words on the page. In our current age of deconstruction, New Historicism, Freudianism, feminism, Marxism, post-colonial studies and the like such a quaint notion that the critic need not poke in the cultural subtexts that might be lurking in the margins seems amazingly unsophisticated. In fact, today's victim, gender, and race methodology of literary criticism suggests that even to assert the possibility that words on paper possess Eternal Truths is also to paint the scarlet letter of A (anti-liberal) squarely on the forehead of the critical miscreant.Richards believed that poetry could be analyzed by a close reading of theme, symbol, tone, and any other literary device that used to be taught in Intro to Lit back in the day. He presents unidentified poems for the reader to analyze. Such an opportunity presents one with the task of using these New Critical skills to come to grips with the meaning of a poem. I found his approach a huge breath of fresh air and eminently worthwhile. Each time that I read of a modern theorist who insists that all readings are misreadings and that only a breakdown of the poem's binary polarities will unravel the Inner Meaning, I could retch. For the undergraduate who has not yet been inculcated with the demons of Derrida or the power assertions of Foucault, PRACTICAL CRITICISM is a must. For the teacher of that undergraduate, it is way too late.

This book was conceived as an experiment.Around 1930, IA Richards gave a group of Cambridge undergraduates a selection of poems, without any indication as to the poems' authorship, and invited them to give their responses. The result should be, and still is, a sobering reminder of what happens to our appreciation of literature (or any art) when we approach it without the usual frameworks of expectation. Mediocre poems by minor poets were warmly admired for their depth of feeling and their lushness of detail. Patriotic doggerel got a good reception, with the readers explaining away the badness of the poetry by assuming that it must mean something more than it appeared to mean. A sonnet by John Donne ('At the round earth's imagined corners'), whose critical stock at the time was as high as it's ever been, was regarded by many readers as a piece of simple-minded religiosity. Perhaps the most hated poem of all was a brief but moving poem by DH Lawrence about loss of innocence; at the time, Lawrence was one of the hippest of hip writers, and you can't help thinking that if only the readers had known it was by him, they would have regarded it very differently.Practical Criticism is the funniest and most alarming works of academic lit-crit ever written, because in reading it, you can't help but think that you, too, would probably been as utterly wrong-headed as some of these readers are. It incidentally demonstrates that the Barthesian dream of the death of the author, while a lovely dream and even a worthy ideal, is an impossibility: most readers are incapable of giving a poem the attention it deserves unless the prestige of the author persuades them that it's worth it.Watch out for editions. In the Kindle edition, the authorship of the poems is not disclosed. (Richards hid it at the back of the book, by printing the names in reverse; the Kindle edition omits this appendix entirely.) The 70s Routledge reprint includes the appendix.

This is a delightful book, highly entertaining. Reading the comments on the unidentified poems is fascinating, and Richards's casual comments are very funny. HOWEVER, my version of this book (the pictured brown modern reprint) has a disastrous problem - they have omitted the final two indexes, including the one where the authors are revealed. This removes part of the point of the book. I thought it was unfair to deduct a star for this, but someone needs to put it right at the publishers...the comments of the reader who read two separate poems as a single one are particularly to be enjoyed... 'the transition from verse 8 to verse 9 rather struck me. I thought it a little sudden.'