Five-minute digest
Practical Criticism
Summary
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment is I. A. Richards's account of an experiment in reading, published in London in 1929 as a companion to his Principles of Literary Criticism. For some years at Cambridge, Richards handed out printed sheets of poems, ranging in his words from a poem by Shakespeare to a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, without the authors' names. He asked his audience, most of them undergraduates reading English for an Honours degree, to comment freely in writing. He called these written comments protocols, and in the following week he lectured partly on the poems but more on the comments. The book has four parts. Part I explains the conditions and aims of the experiment and lists ten difficulties of criticism. These include making out the plain sense of a poem, grasping its sensuous form and rhythm, the misleading role of visual imagery, mnemonic irrelevances drawn from the reader's private memories, stock responses, sentimentality, inhibition, doctrinal adhesions or the problem of beliefs, technical presuppositions, and general critical preconceptions. Part II, Documentation, presents thirteen poems one by one, each followed by a selection of protocols and Richards's comments. The responses show readers misconstruing grammar, reacting to a word or subject rather than the poem, praising or condemning poems for their supposed doctrine, and confidently guessing at authors. The authorship and dates of the poems are hidden in Appendix C, and Richards urges readers not to consult it until they have formed their own judgments. Part III, Analysis, examines the difficulties in turn. Its first chapter proposes four kinds of meaning in any utterance: sense, feeling, tone and intention. Later chapters treat figurative language, sentimentality and inhibition, and doctrine in poetry. Part IV, Summary and Recommendations, reviews the culture revealed by the protocols, including immaturity, lack of reading, inability to construe and reliance on authority, and recommends the careful teaching of reading. The book's method of judging unsigned poems through close attention to the words became a standard classroom exercise and helped shape the New Criticism.
Top Lessons
Reading without labels
Richards removed authors' names so that readers had to judge the poems themselves. The experiment shows how often reputation, not attention, shapes our opinions, a lesson in honest judgment for any student.
The ten difficulties
Richards lists obstacles to good reading, such as failing to make out the plain sense, stock responses, sentimentality and doctrinal adhesions. Naming the obstacles helps students notice them in their own reading.
Four kinds of meaning
Richards says that every utterance has sense, feeling, tone and intention. Students can apply the four to a psalm, a letter of Paul or a poem to see how much more than information words carry.