Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

Prose is an uninterrupted, polite warfare with poetry . . . every abstraction wants to have a jibe at poetry and wishes to be uttered with a mocking voice.—The Joyful Wisdom.

If the availability of his past experience is the first characteristic of the poet, the second is what we may provisionally call his normality. So far as his experience does not tally with that of those with whom he communicates, there will be failure. But both the sense in which it must tally and the sense in which the artist is normal need to be carefully considered.

Within racial[*] boundaries, and perhaps within the limits of certain very general types,[*] many impulses are common to all men. Their stimuli and the courses which they take seem to be uniform. At the same time there are many other impulses which are not uniform. It is difficult to give instances, since there are so few names for impulses, but sounds are fairly uniform while words used in isolation are fairly ambiguous stimuli. Impulses could, if we knew enough, be arranged in an order of general uniformity or stability. Some impulses remain the same, taking the same course on the same occasions, from age to age, from prehistoric times until to-day. Some change as fashions change. Between the two extremes are the vast majority; neither, when the nervous system is vigilant, very fixed nor very erratic; set off by a given stimulus and taking the course they do because other impulses are also active or have just been active.

For successful communication a number of impulses with their effective stimuli must be common to the communicators, and further the general ways in which impulses modify one another must be shared. We evidently cannot expect that many total situations and responses will have been common, and it is not necessary that they should be. Within limits the disparities can be overcome by what is called imagination.

There is nothing peculiarly mysterious about imagination. It is no more marvellous than any other of the ways of the mind. Yet it has so often been treated as an arcanum that we naturally approach it with caution. It is desirable at least to avoid part of the fate which befell Coleridge,[*] and our account will be devoid of theological implications.

Given some impulses active others are thereby aroused in the absence of what would otherwise be their necessary stimuli. Such impulses I call imaginative, whether images occur or not, for image-production is not at all essentially involved in what the critic is interested in as imagination. Which other impulses are brought in is in part determined by which were co-operative together originally when all the impulses had their own stimuli, that is to say, in the non-imaginary experiences from which the imaginary experience derives. In so far as this factor comes in the imagination may be said to be repetitive. The imagination we are concerned with may be called formative[*] by way of distinction. For present circumstances are at least as important. Remember in a changed mood a scene which took place under a strong emotion. How altered is its every aspect! The selection of the impulses which take effect is changed; the impulses are distorted, they run in different courses. The imaginative construction is always at least as much determined by what is going on in the present as by what went on in the past, pasts rather, whence it springs.

Many of the most curious features of the arts, the limitation of their number, their formal characteristics and the conditions of impersonality, detachment and so forth, which have given rise to much confused discussion of the ‘æsthetic’ state for example, are explained by this fact. In difficult communication the artist must find some means of so controlling a part of the recipient’s experience that the imaginative development will be governed by this part and not left to the accidents of repetition which will differ naturally from individual to individual. As a basis for every art, therefore, will be found a type of impulse which is extraordinarily uniform, which fixes the framework, as it were, within which the rest of the response develops. These are among the most uniform impulses, among those which come nearest to having a one-one correlation with their stimuli, of all those which we experience.

In poetry, rhythm metre and tune or cadence; in music, rhythm pitch timbre and tune; in painting, form and colour; in sculpture, volume and stress; in all the arts, what are usually called the formal elements are the stimuli, simple or complex, which can be most depended upon to produce uniform responses. It is true that these responses are not so uniform as the reflexes, as sneezing or blinking for example. But even these are to a considerable extent subject to interference and modification by impulses of higher levels. What communication requires is responses which are uniform, sufficiently varied, and capable of being set off by stimuli which are physically manageable. These three requisites explain why the number of the arts is limited and why formal elements have such importance.

They are the skeleton or scaffolding upon or within which the further impulses involved in the communication are supported. They supply the present dependable part of the experience by which the rest, the more erratic, ambiguous part of the imaginative development, is controlled. By themselves (although there has been a natural tendency in criticism to maintain the contrary opinion) they are often quite inadequate. As we have seen, differences of all degrees, both between and within the arts, exist.

The fashion in which the poet’s impulses must tally with those of his readers, will now be moderately clear. The poet is in the least favourable position, perhaps, among the artists, but as a compensation the range and fullness of the communications open to him is, if he can overcome the difficulties, very great. But evidently the least eccentricity on his part, either in the responses which he makes to rhythms and verbal tunes, or in the ways in which these govern and modify his further responses or are modified by them, will be disastrous. It is the same for all the arts. A defective or eccentric colour sensibility, a common defect as is well known, may play havoc with an artist’s work, qua communication, without necessarily involving any deficiency of value in his own experience. It is theoretically possible for an individual to develop in himself states of mind of very high value and yet to be so unusual in his own sensibility as to seem ridiculous or be incomprehensible to others. The question then arises as to which is in the right, the artist or his uncomprehending critics. This frequent dilemma raised alike by great innovating artists and by nincompoops brings us back to the problem of normality.