Abstract

The early works of I. A. Richards, while not committed to hard-line verificationism, nonetheless seem persuaded of the central tenet of logical positivism, that the only truth strictly so-called is the truth disclosed by the methods of empirical science. This minimal positivism, coupled with a non-physicalist form of behaviorism, is evident in books like Science and Poetry (1926) and Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). However, if Richards was a positivist, he was a positivist who wanted to save poetry from positivism. Primitive positivists like A. J. Ayer impenitently regarded poetic discourse as meaningless. Since they are neither analytic nor available for empirical testing, the statements found in poems are really pseudo-statements, expressions of feeling and no more. Richards, who loved poetry, feared that people would cease to read it or write it if they were convinced that it was nothing but emotional gush. And so, in his early books, he developed an affectivism in which poetry, by helping us order our conflicting impulses, acquires a value distinct from the value of science. On this view, poetry is not a means of expressing and communicating propositional truth-only science does that-but a device for constructive behavior-modification by means of language. Meanwhile, from the very beginning of his career, Richards had been a diligent student of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was convinced that the works of Coleridge contained many important insights into the nature and effects of poetry which, in order to be made generally accessible and secure wider appreciation, needed only to be disentangled from the metaphysics of romantic idealism in which they were embedded. Quotations from Coleridge appeared with great frequency in his own writing and teaching. Kathleen Coburn predicted that sooner or later Richards would have to write a book on Coleridge, and eventually her prophecy was fulfilled. Setting out to rewrite Coleridge in the language of empiricism, Richards produced Coleridge on Imagination (1934), which suggested to some of his readers that Richards had not converted Coleridge to empiricism but that Coleridge had made Richards an idealist, if not a metaphysical then at least a linguistic idealist. It is the Richards thus baptized in the Alphean flood who speaks in the lectures on The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) delivered two years after the publication of the Coleridge book.' From first to last, in all his writings and through all his changes of mind, Richards insisted that he was a pragmatist. And indeed, in every project he undertakes, from Basic English to literary theory, he is unfailingly preoccupied with the practice of reading and the possibilities of communication. If behaviorism and romanticism are just the low-mimetic (preterite) and high-mimetic (elite) forms of pragmatism, respectively, then Richards' progress from the former to