Government and Poetry

The most important trajectory in the early career of I. A. Richards begins and ends in Chinese moral philosophy. This recognition suggests that the binary views of language offered in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Science and Poetry (1926) can be regarded as confusing oversimplifications of his views on utterances leading to equilibra and harmonies of impulses. Practical Criticism (1929) and Mencius on the Mind (1932) address this problem by elaborating earlier and more defensible complexities and thus completes an intellectual arc that began with the composition of ‘The Sense of Beauty’ in 1921 (Foundations of Aesthetics, 1922).