André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism by Franklin Rosemont, André Breton: What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings ed. by Franklin Rosemont (review)

78 Books direct engagement in contemporary politics is approvingly related in Valery and the Modern World (Chapter 5). Perhaps the most impressivesection is the clear and systematic summary of the 29,600 pages of Cahiers that deal with philosophical and psychological subjects. Valery wrote these pages from the age of 23 in 1894until his death in 1945by rising at 4.00 a.m. each morning and writing for three or four hours. The book closes with an account of the main areas ofValtry’s influence, followed by a brief collection of critical comments both in French and in English. As a brief but comprehensive guide or introduction to the whole of Valery’swork, the book is likely to be very useful for teachers and students alike. Complementarities: Uncollected Essays of I. A. Richards. John Paul Russo, ed. Carcanet New Press, Manchester, England, 1977. 293 pp. f6.00 Reviewed by Elmer H. Duncan* Theworks of I. A. Richardsextend over a period of more than 50 years. In 1921 and 1923, he collaborated with C. K. Ogden to write Foundations o f Aesthetics and The Meaning o f Meaning. Probably his best-known works are Principles of Literary Criticism(1925) and Practical Criticism(1929).Among his more recent works are Coleridge on Inlagination (1935), The Pliilosopliy o f Rhetoric (1936), How to Read a Page (1942), Speculative Instruments (1955) and Goodbye Earth and Other P o e m (1958). His works continue to have an up-to-date ring. For example, he and Ogden gave a clear emotivist analysis of value terms (in 1923!),long before the work of the Vienna Circle, A. J. Ayer, etc. Similarly,the writings of George Dickieare at the center of recent discussion of aesthetics in the U.S.A. today; it is possible to assesshow much Dickieowesto Richard’s work. One needs only to compare Chapter 11, The Phantom Aesthetic State, of Richards’ Principles o f Literary Criticism with Dickie’s essay on Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience (Pliilosopliy 62, 129 (1965). In the present book, Russo has brought together ‘uncollected essays’by Richards, written between 1919 and 1974.The essays are divided into three groups: Theory of Criticism, Practice of Criticism and Toward Autobiography. The title of the book is taken from Niels Bohr’s term coniplenientarity, and is used to refer to looking at things from several different, apparently conflicting, points of view. The essays in the book cannot be neatly summarized, but readers will find incisive comments in almost every one of them. As early as 1919, Richards offered a cutting response to Croce’s aesthetic (which is based on ‘expression’): ‘The best suggestion would seem to be that the term (i.e. ‘expression’) be banished altogether from considered criticism, or retained only under the heaviest suspicion’ (p.14). Similarly, in an essay entitled Belief (1930), Richards anticipated the ‘verification’ analysis of meaning. In his 1972 lecture entitled Complementarities, Richards looks back on the days that he and C. A. Mace spent attending the lectures of the great Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore in 1912-1915 and 1918-1919. He says of Moore: ‘He was not likeany other lecturer I have heard or heard of. He made you sure that what was going on mattered enormously-without your necessarilyhavingeven a dim idea as to what it could be that was going on’ (p. 109). Part Two on the Practice of Criticism features sensitive analyses of the works of G. Hopkins, Dostoevsky, Forster, Lawrence, etc. An interesting aspect of the essays in the book is that each one-even the earliest-is prefaced by a few paragraphs in which Richards comments on what he had written as much as 50years before. In somecases he is critical of his own youthfully naive writings. For example, he says of the 1927essayon The God of Dostoevsky: ‘Theterms I was using in 1927 were not up to the job I was asking them to do’ (p. 148). The autobiographical section of the book includes a 1968 interview, in which Richards again reviews his early work with Ogden: ‘It’s a most extraordinary experience, finding you can agree with someone. Decades later it wasn’t the case that we...