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Introduction To Practical Criticism

Practical criticism is a method of literary analysis that began in the 1920s with experiments by I.A. Richards. He had students analyze poems without any context about the author or time period in order to focus solely on "the words on the page". This approach was later developed by William Empson and influenced the New Criticism movement. Practical criticism is now commonly used in literature exams to test students' understanding of poetic techniques, though it no longer relies on Richards' original psychological theories. While it encourages close readings of individual works, it has been criticized for ignoring the historical and social contexts of literature.

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425 views2 pages

Introduction To Practical Criticism

Practical criticism is a method of literary analysis that began in the 1920s with experiments by I.A. Richards. He had students analyze poems without any context about the author or time period in order to focus solely on "the words on the page". This approach was later developed by William Empson and influenced the New Criticism movement. Practical criticism is now commonly used in literature exams to test students' understanding of poetic techniques, though it no longer relies on Richards' original psychological theories. While it encourages close readings of individual works, it has been criticized for ignoring the historical and social contexts of literature.

Uploaded by

UsmanHaider
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Introduction to Practical Criticism

I.A. Richards visiting the Alps, ca. 1930.


Practical criticism is, like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young
discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A.
Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when
they were written. In Practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analysed the results of his
experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words
on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards
this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological
benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems
and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an
'organised response'. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the
poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.
In the work of Richards' most influential student, William Empson, practical criticism provided
the basis for an entire critical method. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) Empson developed his
undergraduate essays for Richards into a study of the complex and multiple meanings of poems.
His work had a profound impact on a critical movement known as the 'New Criticism', the
exponents of which tended to see poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings. New
Critics would usually pay relatively little attention to the historical setting of the works which
they analysed, treating literature as a sphere of activity of its own. In the work of F.R. Leavis the
close analysis of texts became a moral activity, in which a critic would bring the whole of his
sensibility to bear on a literary text and test its sincerity and moral seriousness.
Practical criticism today is more usually treated as an ancillary skill rather than the foundation of
a critical method. It is a part of many examinations in literature at almost all levels, and is used to

test students' responsiveness to what they read, as well as their knowledge of verse forms and of
the technical language for describing the way poems create their effects.
Practical criticism in this form has no necessary connection with any particular theoretical
approach, and has shed the psychological theories which originally underpinned it. The
discipline does, however, have some ground rules which affect how people who are trained in it
will respond to literature. It might be seen as encouraging readings which concentrate on the
form and meaning of particular works, rather than on larger theoretical questions. The process of
reading a poem in clinical isolation from historical processes also can mean that literature is
treated as a sphere of activity which is separate from economic or social conditions, or from the
life of its author.
The classes which follow this introduction are designed to introduce you to some of the methods
and vocabulary of practical criticism, and to give some practical advice about how you can move
from formal analysis of a poem and of its meaning to a full critical reading of it. They are
accompanied by a glossary of critical terms, to which you can refer if you want to know what
any of the technical terms used in the classes mean.
Above all, however, the classes are intended to raise questions about how practical criticism can
be used. Do poems look different if they are presented in isolation from the circumstances in
which they were written or circulated? Do our critical responses to them change if we add in
some contextual information after we have closely analysed them? Do our views of a poem
change if we hear it read, if we see the original manuscript, or if instead of simply seeing the
words on a page, as I. A. Richards would have wished, we see words on a screen?

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