I A Richards

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Richards, I. A. ( Ivor Armstrong Richards) (1893–1979), critic and poet, became a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1929, then in 1931 moved to Harvard, where he devoted many years to the study of linguistics and education. He was the founder, with Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), of Basic English, ‘an auxiliary international language comprising 850 words arranged in a system in which everything may be said for all the purposes of everyday language’; Richards and Ogden published two works together, The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922, with J. Wood) and The Meaning of Meaning (1923). In a literary context Richards is best known for his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926), and above all Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929), a work which revolutionized the teaching and study of English. It was based on an experiment conducted by Richards in Cambridge in which he issued unsigned poems to students and asked for their written comments. Richards's attacks on vagueness, sentimentality, and laziness in poets and readers, and his praise of irony, ambiguity, complexity, and allusiveness, did much to create the climate which accepted Modernism, and greatly influenced Empson (his student from 1928 to 1929) and Leavis; but perhaps his greatest contribution lay in his emphasis on the importance of close textual study and the danger of random generalization. (See New Criticism and practical criticism.) Richards also published several volumes of poetry; a collection, Internal Colloquies: Poems and Plays, appeared in 1972.

I. A. Richards (Ivor Armstrong Richards), 1893–1979, English literary critic. Richards was one of the founders of the school of interpretation known as the New Criticism, which stressed an awareness of textual and psychological nuance and ambiguity when studying literature. He advocated this viewpoint in influential studies including The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K. Ogden, 1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929) (see criticism ). Richards's own poetry included Internal Colloquies: Poems and Plays (1973) and Beyond (1974) Richards was well-known for his creation, with Charles Kay Ogden, of a simplified language called Basic English, which consists of a primary vocabulary of 850 words. He championed its adoption in books such as Basic English and Its Uses (1943) and So Much Nearer: Essays Toward a World English (1968), and in his teaching at Cambridge and Harvard; he even translated Plato's Republic into Basic English.

Bibliography: See biography by J. P. I. Russo (1989).

Richards, I.A. ( Ivor Armstrong) (1893–1979) English literary critic and theorist. Richard's emphasis on close reading and verbal analysis of literary works is expounded in The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929). See also literary criticism