ABSTRACT
The admissions that I am making might be disputed, particularly on grounds of vagueness of formulation, but my target is large implausibilities rather than adjustments within probabilities. For when Richards writes of order or organisation, he is not referring to the kind of organisation I have been describing but to an organisation of the attitudes. Skilled poetry-reading, he maintained, would result in a reproduction within the reader of the organisation of attitudes that occasioned the poem. It is important to distinguish between skill in attitudes and skill in poetry-reading. To have the emotional attitudinal pattern reproduced in one's own experience as a result of reading a poem properly is to enjoy, as it were, a finished product. It is not the same as following step by step the poet's process in writing the poem, with its re-readings, its judgings, and its revisings, its concomitant development of "attitudinal" organisation. Then again one might imagine that different readers could read the same poem with the right emphases and perceptions, having freed themselves from misleading ideas, and yet have emotional experiences of different power and consequently greater or less satisfaction of impulses. Some readers after all are more inhibited in their capacity to feeI than others, and this capacity might also be regarded as a skill, independent of that of poetry-reading. Acting or the recital of poetry aloud might, it is true, be means of increasing this capacity to feel; but so, for that matter, might psycho-analysis. f: . . Even if we were to grant that the having of a highly ordered emotional experience, as a gift from an expert, would improve our own ordering, would this generalise to poems of a different structure, and, above aII, would it generalise to emotional responses to situations other than poetry-reading ones? Richards thought that it would,
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because he believed in the efficacy of formal transfer of training. This belief, though it has energised his life's activities, is a most criticisable part of his thought. Let us consider again its formulation.
