ABSTRACT
The artist's experience to one side, Richards was left with two other positions to pursue on wholeness: the poem itself and the reader's
response. For some years Richards could not adequately separate these two positions. The burden of his argument from "synaesthesis" was that impulses and attitudes become systematized and intensified into equilibrium. Yet in Principles of Literary Criticism, he insisted that one could not trace the psychological equilibrium back to "sets of opposed characters in the object," that one could not, say, necessarily derive synaesthesis from synesthesia; otherwise one would have a simple "formula for beauty." Still, stimulus and response were connected. Richards went back and forth between the one and the other, but for all his psychological researches, he received his central insights on wholeness from his meditation on the poem: from its "stability," "unity," and status as "exemplar," from that "kind of mutual and just control of part by part which is health."5 In the event, his terms for psychological wholeness served almost equally well for literary analysis, not only as to "impulses," "attitudes," "tension," "opposition," "equilibrium," and the rest; but, less obviously, words like "freedom," "stability," "movement," "completion," and "possibility." This dual functioning of terms allowed Richards to slide between mind and poem and to understand and define one quite literally in terms of the other. A successful poem is a model in miniature, and nowhere is this better shown than in the way that the poem's "possibilities" are left "open," releasing the reader into "larger freedoms." 6 Impulses that "adjust themselves at so many levels" may in fact go on doing so, "perhaps indefinitely."7 Words are a "permanent set of possibilities of understanding."8 While Richards was reluctant to sever the poem from the experience of it, both romantic organicism and the exigencies of textual analysis gradually led him to make a strong case for poetic autonomy. But this was not meant to deny that the poem is at the same time an experience, that it may be misread in ways that systematically shut down its real meanings, that it creates mental wholeness or fails to do so. Or, to turn matters around, critical analysis may discover that the failure to unify lies with the poet; that is, the poem is "bad."
