ABSTRACT
After Richards began writing poems in his sixtieth year, he was likened to the aging Socrates learning to play the lyre. 1
Two careers were already behind him. He had lived and taught in England, China, and the United States and had written fifteen books. His late calling to poetry was endowed with a wealth of human experience and an unrivaled analytical knowledge of the technique of poetry. Four collections of an original, densely textured poetry appeared over the last twenty-five years of his life: Goodbye Earth and Other Poems (1958); The Screens and Other Poems (196o); Internal Colloquies (1971), which collected previous books and included Further Poems (1960-70); the three cantos entitled "Whose Endless Jar" in Beyond (1974); and an anthology New and Selected Poems, with the addition of New Poems (1971-77).2 During the same period he published four plays: A Leak in the Universe (1956), Tomorrow Morning, Faustus! An Infernal Comedy in verse (1962), Why So, Socrates? (1964) taken from Plato's dialogues, and Job's Com/orting (1971), a verse translation of the Book of Job that appeared in Internal Colloquies. There are also three unpublished plays in prose: "Erna: An Extravaganza" in two acts (1963), "The Wrath of Achilles" in one act (1970-71), and "Homage to Hector" in one act (1970-71). We have, therefore, a substantial collection. Richards had nurtured a third career to go with the others.
