ABSTRACT
The Central dominant change in the intellectual background may be described as the Neutralization of Nature, the transference from the Magical View to the scientific. Mr I. A. Richards says the effect of Science on Poetry is of the greatest importance 'We shall not have dealt adequately with it unless we have raised questions of great significance' but the problem is in no way elucidated by a lick-spittle attitude to science. Mr Richards is convinced that, until lately, the 'endeavour to explain the high place of poetry in human affairs' has met with few convincing results because 'until recently the preliminary task could only be incompletely carried out'. Mr Richards' views on poetry, expressed at greater length in Principles of Literary Criticism, were reviewed in an earlier number of The Calendar. The Ptolemaic system was once a certified scientific statement, Galileo's is another, differing in that it has not as yet been disproved.
