ABSTRACT
Mr I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism is it seems to me, a most instructive book. The curious thing is that to the instruction it contains the author himself appears completely blind. Practical Criticism is instructive because the great majority of us are as convinced as were his undergraduates, of our ability to appreciate poetry. The greater part of Longfellow's work, for instance, no longer ranks as high as it once did. Again, the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe, has not been allotted its rank by the decision of any single critic. The Divine Comedy is not as accessible to us who are alive today, as it was to its author's contemporaries. The Japanese chorus in The Mikado do not, when they dance the hornpipe, have the feeling a sailor has when he hauls on a rope, and yet their feeling is connected with a sailor's actual hauling.
