ABSTRACT
Mr I. A. Richards is a British psychologist devoted to a very special career, which is the application of his science to poetry. Poetry is an illusion like superstition, and based on the same subjective need of expression. The analysis of a poetic experience given in science and poetry reads like the study of a brain. The poets, says Mr Richards, offer them their charming myths and create a nature that is not the same as the soulless one given by the physical sciences: It is such a Nature that the religions in the past have attempted to provide for man. Mr Richards's progress as an aesthetician consists in his reluctant and gradual adoption of the view that cognition is the essential element in a poetic experience. He is increasingly concerned over the fact that the poet makes assertions; but unfortunately they seem to be only mythical: 'pseudo-statements' which science has to reject.
