ABSTRACT
The notion of decadence lurks within all three of LA. Richards' early extended formulations of literary criticism: Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926), and Practical Criticism (1929).1 It hovers most obviously around his representations of early twentieth-century Western society and culture. These are seen to be decadent because they are dominated by popular, rather than high, culture, and by the sciences rather than the arts. This primacy of the popular and the scientific is associated with the threat posed to civilization by the forces of chaos, and Richards' views on the role and the methodology of literary criticism will be shown, in this essay, to be a direct response to that threat.
