ABSTRACT
But though there are many contrasts with The Meaning 0/ Meaning, the two books are obviously products of the same mind. Principles 0/ Literary Criticism, we find, applies to artistic theory the same treatment as The Meaning 0/ Meaning had applied to the question of meaning. It is similarly, though not so drastically, iconocIastic in its treatment of aesthetics, as its opening salvo, a chapter called The Chaos 0/ Critical Theories, at once makes cIear. It denies, too, a special separated-off aesthetic realm as its predecessor had denied a special mental realm, and it counteracts that sense of artificial abstraction many writings on aesthetics aroused in Richards, by the same corrective of spelled out psychological extensionalism. Thus what a poem is is treated in the same kind of way as what meaning is-in causal terms. Different definitions are reviewed, according to the spirit of multiple definition, but Richards' own is put forward as "by far the most convenient, in fact . .. the only workable way of defining a poem; namely, as a c1ass of experiences which do not differ in any character more than a certain amount, varying for each character, from a standard experience .. . [wh ich is] the relevant experience of the poet when contemplating the completed composition" (227). This is like defining the meaning of a sentence in terms of references 01' thoughts it symbolises, but more than references are involved, because there are also the feelings and emotions that caused these signs or contributed to these symbols. Therefore the definition is in terms of the wider term, "experiences".
