ABSTRACT
Gerald Graff's polemical formulation of the issues has the virtue of placing them in a historical and ethical context. Graff urges a revival of referential or propositional truth and logical consistency in poetry, something he considers Richards to have denied. Neoclassicism held premises of objective "Nature," universals, and rational understanding; it was succeeded by romantic individualism, subjective idealism, and the premise of feeling. Richards is an "extreme case" of the view that the truth of poetry is self-justified on the grounds of impulse and attitude and needs no reference to external standards. Graff realizes that Richards does not negate "sense" in poetry; on the contrary he is "severe with readers who fail to construe the 'Sense' of a poem accurately." What troubles Graff is the gap between the poem and "workable criteria of evaluation," between the poem and behavior. Richards does not show how the wholeness of an experience can be "authenticated," nor how positive social values may be supported, others suppressed, in the poetic experience; nor, when he asserts that poetry is an "adjustment" to reality, how poetry can then affect or alter that reality. "Although it would be far from what Richards intends, his principle that 'experience
is its own justification' provides an unanswerable justification of any extreme sadism or totalitarian power worship in conduct or of indiscriminate emotionalism in poetry." These conclusions stem from Richards' lacking a satisfactory explanation of reference in poetry; he makes emotive attitudes "independent" of references, and poetic value "independent" of external truth. "Poetic emotions," Graff writes, must be "grounded upon objectively asserted views of the world."9
