ABSTRACT
Richards was the ideal critic for his age and made its problems his own. He was in sympathy with its great writers and invented the most capacious method for analyzing their work. Without questions, the success of his theory and method hastened the overwhelming acceptance of what we now call "high modernism" (as in the poetry, for example, of Eliot and Stevens) in university study. In Britain he instructed the two principal critics of their generation, William Empson and F. R. Leavis. His influence reached out to many universities in the Commonwealth. In the United States he was the acknowledged "father" of New Criticism, which occupied the theoretical high gound in the academic study and teaching of literature from the r940s to the r96os. 1 Its members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Eliseo Vivas, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, William Wimsatt, Reuben Brower, and Earl R. Wasserman. Further, such critics as F. 0. Matthiessen, Kenneth Burke, Elsie Elizabeth Phare, M. H. Abrams, Denys Thompson, David Daiches, Muriel Bradbrook, Q. D. Leavis, Mark Schorer, Angus Fletcher, and Helen Vendler have expressed their indebtedness. Richards' influence was well-timed, coinciding with the expansion of higher education and graduate programs in English, especially rapid after World War II.2 There was a repetition, on a much larger scale, of Richards' experience after World War I when the veterans returned to Cambridge. In I935
Blackmur said that "no literary critic can escape his influence [which] stimulates the mind as much as anything by showing the sheer excitement as well as the profundity of the problems of language-many of which he has himself made genuine problems of language." Richards' aesthetics, according to Vivas, "constitutes the most systematic defense of poetry that we can find in the English language." In 1952 W. Jackson Bate wrote that Richards "rivals T. S. Eliot as the most important contemporary influence" in criticism. "Mr. Richards's intellectual history," said Allen Tate, "will probably turn out to be the most instructive, among critics, of our age."3
