For many of us with an interest in twentieth-century literary criticism, Ivor Armstrong Richards is at once a central and a problematic figure. He was, of course, one of the most influential critics of the modern age, if not the most influential. His emphasis on rigor, precision, and the poem-as-object earned him (from some) the impressive sobriquet “father of the New Criticism,” while his preoccupation with theory and with the relativity of literary truth reflects more than coincidental—and less than delightful—affinities with the practitioners of deconstruction. As John Paul Russo observes in his exhaustive new study of Richards’s life and work, Richards, for better and for worse, “led the age of analysis into literary criticism.”¹

Born in Cheshire, England, in 1893, the son of a chemical engineer, Richards was, for all his love of poetry, aware from a tender age of the centrality of science and technology to modern society; yet this centrality, in his view, was not properly reflected in the way literature was talked and written about. As a student at Magdalen College, Cambridge, around the time of the First World War (when recurrent tuberculosis kept him out of uniform), he looked upon the varieties of criticism then in vogue and found them—well, unscientific: in the wake of 1890s Aestheticism, literary critics tended toward post-Paterian impressionism, with its windy appreciation of “Beauty” and “The Grand Style,” and toward biographical and