Spenser, Donne, I. A. Richards and the Limitations of Practical Criticism

Abstract

I. A. Richards virtually created close reading or practical criticism, still the basic tool of criticism of any school. Richards was deeply influenced by modernist aesthetics and the poetry of John Donne. With expressivist poetry of thick surfaces where the poem is not trying to mean but to be, close reading is fruitful. But with other sorts of poetry — the rhetorical and the highly simple or sparse — practical criticism can mislead, its assumptions, practices and tools being at odds with them. Generalising from Spenser’s poetry, a taxonomy of English poetry is suggested : the poetry of being, the rhetorical, and the sparse or georgic ; some critical approaches appropriate to rhetorical and sparse poetry are indicated : a renewal of rhetorical appreciation, engagement with the message of a poem, and accepting that sometimes a poem means just what it says.