I. A. Richards

I. A. Richards (1893-1979), English literary critic, semanticist, and educator, born in Cheshire, and educated at the University of Cambridge. He taught at Harvard University from 1939 to 1963. With the British psychologist and educator Charles Kay Ogden, Richards wrote The Meaning of Meaning (1923), a modern study of semantics viewed from a historical and critical standpoint. Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Science and Poetry (1926), and especially, Practical Criticism (1929) changed radically the way English is studied and taught. Richards emphasized the importance of close textual reading and warned against the dangers of sentimentality, generalizations, and lazy, careless reading. His work led to the New Criticism, which shaped literary analysis for much of the 20th century. His other writings include Coleridge on Imagination (1934), a study of the famous poet's theory of the imaginative faculty; Basic English and Its Uses (1943), which proposed that the entire world adopt 850 English words to facilitate worldwide communication; The Screens and Other Poems (1960); So Much Nearer (1968), a book of essays; and Internal Colloquies (1973), a collection of poems and plays.