I. A. Richards Findings

I.A. Richards was born on February 26, 1893, and died on September 7, 1979. He was an English critic, poet, and teacher who was highly influential in developing a new way of reading poetry that led to New Criticism, an influential movement in literary theory during the middle 20^th century.  Richards went to Magdalene College in Cambridge and was a lecturer in English and moral sciences there from 1922 to 1929.

I. A. Richards was one of the first professors to make a systematic study of how his students actually read poetry without guidance. He describes the methods he used in his famous book, Practical Criticism, written in 1923.  Richards gave his students lots of poems but no extra information, like the titles or authors, and asked them write commentaries about the poems.  He discovered that many of his students failed to understand the poems.