fortunate move he could have made. At Cambridge such luminaries as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis were pioneering the approach to literature known as the New Criticism.
Earlier criticism of poetry, while it pointed out the beauties of diction, rhythm and sound, had tended to look upon individual poems as the expression of the ideas and personality of the poet. I. A. Richards, however, was concerned primarily with how the poem communicated meaning—not meaning in the sense of concepts that could be paraphrased, but states of mind and emotion. He emphasized that most words had several different meanings, and that the meaning of a word in a poem varied according to its context. The trick, then, was to play close attention to every word in a poem, to juggle possible meanings, and to decide intelligently which ones made the
