To drive home his point that few people had been properly taught how to read, Richards played a rather cruel trick on his students. He gave them a series of poems to analyze—some of them doggerel by such popular versifiers as “Woodbine Willie,” others, great poems by writers such as Donne and D. H. Lawrence. None of the poems were signed, however. To their embarrassment, students found, when Richards revealed the authors, that they had lavished praise on Woodbine Willie and showered contempt on Donne and Lawrence.
McLuhan—although he came to Cambridge too late to participate in this particular experiment—never forgot the lesson. For the rest of his life he would be fascinated with
