Even as Richards inadvertently paved the way for the study of poems as independent structures,… he created, as he meant to, several obstacles which his followers had to overcome in order to earn this position. It is impossible to conceive of the work itself as a self-contained entity when it is relegated to being a shadowy middleman that merely reflects the psychology of the two people who have to do with it, the poet and the reader. And it is reduced precisely to this status when Richards defines it solely in terms of the experiences of its readers and the experience of its author. So long as Richards maintains his concept of the interaction of contexts, so that the reader's life outside the poem is as crucial a factor in his aesthetic experience as is the life he discovers in the poem, he has left us a good...