[I. A. Richards' poetry] is a poetry of speculation, taking as its subject states of mind and feeling experienced in the later years of a long life. Richards is gnomic, epigrammatic, and conclusively inconclusive: "What," "Whence," "Whither," and "Why" are the cardinal points of his compass of interrogation. "What do, what should, I want?" one poem inquires; "Why re-awaken?" asks another; "Whereto? Wherefrom?" echoes a third, thinking about Frost's two diverging roads. The persistence of questioning betrays Richards' conviction that query is still a viable form of thought…. One of Richards' best known "early" poems, reprinted [in New and Selected Poems], was called, in a very satisfying chiasmus, "Harvard Yard in April: April in Harvard Yard": it enunciates a firm, if tender, rejection of the shows of things in their classically appealing forms … for the "degrees of loneliness" of the thinker-spectator. The paradox of all of Richards' work...