The Practical Criticism Experiment
I.A. Richards and the Making of Close Reading

About this book:

**What happens when you strip away every name, date, and footnote—and ask readers to judge a poem on its own merits?** In 1925, I.A. Richards did exactly that, handing thirteen anonymous poems to Cambridge’s brightest minds. The results were a scandal: these elite students praised doggerel as genius, dismissed Shakespeare as trash, and revealed the chaos lurking beneath the surface of "good taste." *The Practical Criticism Experiment* plunges you into that packed lecture hall, into the chaos of those written protocols, and into the birth of an idea that would upend literary study forever.

This is more than a history lesson—it’s a detective story about how we read, why we misread, and what it means to actually pay attention. Richards’s experiment didn’t just expose his students’ failures; it sparked a revolution that conquered academia, from Empson’s dazzling ambiguities to the New Critics’ conquest of American classrooms, and it still shapes how you encounter every poem, novel, or tweet today. With vivid detail and sharp analysis, this book charts the rise, the backlash, and the enduring legacy of close reading—a fragile art in an age of algorithmic skims.

**If you’ve ever wondered why a text moves you (or leaves you cold), or why critics argue over a single line, this is the story you’ve been waiting for.** It’s a gripping tale of intellectual ambition, clashing egos, and a simple question that remains dangerously urgent: *What actually happens when a mind meets a page?* Turn the first sheet, and find out.