Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
The Explorer
By Helen Vendler
I. A. Richards: His Life and Work
by John Paul Russo
Johns Hopkins University Press, 843 pp., $39.95
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979) was perhaps the last of the Victorian sages. Like Ruskin or Mill, he tried to contain within himself the chief currents of his time: the state of the world, the state of scientific learning, the state of ethics, the state of art. Because of his training in philosophy and in science, he was a firm advocate of method, proof, and verification; he disbelieved in any physical force (e.g., God) unsupported by physical evidence. As a humanist (who became a lifelong teacher of literature) he admired the cultural achievements not only of the West, but also of the East (especially China). An indomitable advocate of international understanding, he broke his life on the rack of international misunderstanding in his forty-year effort to establish Basic English as a universal means of intellectual communication.
Review, 4402 words
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