‘The key to the effects of poetry’: IA Richards and the centrality of sound

In Principles of Literary Criticism, IA Richards articulates succinctly what is perhaps his most pointed position on the centrality of sound in poetry: ‘in most cases’, he writes, the sound ‘is the key to the effects of poetry’. While Richards never says exactly why or how sound is so important, we can begin to understand this when we address what he says elsewhere in the book about sound. This article suggests that two interrelated points in Richards’ thinking help us understand sound as the key to the effects of poetry. First, Richards understands sounds to be in-and-of-themselves empty, gaining meaning or emotional weight only when they are heard within a given context (that of the reader and of the poem). Second, he sees emotional, rather than intellectual, effects as the stuff of poetic language, and so the centrality of sound is logically contingent on a link that Richards hints at between sound and emotion. This article pursues these two points with recourse to Richards and to other, both earlier and later, theorisations of the role of sound, before illustrating Richards’ position with the aid of Keats’ poem ‘On the Sea’.