I. A. Richards

I. A. Richards
I. A. Richards in the Alps c. 1930
Born	Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-02-26)26 February 1893 Sandbach, Cheshire, England
Died	7 September 1979(1979-09-07) (aged 86) Cambridge, England
Occupation	Educator
Alma mater	Magdalene College, Cambridge
Period	20th century
Spouse	Dorothy Pilley Richards

Ivor Armstrong Richards CH (26 February 1893^[1] – 7 September 1979^[1]), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.

Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).