The Role of Figurative Language in Meaning Formation:
A Study of I. A. Richards' Theory of Sense and Feeling
Academic Details:
Name : Sandipkumar Jethava
Roll No. : 26
Enrollment No. : 5108250020
Sem. : 02
Batch : 2025–27
E-mail : sandipjethava9081@gmail.com
Assignment Details:
Paper Name : Literary Theory & Criticism and Indian Aesthetics
Paper No. : 109
Paper code : 22402
Unit : 01 -I A Richards's The Practical Criticism - Figurative
Language
Topic : The Role of Figurative Language in Meaning Formation:
A Study of I. A. Richards' Theory of Sense and Feeling
Submitted To : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted Date : 3rd May 2026
Word Count : 3468 words
Table of Contents
Abstract
Research Question
Hypothesis
1.Introduction
2. Theoretical Framework: The Four Kinds of Meaning
3. Figurative Language: Sense-Metaphors and Emotive-Metaphors
4. Sense, Feeling, and the Interaction Theory of Metaphor
5. Misreading, Stock Responses, and the Pedagogical Stakes
6. Critical Evaluation: Strengths and Limitations
Conclusion
Works Cited
The Role of Figurative Language in Meaning Formation:
A Study of I. A. Richards' Theory of Sense and Feeling
Abstract
This paper examines I. A. Richards's theory of figurative language as articulated in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), with particular focus on how Richards frames the categories of "sense" and "feeling" as the twin pillars of poetic meaning. Richards contends that the total meaning of any utterance is a composite of four interdependent functions sense, feeling, tone, and intention and that figurative language, above all other literary devices, is the site at which these functions most dynamically interact, creating meanings that exceed logical paraphrase. By analysing Richards's theoretical framework alongside his close readings of anonymously presented poems, this study argues that figurative language is not merely an ornamental feature of poetry but a fundamental mechanism through which emotional attitudes are organised, communicated, and received. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship from Project MUSE, ResearchGate, and Cambridge University's Faculty of English, this paper further situates Richards's theory in relation to subsequent developments in New Criticism and cognitive metaphor theory, evaluating both the enduring relevance and the critical limitations of his model. The assignment concludes that Richards's distinction between sense-metaphors and emotive-metaphors anticipates later frameworks such as Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, thereby establishing his work as a foundational moment in the history of literary and linguistic thought.
Keywords: I. A. Richards, figurative language, sense and feeling, Practical Criticism, metaphor, New Criticism, meaning formation, emotive language
Research Question and Hypothesis
The central research question of this assignment is as follows:
How does I. A. Richards's theory of the "four kinds of meaning" and the relationship between sense and feeling in particular illuminate the function of figurative language in the formation of poetic meaning?
This question directs attention to the mechanisms by which metaphor, personification, and other figures of speech do not merely decorate meaning but constitute it. Richards's framework suggests that the meaning of a poem is never reducible to its literal paraphrasable content; rather, meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of its four components. Figurative language, as the most concentrated site of this interplay, becomes both the problem and the resource of interpretation.
The hypothesis advanced in this paper is twofold. First, that Richards's distinction between sense-metaphors (metaphors operating on the level of referential meaning) and emotive-metaphors (metaphors operating on the level of emotional attitude) maps directly onto his broader distinction between the sense and feeling functions of language. Second, that this mapping reveals figurative language to be not ornamental but constitutive of poetic meaning that is, the meaning does not exist prior to the figurative form in which it appears, and therefore cannot survive translation into non-figurative language without significant loss.
1. Introduction
Language, in its most ordinary use, communicates information but when a poet writes, "Death kindly stopped for me" (Emily Dickinson), the meaning that reaches the reader is no longer merely informational. Something else occurs: the abstract fact of mortality is clothed in social courtesy, and through that figurative gesture, feeling shapes the sense of the utterance. This transformation from literal proposition to emotionally layered meaning lies at the very heart of I. A. Richards's theoretical project. Richards, widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern literary criticism, argued that the study of language must attend not only to what words denote but to the complex web of emotions, attitudes, and intentions that accompany every act of utterance.
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979) was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician whose 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 aesthetic object (Wikipedia). His intellectual contributions are spread across four central texts: The Meaning of Meaning (1923, co-authored with C. K. Ogden), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). Together, these works constitute a sustained inquiry into how language makes meaning and how the meanings made by poetry differ fundamentally from those made by scientific prose.
This assignment focuses on the intersection of two concerns central to Richards's work: his taxonomy of the "four kinds of meaning" and his theory of figurative language. Specifically, it examines how Richards's categories of "sense" and "feeling" operate within figurative language to produce meanings that are irreducible to plain statement. The research question guiding this study is: How does Richards's theory of sense and feeling account for the role of figurative language in the formation of poetic meaning? The hypothesis advanced is that, for Richards, figurative language and metaphor in particular is the primary vehicle through which sense and feeling are fused, producing meanings that cannot be recovered by paraphrase alone.
2. Theoretical Framework: The Four Kinds of Meaning
Richards inaugurates his discussion of meaning in the "Analysis" section of Practical Criticism by insisting that the problem of making out the meaning of a poem is the fundamental problem of criticism. He identifies four distinct but interrelated functions that language performs simultaneously in any act of communication. In Practical Criticism, The Meaning of Meaning and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards advocates a close textual and verbal analysis of poetry; language is made up of words, and hence the study of words is of paramount importance in the understanding of a work of art. Words, according to Richards, communicate four kinds of meaning or the total meaning of a word is a combination of four contributory aspects: Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention (Devika).
"Sense" refers to what is said: the items, states of affairs, or ideas that the speaker directs the hearer's attention toward. It is the referential, propositional content of an utterance the level at which the dictionary can assist a reader. "Feeling" refers to the speaker's emotional attitude toward what is being said: the bias, the accentuation of interest, the pleasure or displeasure that colours the utterance. "Tone" is the speaker's attitude toward the audience, shaping the register and mode of address. "Intention" is the conscious or unconscious aim of the utterance its purpose in the larger communicative act. Richards does not treat these as discrete and separable components but as simultaneous dimensions of any total meaning.
The significance of this schema for the analysis of figurative language is immediately apparent. A metaphor, by its very nature, operates across all four functions at once: it presents a sense (a comparison between two unlike things), carries a feeling (an emotional attitude toward the comparison), adopts a tone (a certain relationship to the reader implied by the figure), and serves an intention (the effect the metaphor is designed to achieve). Meaning is of four kinds sense is the state to which the words direct the reader's attention; feeling is the way the author sees these objects; tone is the author's attitude towards the reader; intention is the effect which the author is trying to bring about by his words (INFLIBNET e-PG Pathshala). What makes figurative language so charged and so dangerous for the careless reader is precisely this compression of all four functions into a single verbal gesture.
3. Figurative Language: Sense-Metaphors and Emotive-Metaphors
Richards's specific treatment of figurative language in Chapter II of the "Analysis" section of Practical Criticism builds directly on the four-kinds framework. He begins by distinguishing between two uses of language that he terms "scientific" and "emotive." Generally, sense predominates in the scientific language and feeling in the poetic language; the figurative language used by poets conveys emotions effectively and forcefully, and words acquire a rich associative value in different contexts (Devika). This does not mean that sense is irrelevant in poetry Richards is emphatic on this point but rather that in poetry, sense is typically instrumentalised in the service of feeling, tone, and intention.
Within this broader distinction, Richards identifies two types of metaphor. A sense-metaphor is one in which the shift of meaning is grounded in a similarity between the objective properties of the things compared: the vehicle illuminates the tenor by pointing to a shared attribute accessible to observation or reasoning. An emotive-metaphor, by contrast, is one in which the shift is grounded not in objective similarity but in the similarity between the feelings that the tenor and vehicle characteristically evoke. The same word, in different contexts, may function as a sense-metaphor or an emotive one, depending on which aspect of meaning the context foregrounds (Devika).
This distinction has profound consequences for reading practice. When a poem uses a sense-metaphor, the reader is invited to perceive an objective resemblance, however surprising or unconventional. When a poem uses an emotive-metaphor, the resemblance is affective rather than logical: the reader is being asked to feel about X the way they feel about Y, not to think about X as if it were Y. Richards argues that the failure to distinguish between these two types the attempt to read an emotive-metaphor as if it were a sense-metaphor demanding logical justification is one of the most common sources of misreading in the student protocols he analyses.
Richards draws on several of the anonymous poems in Practical Criticism to demonstrate this failure. The student responses to the poem "Solemn and Gray" reveal a characteristic misreading: readers objected that a cloud could not "harbor desires" and that a mantle was incapable of "possessing imaginations" grievances that hinged upon an assumption about language that would prove detrimental to the realm of poetry (ResearchGate, 2024). These readers were applying the standards of scientific language demanding that the sense-content of the metaphor be verifiable to what were emotive metaphors operating at the level of feeling. Richards's diagnosis is that such readers had not understood the difference between the two uses of language, and therefore could not receive the figurative meaning the poem was offering.
4. Sense, Feeling, and the Interaction Theory of Metaphor
Richards's analysis of figurative language in Practical Criticism finds its fullest theoretical elaboration in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), where he develops what has come to be known as the "interaction theory of metaphor." Here, Richards moves decisively beyond treating metaphor as a rhetorical ornament or a mere figure of substitution. In this major work, Richards defines rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding and its remedies focusing on how words work in discourse and examining the interaction of words with each other and with their contexts, demonstrating how a continual synthesis of meaning or "principle of metaphor" gives life to discussion (Oxford University Press).
Central to this theory are the concepts of "tenor" and "vehicle." Richards defined the tenor as the underlying subject or concept that the metaphor seeks to illuminate, while the vehicle is the image or idea through which the tenor is expressed. In the metaphor "time is a thief," the tenor is "time" and the vehicle is "thief." The metaphor draws its meaning from the interplay between these two elements (The Metaphor Society). Crucially for Richards, the meaning of a metaphor is not the tenor alone (the literal subject) or the vehicle alone (the figurative comparison) but the resultant of their interaction: a meaning that neither element could have produced on its own.
The connection between this interaction theory and the sense/feeling distinction is direct. When Richards writes in The Philosophy of Rhetoric that "when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction" (qtd. in ResearchGate, "Emergent Representations"), he is pointing to a process in which sense and feeling are co-produced. The tenor carries its sense-content (what is literally being discussed) and its feeling-content (the emotional attitude that typically attaches to it); the vehicle brings its own sense and feeling; and the metaphorical meaning arises from their fusion. A metaphor is a point at which many different influences may cross or unite hence its dangers in prose discussions and its treacherousness for careless readers of poetry, but hence, at the same time, its peculiar quasi-magical sway in the hands of a master (CEC/UGC Study Material).
This interaction is not reducible to a simple transfer of properties from vehicle to tenor. Richards insists that the relationship between tenor and vehicle is more dynamic: the tension between the two is not a flaw but the very mechanism by which metaphors stimulate interpretation, creativity, and new understanding (The Metaphor Society). The reader who encounters a powerful metaphor is invited not merely to note a resemblance but to undergo a reorganisation of their emotional and cognitive attitudes to feel and think about the tenor in ways that the vehicle makes possible, while simultaneously allowing the tenor to inflect and qualify the vehicle.
5. Misreading, Stock Responses, and the Pedagogical Stakes
Richards's analysis of figurative language is inseparable from his diagnosis of misreading. The protocols gathered in Practical Criticism reveal a systematic failure among educated readers to respond adequately to the figurative dimensions of poetry. Richards identifies several causes of this failure, of which the most relevant to the present discussion is the failure to recognise the distinctive nature of the poetic use of words as compared to their utilisation in prose. While the literal sense of words may be readily apprehended with the aid of a dictionary, the ability to grasp the poetic sense of words is not as easily rectified (ResearchGate, 2024).
Richards diagnoses this as a problem of category error: readers trained primarily in scientific or expository prose bring inappropriate expectations to poetry, demanding that figures of speech justify themselves by the standards of literal sense. The result is what Richards calls a "stock response" a set of automatic, conventional reactions that bypass genuine engagement with the specific emotional and cognitive content of the poem's figurative language. Richards classified student responses into categories including inability to understand the author's meaning across sense, feeling, tone, and intention; problems with visualizing and therefore understanding imagery; and dependence on stock or sentimental response (INFLIBNET e-PG Pathshala).
The pedagogical implication Richards draws from this is that the cultivation of critical reading must focus specifically on developing sensitivity to figurative language as a vehicle for feeling. Words in poetry have an emotive value, and the figurative language used by poets conveys those emotions effectively and forcefully; rhythm, metre, and meaning cannot be separated they form together a single system that is not separable into discrete entities but is organically related (Barad). The argument, extended, is that a prose-paraphrase can never adequately convey the total meaning of a poem precisely because the figurative form is not separable from its content: the sense and feeling of a poem are co-constituted in its specific figurative choices.
This insight has direct consequences for university-level literary education. Richards's experiment was designed not merely to document the prevalence of misreading but to suggest remedies: a more rigorous training in close verbal analysis, a heightened awareness of the multiple dimensions of meaning, and an education of the emotional responses that figurative language is designed to organize. In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929), Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism (Poetics Today, Duke UP).
6. Critical Evaluation: Strengths and Limitations
Richards's framework has exercised an enormous influence on the subsequent history of literary criticism. His most influential student, William Empson, developed the implications of Richards's approach to figurative ambiguity in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), treating the multiple meanings of poetic figures as a resource rather than a problem. In the work of Empson, practical criticism provided the basis for an entire critical method that had a profound impact on the New Criticism, whose exponents tended to see poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings (Cambridge Faculty of English).
Furthermore, Richards's interaction theory of metaphor anticipates some of the central claims of twentieth-century cognitive linguistics. As a scholarly analysis confirms, Richards's theory saw metaphor as language's "omnipresent principle" and "the essence of thinking," anticipating two of the three central claims of cognitive metaphor theory as developed by Lakoff and Johnson (Brill/Richards' Theory of Metaphor). Richards's Interaction Theory marked a turning point in metaphor scholarship instead of viewing metaphor as ornamental language (as Aristotle had argued), Richards highlighted its cognitive and semantic productivity, paving the way for Max Black's elaboration of the interaction theory and eventually the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) (The Metaphor Society).
However, Richards's framework is not without its limitations. Several critics have noted that his model tends to universalize the reading experience in ways that elide differences of cultural context, historical location, and social position. His experiment was conducted with Cambridge undergraduates a highly specific and historically situated group of readers yet he drew conclusions about the nature of poetic language and human response in general. The assumption that sense and feeling function in broadly similar ways across all readers does not account for the ways in which figurative meaning is always embedded in cultural and ideological frameworks. A postcolonial reading, for instance, would note that the figurative traditions of non-Western poetry may involve entirely different relations between sense and feeling than Richards's model predicts.
Additionally, Richards's insistence on treating the poem as a self-contained verbal structure analysable without reference to author, history, or context reflects an ideological choice as much as a methodological one. The removal of authorial context was meant to liberate readers from biographical fallacy and to encourage attention to the words themselves; but it also produces what subsequent critics have identified as its own form of ideological mystification, naturalising certain modes of figurative reading as "correct" while dismissing others as failures.
Conclusion
This assignment has argued that I. A. Richards's theory of figurative language, as elaborated in Practical Criticism and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, establishes a powerful framework for understanding how meaning is formed in poetry through the interaction of sense and feeling. By identifying the four kinds of meaning and showing how figurative language particularly metaphor simultaneously engages all four dimensions, Richards provides a systematic account of why poetry cannot be replaced by prose paraphrase and why inadequate responses to figurative language constitute failures of the whole meaning-making process.
The distinction between sense-metaphors and emotive-metaphors, grounded in the broader distinction between sense and feeling, is one of Richards's most durable contributions: it explains not only how misreadings occur but what a successful reading requires. To read a poem well, on Richards's account, is to achieve a fine adjustment of all four meaning-functions to receive not only the sense but the feeling, not only the information but the attitude, and not only the metaphor but the full weight of emotional meaning that its figurative form carries. Richards is simply the most influential theorist of the century, as Eliot is the most influential of descriptive critics; Richards's claim to have pioneered Anglo-American New Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s is unassailable (Devika).
His framework, despite its cultural limitations, remains a foundational starting point for any serious engagement with the role of figurative language in literary meaning-making. Its anticipation of cognitive metaphor theory, its rigorous attention to the verbal texture of poems, and its insistence on the emotional dimensions of meaning ensure that Richards's Practical Criticism continues to be read, taught, and debated in postgraduate programmes of English literature worldwide.
Works Cited
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