My book, I fear, will seem to many sadly lacking in the condiments which have come to be expected in writings upon literature. Critics and even theorists in criticism currently assume that their first duty is to be moving, to excite in the mind emotions appropriate to their august subject-matter. This endeavour I have declined. I have used, I believe, few words which I could not define in the actual use which I have made of them, and necessarily such words have little or no emotive power. I have comforted myself with the reflection that there is perhaps something debilitated about a taste for speculation which requires a flavouring of the eternal and the ultimate or even of the literary spices, mystery and profundity. Mixed modes of writing which enlist the reader’s feeling as well as his thinking are becoming dangerous to the modern consciousness with its increasing awareness of the distinction. Thought and feeling are able to mislead one another at present in ways which were hardly possible six centuries ago. We need a spell of purer science and purer poetry before the two can again be mixed, if indeed this will ever become once more desirable. In the Second Edition I added a note on Mr. Eliot’s poetry which will elucidate what I mean here by purity, and some supplementary remarks upon Value; in the Third, a few minor improvements have been made. It should be borne in mind that the knowledge which the men of A.D. 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our æsthetics, all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful. Poor indeed would be the prospect if this were not so. The thought, “What shall we do with the powers, which we are so rapidly developing, and what will happen to us if we cannot learn to guide them in time?” already marks for many people the chief interest of existence. The controversies which the world has known in the past are as nothing to those which are ahead. I would wish this book to be regarded as a contribution towards these choices of the future. Between the possession of ideas and their application there is a gulf. Every teacher winces when he remembers this. As an attempt to attack this difficulty, I am preparing a companion volume, _Practical Criticism_. Extremely good and extremely bad poems were put _unsigned_ before a large and able audience. The comments they wrote at leisure give, as it were, a stereoscopic view of the poem and of possible opinion on it. This material when systematically analysed, provides, not only an interesting commentary upon the state of contemporary culture, but a new and powerful educational instrument. I. A. R. _Cambridge, May_, 1928. CHAPTER I The Chaos of Critical Theories O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!—_The First Part of King Henry the Fourth._