The poet and critic I. A. Richards once said he “didn’t think History ought to have happened”. It was because he hated the past for its suffering and cruelty that he turned to Philosophy and, later, to the newly emerging discipline of Literary Criticism, where he rejected the practice of backgrounding works of literature in historical periods and insisted on considering them as autonomous artefacts with their own internal logic. In his groundbreaking study The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Richards argued that the purpose of a poem was to restore order to our confused impulses. Art does not instruct us on how to live by what it says (he was dismissive of “message hunters”), but by what it shows: by its unity, harmony and balance. We learn what is important from its form rather than its content. Words do not just express experience, they create it. The moral lesson is the poem itself.
Despite Richards’s dislike of history, he offers, in his sonnet “The Terrorist”, first published in the TLS in 1978 and then in New and Selected Poems (1978), a brief history of terrorism from the lone-wolf assassin with a grudge to its weaponization in twentieth-century international politics, and follows it with the most obvious of questions and answers. The poem’s architecture could not be simpler – which is precisely Richards’s point. Blood-lust on this scale risks destroying all perspective. But the lodestone of a sonnet, perhaps, with its recurring, magnetic rhymes, can help us reset our moral compass.
The Terrorist
Of old the solitary hedge-shot told
Of not much more than a hatred and its aim;
Later, the boasting, vanity and the claim
From the murderers, to responsibility and the shame;
Not long ago, with the napalm bomb, came
The couldn’t-be-worse, we thought. We did not know
As yet, how far the human fiend could go.
The Lebanon exhibits … the Ethiopian game.
How long before they all will do the same?
Why daren’t the terrorist his own heart ask
What holds him subject to his awesome task?
It isn’t common fear, but a pride grown so bold,
A flame so fierce that his own spirit’s cowed,
Can’t tell itself of what Man should be proud.
I. A. RICHARDS (1978)
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