2 ECOPOETICS AND THE MYTH OF MOTIVATED FORM Greg Garrard and Rina Garcia Chua The study of English Literature in the mid- to late twentieth century, particu- larly in the classrooms of Britain and its former Empire, took its moral purpose from Leavisism but its method from IA Richards. The pedagogy and practice of close reading are derived from Richard’s Practical Criticism (1929), which reported on experiments carried out at Cambridge on readers presented with poems stripped of both author and historical context. Richards claimed that readers in these circumstances encountered typical “difficulties” (Richards 13), from failure to understand the “plain sense” of a poem through the “Scylla and Charybdis” of “sentimentality” and “hardness of heart” (16) to distracting “doc- trinal adhesions.” Close reading – which Richards asserts “All respectable poetry invites” (203) – is intended to counteract these difficulties by bringing sustained attention to the words on the page. Since this method happens to align with the exigencies of the unseen written examination, the supposed gold standard of assessment in British and imperial education systems, practical criticism, and close reading took their place at heart of English Literature pedagogy throughout the remainder of the century. One of Richards’s difficulties is “sensuous apprehension,” or the challenge some readers experience in sensing poetic rhythm: “The gulf is wide between a reader who naturally and immediately perceives this form and movement (by a conjunction of sensory, intellectual and emotional sagacity) and another reader, who either ignores it or has to build it up laboriously with fingercounting, table- tapping and the rest” (14). The fortunate sensitive reader, though, having accu- rately divined the rhythm and deduced the meter, might be inclined to ascribe too much significance to the pattern. Indeed, “not a few” of Richards’s experi- mental cohort maintained that “the meaning of the words is irrelevant to the form of the verse” and that “this independent form possesses intrinsic merit” (232). Bringing his trademark humor and scientific skepticism to the question,