Iliad of Homer (Paperback)

Rarely has tuberculosis had such a positive affect on English arts and letters. It was during his convalescence from a bout as a teenager (his condition was chronic) that Richards discovered his passion for literature and linguistics. Yet his early collegiate studies, perused at Magdalene College, Cambridge, only tangentially exhibited this interest: he studied philosophy, taking a degree in moral sciences in 1915. After graduating, Richards once again suffered from tuberculosis. This time he convalesced in mountainous Wales, where, despite the infirmity of his lungs, he developed an interest in mountaineering that stayed with him throughout his life. Over time he was to climb almost a dozen major challenging mountains. When Richards was well enough, he returned to Cambridge, reuniting with his former classmate C. K. Ogden in 1918, with whom he began to coauthor THE MEANING OF MEANING, which was serialized in a journal Ogden published as an aid to the war effort. Though Richards had intended to follow his philosophy degree with a medical career emphasizing psychoanalysis, history intervened. Richards was offered a teaching position too good to pass up. He accepted a lecturing position at Clare College, where he honed his theory regarding English pedagogy. In 1922 he became lecturer at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which led to his being named a fellow four years later. However, Richards's most significant experience teaching English was in China to students for whom English was not the mother tongue. Teaching there, he and Ogden developed their theory of "Basic English." "Basic," an acronym for "British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial", was a whittled-down version of English, consisting of a mere 850 words, in which Richards and Ogden sought the possibilities of international communication. Richards eventually joined the faculty at Harvard to train devotees of the concept and develop a text book. Hoping to integrate multimedia, mass communication of Basic English, he was granted funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the art of cartooning at the studios of Walt Disney. Though there was support for basic English, no country adopted the method, and the concept of Basic English was dropped in the 1960s. Late in life Richards began to compose poetry, and published two collections, as well as a play, before his death.