Here, at last, was the prophet we had been waiting for…he was infinitely more than a brilliant new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning-flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World…Poets, ordered Mr. Richards, were to reflect aspects of the World Picture. Poetry wasn't a holy flame, a firebird from the moon; it was a group of interrelated stimuli acting upon the ocular nerves, the semicircular canals, the brain, the solar plexus, the digestive and sexual organs. It did you medically demonstrable good, like a dose of strychnine or salts. We became behaviourists, materialists, atheists. In our conversation we substituted the word ‘emotive’ for the word ‘beautiful’; we learnt to condemn inferior work as a ‘failure in communication’, or more crushing still, as ‘a private poem’. We talked excitedly about ‘the phantom aesthetic state’.