by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

“Context: The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”
– Oxford English Dictionary

In the early twenties, Professor Ivor A. Richards, in search of a new way to teach the assessment and appreciation of poetry, came up with an idea that seems commonplace now, but at the time was interesting enough to challenge existing conventions. What he did, an experiment he detailed in his book Practical Criticisms (1929), was to distribute to his students, poems written by a wide range of people from ancient masters to modern practitioners, from Shakespeare to a random poet in the reigning literary magazine, without the names of the authors printed on the pages of the poems.