Ivor Armstrong Richards, known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, and rhetorician whose work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory, which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential æsthetic object.

Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of the New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by Charles Kay Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).

among Richards' students was Marshall McLuhan, who also applied and developed the term and the concept of feedforward.

References

Ivor Armstrong Richards, Wikipedia