In this ground-breaking book, Richards writes about that time he experimented on his students. What did he ask them to do? Well, he handed 'em a packet of poems and said "analyze these," without giving them any other information about their works—no titles, no authors, no dates of publications, nada.
Nice one, teach. His central question was this: Do you need to know anything about the author of a work and the historical context in which it was written in order to analyze it well?
Also, riddle us this Batmen: If you had to analyze one poem by Shakespeare and one by someone you'd never heard of, would you give the poems equal attention?