F. R. Leavis Summary

F. R. Leavis is widely considered the most important literary critic of the twentieth century. He is identified with the consolidation of English as a university subject and with the production of an ... Read more

Critical Essay by D. W. Harding It is the distinction of [New Bearings in English Poetry] that it consistently treats poetry as one of the major products of normal human activity, and the making of po... Read more

Critical Essay by William Walsh Criticism, as Leavis conducts it, is the relevant, delicately attentive analysis of a complete response to literature; it is a commentary upon the act by which one ente... Read more

Critical Essay by George Steiner Like certain writers of narrow, characteristic force, Leavis has set aside from the currency of language a number of words and turns of phrase for his singular purpose... Read more

Critical Essay by George A. Panichas For the shortcomings in Leavis' criticism we have cause for regret. Magnanimity, after all, is not without its place in the humane tradition of learning. Bu... Read more

Critical Essay by Philip Hobsbaum Up to, and more or less including, the D. H. Lawrence book of 1955, [Leavis's] work has a singular coherence. Revaluation and New Bearings mapped out the terra... Read more

Critical Essay by R. P. Bilan The extensive critique of the Four Quartets which F. R. Leavis presents in The Living Principle (1975) perhaps brings to an end the lengthy history of his increasingly am... Read more

Critical Essay by Eugene Goodheart The humanist criticism of the nineteenth century persists in the work of F. R. Leavis. As critic and teacher for over forty years and as editor of Scrutiny, Leavis h... Read more

Critical Essay by H. M. Mcluhan [It is not] possible to arrive at a critical evaluation of a poem or an age from the point of view of rhetorical exegesis, as one can see in the work of Richards and Em... Read more

Critical Essay by Martin Jarrett-kerr [What] is the immediate and total impression of [The Common Pursuit]? Dr. Leavis's criticism is nothing if not personal (the word is not meant in a depreci... Read more

Critical Essay by Eliseo Vivas Nothing will be gained by beating about the bush. To my astonishment, I found [D. H. Lawrence: Novelist] both difficult to read and unsatisfactory in several fundamental... Read more

Critical Essay by R. J. Kaufmann [I mean] to recommend Leavis as a thinker, a "critical thinker" whose subject matter is the moral (not the moralistic) use of literature. The stress must... Read more