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 influential map of the English literary tradition in...

For more than forty years, Frank Raymond Leavis was an insistently hovering presence in the intellectual and academic life of Britain and America. Sternly and abrasively contemptuous of what he considered the easy adulation and routine puffery that passed for judgment in the...

Ian MacKillop. New York. St. Martin's. 1997. xvii + 476 pages + 8 plates. $35. ISBN 0-312-16357-6. What is a life in criticism? To judge by Ian MacKillop's performance here, it consists of adding up assorted facts and anecdotes about his biographical...

The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Michael Gray. Continuum, 736 pages, $40. Bob Dylan is a senior citizen. That’s right: The voice of a generation, the voice that implored millions to “stay forever young,” hit 65 last month. Robert Zimmerman with the Zimmer Frame...

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 ambivalent response to T. S. Eliot. Beginning, in effect, as a disciple of Eliot's criticism and as the main advocate of his early poetry, Leavis has been led, with an almost inevitable logic, to a major confrontation with his one-time mentor. This revaluation of Four Quartets is particularly revealing of Leavis's basic assumpti...

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…. "Close, delicate wholeness"; "pressure of intelligence"; "concrete realisation"; "achieved actuality"—are phrases which carry Leavis' signature as indelibly as "high seriousness" bears that of Matthew Arnold. The list is worth examining. It does not r...

One thing is certain: when the literary history (and for that matter, the social history) of England in the mid-twentieth century comes to be written, Leavis's influence is something which the historian will have to take into account…. [Leavis] has affected—and very often profoundly affected—the response to literature of perhaps thousands of students and readers, and if we allow 'influence' to cover every kind of effect (including violent and hostile reaction), it w...

Provides a brief introduction on the prominent critic F. R. Leavis, and an analysis of one of his major works, The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought.