A new book by Leavis on Lawrence,… some two decades after the ground-breaking [D. H. Lawrence: Novelist], might well have been an extraordinary event. I, for example, welcomed Thought, Words and Creativity with enthusiasm and high expectations. Here would be, I hoped, the provocative after-thoughts, the final corrections and extensions of understanding, the serenely authoritative wisdom that accrues to a powerful mind which has contemplated a subject for fifty years. But judged by these expectations, Thought, Words and Creativity is a very great disappointment. Leavis offers few new insights or even fresh ideas, demonstrates a remarkable lack of awareness of the other work on Lawrence which has been done since 1955, seems totally ignorant of modern cultural plurality (which has promoted both unspeakable vulgarity and philistinism, and deeply assimilated appreciation for Lawrencean values), and most sadly of all, rehearses all the old grievances against T. S. Eliot, which had...