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 assumptions, for in opposing Eliot's sense of reality he is forced to bring his own view of life to a new point of explicitness. (p. 151)
When the Four Quartets originally appeared Leavis accorded them the highest possible praise. In his review of the poems, entitled 'T. S. Eliot's Later Poetry' (1942), Leavis explicitly commended the exploration of the complexities of experience below the doctrinal or conceptual religious frame…. Leavis was totally appreciative of Eliot's poetry here, but in a slightly later review, 'Approaches to T. S. Eliot' (1947), he returned again to the question of Eliot's limitations as a critic, especially those revealed in his predominantly negative response to Lawrence. None the less, Leavis's assessment remained generally positive.
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