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...

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 has been the modern embodiment of this critical tradition. His work provides an excellent measure of its present strengths and weaknesses. Against increasing skepticism about the legitimacy of high culture, Leavis has passionately argued that at stake in the defense of what he calls the great tradition is not simply English as a discipline but th...

The greatest problem of criticism has always been to work with a sound understanding of the relationship between literary qualities and the values of life in general; the major errors have come either from treating literature too simply in terms of general ethics, or from trying to explain literary values in dissociation from other values. What Leavis developed was a language for evaluating emotion—in terms essentially of one's attitude to one's own emotions: was one nourishing them for...

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 terrain of English poetry; The Great Tradition and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist did the same for the novel. Leavis's views on teaching were given in Education and the University and in his introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, and the latter also indicated his line on 19th-century English thought. Any lacunae remaining were filled by the...

[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 depreciatory sense); my assessment of it will therefore be personal too. Re-reading, then, in one volume essays which (most of them) I had read before scattered over several years, the effect for me was—let me say frankly—one of a profound satisfaction. To describe the satisfaction a little more precisely I should say that it was the satisfa...

That F. R. Leavis is a first-rate critical personality is certain, but that is by no means the same thing as saying that he is a first-rate literary critic. No doubt he has at times achieved that stature; at other times not at all. (p. 289) What I chiefly like about Leavis' work are its Johnsonian qualities: the robustness, the firmness, the downrightness. He is not one to beat around the bush, to play the diplomat, to cultivate ambiguity, or to shun controversy. A critic in the Arnoldian tradition, ...

[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 fall equally on moral and literature, for it is precisely the distinction of Leavis that he has had the tact and intelligence largely to preserve this balance. (p. 248) Seen from one perspective, Leavis's whole work is a series of wide-ranging, superlatively intelligent, violently partisan responses to the repellent and central fact of...

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. But genius, mutatis mutandis, has its failings. In the end, I think, we shall remember Leavis (and Scrutiny) not for his hardness, or his harassments, but for disciplining us in how to read; for trying to save us from that "spiritual Philistinism" with its "implicit belief that the only reality we need take account of in orderin...

There could be, no doubt, a standard of literary values so high, so icily severe, that in its sight a Virginia Woolf would possess nothing but a slender talent. But from this height a Dr. Leavis would not exist at all. His loudest screams could never be heard. His claim to write even one sentence worth reading could not be accepted. This is where the arrogantly dogmatic, absolutist critic, behaving more like the Grand Inquisitor or Calvin than a sensible man of letters, walks into a trap. For if our time is...

The problem of the practical critic who has ambitions as a social moralist as well is to stretch his microscopically intricate method of analysis into a medium of prophecy; his texts have to become tablets, his readings utterances of unalterable law, the corpus of his favourites an embattled cell of opponents to 'the American blankness' or the 'technologico-Benthamite civilisation'. As F. R. Leavis has declined from a critic into a lay preacher, he has turned what used to be a st...

That Dr. Leavis approaches literature with a singular intensity is presumably by now a commonplace; and the intensity is usually thought of, I imagine, as manifesting itself primarily in Dr. Leavis's insistence upon the need for making continual strenuous discriminations and in the rather rigorous kind of engagement that he has often been involved in with other critics. But what is equally important, and much less frequently remarked upon, is that the intensity derives, fundamentally, from his no les...

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 enters into as full as possible a possession of the experience given in the words. When sensibility is made articulate there will be found in it elements of judgement and discrimination. But they are explicit in the account only because they are implicit in the response. They are distilled by the experience itself, not items carted in from outsid...

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 poetry as being at least as responsible an occupation as, say, scientific research. In fact the quality of the book may be indicated by saying that an intelligent scientist (if he were free from conventional preconceptions about literature) could read it without getting exasperated and without a sense of lacking initiation. It is only those for...

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 respects. At its best, Mr. Leavis's study of Lawrence is as good as, or better than, his essays in The Great Tradition or in The Common Pursuit. But one of the factors that account for its excellence, the author's strong emotional ties to his subject, tends to make him see virtues that are not there, and to overlook flaws that...

There are obvious dangers attendant on any criticism which assumes that there are absolute standards of perfection against which we can measure works of art. The critic who starts off with this assumption is driven as he proceeds to elaborate and define his measuring rod of what art should be. Before long he is in danger of usurping the creative function: we find that he has unconsciously invented a schematic poetry of his own, which is simply the kind of poetry he might have written had he been poet instea...

I am, I fear, too much of a theorist not to feel strongly the ambiguity, shiftiness, and vagueness of Leavis's ultimate value criterion. Life. In its implications and rejections it brings out the limitations of Leavis's concept of literature and the narrow range of his sympathies. Life for Leavis is first of all simply realist art—not merely in a sense of copying or transcribing a social situation, a dramatic, objective rendering of life, of course, but as we find it in Shakespeare and ...

[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 Empson. Basically a rhetorical exegesis is concerned with indicating the "strategy" employed by a writer in bringing to bear the available means of persuasion. One can go on indefinitely describing the situation from which the strategy emerges, elaborating whole psychological and political treatises without ever reaching the point...

It would be hard to over-rate the importance of Mr. Leavis' [The Great Tradition] for the present time. The critical problem of the novel is stirring once more, and unless Mr. Leavis is simply ignored, it will be impossible again to deal with the English novel, as we have in the past, as if the great novelists of its central tradition did not exist, as if, consequently, freaks and fakes like Djuna Barnes and Ronald Firbank were serious matters, authentic minor novelists like Virginia Woolf major nove...

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,...