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D. E RICHARDSON
Three volumes of F. R. Leavis's literary criticism have just been republished in paperback. Is there any reason why they should be of interest now, twenty years after his death in 1978 when--even at that time--his vogue had already been swallowed up by the fashion for French critical theory?
As an undergraduate in the early 1960s I read with excitement Leavis's essays, many of them collected from his still-famous magazine Scrutiny. By the early 1970s with furrowed brow I was trying to be deeply moved
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by the jouissance of new French literary theory. When the pleasure of the theoretized text never fully overtook me, I began looking surreptitiously for literary critics who could, like Leavis, make contemporary poetry seem part of today's battle for the common good. (One such critic was the poet Donald Davie.) I was looking for what mattered to Gerard Manley Hopkins when he insisted that fame matters to a "true" poet: "What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. Education is meant for the many; standards are for public use. To produce then is of little use unless what we produce is known, if known widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good."
I was tempted to nostalgia for the enthusiasm of youth while reading these republished volumes of Leavis. But, if nostalgia is a moral danger, so can be shame at the callowness of one's pretheoretical youth. What with one temptation and the other, it becomes necessary to do justice to Leavis.
Leavis boasted of being the defender of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence when they could not get a fair reading in the universities and in the literary establishment of London. The essays in Revaluation (1936), which begin with a defense of Donne and the "Line of Wit," compose a new grand narrative of the history of English literature since Shakespeare. Leavis draws on Eliot's notion of the "dissociation of sensibility" to argue that English poetry began to lose vitality in the late seventeenth century, revived momentarily in Blake and Hopkins, and ultimately experienced a rebirth in Eliot. Leavis assumes that the...