F R LEAVIS, THE CRITIC

F R Leavis was associated with the Cambridge revolution of the 1920s, along with I A Richards and
William Empson. Richards is the pioneer of practical criticism based on close reading of the text, which
came to be known as new criticism in America. Leavis did not accept the ultra close reading of the text
and he preferred the expression practice in criticism to practical criticism, but he tried to defend the
method against the attack of the so called theorists and tried to popularize it in his journal Scrutiny that
he founded in 1932. He was famously engaged in a prolonged debate with Rene Wellek, the celebrated
American critic. Leavis was indeed an admirer of I A Richards whose practical criticism provided him with
materials for a program for instructing public taste. He was a practical critic without resorting to the
intense local analysis associated with it. He rejects Richards' theory of art and his psychological
approach. He challenges Richards' idea that the reading of literature brought different impulses into
harmonious relation with each other. He wanted to protect the practice of close reading as the
legitimate activity of the department of literature and consider theory as the concern of philosophy.
Leavis like Arnold in the previous century assumed that the steady and appreciation of literature is a
precondition to the health of society. He too distrusted abstract thought and looked for a system of
literary appreciation, which bypassed fixed criteria. Like Arnold, he rejected any attempt to politicize
either literature or criticism directly. Leavis began as a devotee of Eliot's critical work as well as of his
poetry, but later greatly modified his views. He refused to accept Eliot's doctrinal techniques and he
avoided the coining of critical vocabulary and instead used as critical terms ordinary words. Life, for
example, is used by Leavis almost as a critical term as if the notion of felt experience. For Leavis the
crucial test is whether the work is conducive to life and vitality. He combined in him, the moralism of Dr.
Johnson and the anti-theoretical critical practice and social mission of Arnold. Leavis was pivotal in the
establishment of the liberal humanist tradition, which evolved out of the English studies based on close
reading. And the belief that human nature is something fixed and constant that great literature
expresses.

Leavis’ important critical works: New bearings in English poetry published in 1932. Leavis attacked
English, late Victorian poetry and proclaimed the importance of the works of T S Eliot, Ezra Pound and G
M Hopkins. He prefers their play play of intellect to the romantic sensuousness. Revaluation published in
1936. The book surveys English poetry from Donne to the Victorian romantics. It famously updates
Donne and Marvell while showing skepticism towards Milton and offers a complex treatment of
Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. The Great Tradition published in 1948. Leavis names Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad as the great English novelists. Leavis disparaged Dickens,
except for his novel Hard Times as lacking the mature standards and interests found in the works of
Henry James. He considered D H Lawrence as the only successor of the great novelist whose works
displayed openness before life. The next work is the Common Pursuit published in 1952. It is a selection
of Leavis' essays from Scrutiny. It includes his robust defense of Milton against T S Eliot and his deeply
felt engagement with Shakespeare. Then D H Lawrence, novelist published in 1955. The work confirms
Leavis' convection of Lawrence's centrality as writer and thinker. He finds Lawrence's art and education
in the broadest and deepest senses, both enlivening and enlightening. He endorses Lawrence's views on
the impact of novel on life.

To Leavis, the function of literary criticism is to express and define the contemporary sensibility and
to help to form it. He has no philosophy of criticism. He made his assumptions and defended them
systematically. He believed that the critic of poetry is the complete reader. The ideal critic is the ideal
reader. The critic is concerned with evaluation, but to think of him as measuring with a norm, applied
from outside is to misrepresent the process, which is only a discipline of sensibility and a labor of
intelligence. Leavis defined literature as an embodiment of the finest expression of language. It is an
example of what can be achieved with language. It sets a standard of thought that enables the educated
public to reject cliches and slogans of the politicians and the media. Criticism is to see that the creative
work fulfills its raison d'etre the main purpose of its existence that it is read, understood and duly valued
and has the influence it should have in the contemporary sensibility. Though Leavis opposed F W
Bateson's (an English literary critic) view that literature should be put in the context to understand it, he
never thought that literature existed in isolation from social order. In spite of being the practitioner of
decontextualized close reading, he did not see literature as existing in error or run apart from the rest of
society. He never interpreted a work only to make the meaning plain. It was to be duly valued. Critic's
concern is to induce and validate the writer's judgment on life. The value of the literary work is
comparative, not inherent. What is important is how it affects our sense of relative value, our sense of
direction or sense of life. He loaded the novelists of the great tradition for their sense of life. He
adjudged Hopkins, Yates, Ezra Pound and Eliot as the most significant of the modern poets as they
restored the contact of poetry with life. Literature is not simply language charged with meaning to the
utmost possible degree. It is the store house of recorded values. It is the rightest exploration of the
cultural tradition of its age, of all that the age, habitual things, fields and acts upon. Literature to Leavis
is not just an aesthetic experience, but one dictated by the rightest profoundest interests in life.
Literature offers an evaluation of the culture in each age and its effect on the quality of living. Its
method is different from that of history, which offers a bare record of it. Literature, particularly poetry
bides evocative use of words, makes everything relive for us. Words do not just state, but realize
experiences. In criticism, Leavis traces the establishment of the main lines of development in the English
tradition. To him, the literature of the past really matters only if it has value for the present. Its life is in
the present or nowhere. It is alive in so far as it is alive for us. The good literature of the present is but a
continuation and development of the really good literature of the past. He shared Eliot's views on the
pastness and presence of the literature of the past. That is how he tried to maintain what he called the
living principle. That is Leavis' term for tradition. The basic assumptions of Leavis' criticism are that
literature matters vitally for civilization, it enacts what it states and that literature of the past has to be
judged in terms of its present value and that serious interest of literature starts from the present.

It is the business of the critic to perceive for himself to make the finest and sharpest relevant
discriminations and to state his findings as responsibly, clearly and forcibly as possible. To do it, he must
respond to the work before him, with all his mind and heart paying attention to the details until the
author's experience is realized in full. But criticism to Leavis, is not merely such an analysis or the
scrutiny of the words on the page in their minute relations, but an interesting man, society and
civilization. The inevitable stages in Leavis' critical practice are a complete response to the work in hand;
it's close scrutiny or analysis, and finally, judgment of its significance. Both cultural and literary criticism
were affected by the destruction on the organic community by the advent of the machine and mass
culture. The organic community, represented harmony and peace. Industrial society based on rules,
machines, and anonymity represent discord and chaos. There was separation of economy and society in
the 18th century. Leavis was concerned with the commercial values would trample upon human wants.
He sincerely believed that mass culture along with industrialization had destroyed an authentic unified
culture, replacing it with a synthetic divided one. He was convinced that under the impact of scientific
revolution of the 17th century, growth of the press in the 18th and industrial revolution of the 19th
century, the culture collapsed. Leavis attacks advertising, radio and cinema because they are changing
our ideas about what is essential to living. Leavis lambasted the institution of modern world, the
government, the scientific establishment and the media for not strongly dealing with a culture
dominated by money and what it will buy and for imagining that all human experiences can be
encompassed by survey and statistics. He addressed not just the loss of tradition, but the contempt
displayed by the metropolitan culture of The Guardian and The New Statesman and the BBC. The
Guardian was a British daily newspaper, The New Statesman, British political and cultural magazine
which had created a society in which we feel our lives lack significance. We fill the void left by
disintegration of tradition with drugs, sex, and alcohol. Leavis was remarkably prophetic. In 1970s, he
warned that universities were being defined as industrial plants whose prime consideration was profit.
Such a university has no room for the study of English. He believed university to be the center of
consciousness and conscience where the English department has the special role to maintain cultural
continuity and create a diverse but educated public who would raise the standard of public debate.

CRITICAL SUMMARY OF POETRY AND THE

MODERN WORLD, ESSAY BY F R LEAVIS
The essay Poetry and the Modern World forms part of Leavis' work New Bearings in English Poetry
published in 1932. Leavis examines the problems of the 19th century poetry from the standpoint of
modernism and goes on to outline the features of modern poetry. Both the romantics and the
Victorians, according to Leavis failed to grasp contemporary life and its complexity. They were dreamers
and their poetry was out of touch with reality. Leavis was a staunch advocate of modern poetry that
consistently addressed issues of the head and the heart. He also loved its stylistic and technical
experimentation. Leavis proclaims at the outset that poetry matters little to the modern world. He has
no high opinion about the body of poetry produced in English in the beginning of the 20 century. It does
not prove the existence of genuine interest or talent in poetry. Anthologists think otherwise. They make
extravagant claims on behalf of the age and think of its greatness and are convinced that many of the
poets would be remembered after hundred years. Leavis feels that such claims are symptomatic of
weakness. They can be made only in an age in which there are no serious standards or live tradition of
poetry and no public capable of informed and serious interest. No one can be seriously interested in
what is offered as the flower of fine poetry. There are only poetical persons, not poets. They are dead
never alive. The poems have no rules. They are superficial. It is evident that the present age does not
favor the growth of poetry. Leavis strongly believes that something has been wrong for 40 or 50 years. It
was from the closing decades of the 19th century. He points out that the number of potential poets,
poets with talent does not vary from age to age. What really changes is the use made of the talent. The
use each age makes of its talents is determined by its preconceptions and assumptions on poetry. There
are social, economic and philosophical conditions that determine the use each age makes of talent. But
Leavis is concerned with those conditions that can be modified by poets and critics.
Every age has its preconceptions and assumptions regarding poetry, on its subjects and methods.
Leavis proceeds to discuss what is poetical of the 19th century. Preconceptions of the last century were
established in the period of the great romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.
They're powerly in their being vague and undefined. Romantic poetry excluded play of wits and sense
from poetry. This romantic idea of the poetical remained unquestioned in the Victorian age. Arnold
dismissed Dryden and Pope as classics of prose though, their poetry was composed in the wits. Only
poetry that was simple, sensuous and passionate was accepted as genuine poetry. Arnold represented
the prejudice of his age. It was believed that poetry should be direct expression of simple emotion. Wit,
play of intellect and stress for the cerebral muscle had no place in it. 19th century poetic sensibility was
comprehensively reflected in poets like Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci, Tennyson's Mariana and Lady
of Shalott and D G Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel. Leavis asserts that poetry of every age is confined to
the idea of the poetical. Poetry matters because the poets are more alive than other people. They are
more alive in their own age. The potentiality of human experience is realized through the poet. He has
the capacity to experience and the power to communicate the experience. His words express what he
feels that is the enactment of feeling. It cannot be distinguished from his awareness of what he feel.
He's unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere, and more himself than ordinary people. He
knows what he feels and knows what he's interested in. His interesting experience is not different from
his interesting words. By the evocative use of words, he sharpens his awareness of his ways of feeling.
Poetry can communicate actual quality of experience with subtlety and precision unapproachable by any
other means. But if poetry and intelligence lose touch with each other, poetry will cease to matter much
and age will be lacking in finer awareness. Leavis feels that it is deplorable. Poetry is out of step with
intelligence that it fails to delight the intelligent. The mischievousness of the 19th century conventions
of the poetical are plain. They had behind them, the prestige of the Romantic Movement and found that
sanction in their undoubted poetic success. But as the situation changed and the incidents of stress for
the adult mind shifted, they tried to get between such a mind and its concerns. They could not have
taken day dreaming seriously, but cut free from accompanying convention and technique would not be
easy. The sensitive adult of the 19th century would be preoccupied with changed intellectual
background. His main interest would be inseparable from the modern world. Tennyson did his best to
capture the changed intellectual spirit. There was copious allusion to scientific ideas in his poetry, but
his intellectual concerns did not find expression in his successful poetry which was in harmony with the
general poetic trend of his age. He rustled solemnly with the problems of the age, but his habits,
techniques and methods are not suitable for the rigors of the age. Victorian poetry admits that the
actual world is alien, recalcitrant and unpoetical. But instead of protesting, it tends to withdraw.
Victorian poetry was only an extension of romantic poetry. Leavis examines the cause for the other
worldliness of the Victorian poetry.
Arnold identifies it as a strange disease of modern times. The frankness of this explicit recognition of
the inadequacy of his age distinguishes Arnold's poetry from that of his fellow poets. But it is not enough
to constitute criticism of life that he desiderated, that is he wished to have. He too is an escapist. Arnold
derived inspiration from the romantics as Tennyson himself did. Modern life and its sick hurry are really
absent in his poetry. Only the genius of Hopkins could do it. He had technical originality to match his
sensibility. Arnold often slips from uncongenial place, the human place to moonlight, which is a
recurring image in his poetry. He practiced his own style of evasion. There is cool meditative lucidity in
his waking dreams. In poems of English countryside like Scholar Gypsy, he's on quest of a sanctuary from
modern life. There is well bred innocence and limpid solemnity. But Arnold was not qualified as a critic
or poet to give new direction to English poetry. When he predicted poetry to take the place of religion,
he intended something different. There was only indulgence in religious sentiment.

Leavis puts Browning in the right perspective in this context. His cannot be described as poetry of
withdrawal. It definitely belongs to the world he lives in, but he lives happily in the Victorian world. He
always tried to bring his living interest into poetry, but that was not the interest of an adult sensitive
mind. On his part, there was no need to withdraw into a dream world because he was able to be a naive
romantic of love and action on the waking plane itself. Leavis also deals with in passing Victorian poets
like Meredith and Morris, George Meredith and William Morris, to prove that the Victorian age did not
use its talent properly. They were versatile, energetic and original, but their poetry was only the
extension of their daydream. Leavis concludes with the observation that the scenario of modern poetry
is quite hopeless. Modernity manifests itself in complacent debility. Technical liberation takes the form
of loose, careless workmanship. It is not really easy to make a fresh start. It is easy to say that poetry
should be adequate to modern life. The age has been waiting for unusual talents. Current conventions
are not congenial to new poetry. Basic questions are asked about poetry, what it is and what it is not.
Leavis identifies some misconceptions about the way to express modernity. Modernity is not just about
mentioning modern things, apparatus or modern subjects. Eliot once said that modern perception of
rhythm was affected by the internal combustion engine. Leavis thinks that the modem poet has to be
fully alive in his age. The evidence for this is to be thought in the texture of his poetry. Words should
express an intensely personal way of feeling. The technique has to be adequate to the feeling. Leavis
lavish his plays on Eliot with the observation that in Eliot, the critic and the poet reinforce each other. He
has given direction to English poetry and liberated it from the romantics and the Victorians. Leavis'
critique of modern poetry is informed by his sense of tradition, classical preoccupations and liberal
humanist predilections