Literary Criticism, Literary Studies

D.H. Lawrence: Novelist

Literature & Fiction

Leavis, Frank Raymond

History & Criticism

Univ of Chicago Pr

It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the journal Scrutiny, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.

New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation

Ams Pr Inc

Dr Leavis's Selection from Scrutiny gives in two volumes important material which is not easily available elsewhere.

A Selection from Scrutiny 2 Volume Paperback Set

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Education and the University was first published in 1943; this reissue follows the text of the 1948. The book deals with the problems facing universities in a world in which the demand for specialisation has increasingly overshadowed the ideal of a liberal education. Deeply disturbed by this state of affairs, Leavis puts forward a proposal for a University English School which would offer a programme of liberal studies designed to bring various disciplines into relation without promoting superficiality. This in turn leads him to consider the wider issue of the idea of a university in modern society as a 'focus of the finer life of cultural tradition'. 'Such prepotency,' he writes in the preface, 'as this country may hope for in the English-speaking world of the future must lie in the cultural realm, and ... in the performance of this function the universities have an essential part'.

Education & the University: A Sketch for an English School

Education & Teaching

Higher & Continuing Education

Ayer Co. Pub

Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry

Praeger

The noted British critic here presents one of the most penetrating short studies of D. H. Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence

Haskell House Pub Ltd

A scrutiny of verse from Donne to Keats, showing “the main lines of development in the English tradition…the essential structure.” In this overview, Leavis has given us genuinely new judgements which are now part of our thinking.

Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry

Reference

Ivan R. Dee

Leavis’s central preoccupation here is the nature of thought and language, and the way in which thoughts are expressed in language. His supple and vigorous analysis of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is considered by many the best part of the book.

The Living Principle: 'English' As a Discipline of Thought

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