Title: The criticism of F.R. Leavis
Description: **Author's Abstract**

This study examines the nature of F. R. Leavis's criticism. Since he consistently refused to state his critical assumptions, the procedure here has been to examine, primarily, four collections of his essays-- New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation, The Great Tradition and D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. The study briefly examines the Cambridge University English School that helped inform his critical ethos and moves to exemplifying representations or his essays. It finds Leavis searching out a viable native English tradition, using authorial "Impersonality" as the signal clue.
 
F.R. Leavis expected a quality of life or "vitality" in literature; the besetting sin was its absence. He said of writers in his "great tradition" of the English novel: "they are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity. " But Leavis saw a “drift of civilization" or state of culture inimical to literature. Technology, mass production and the mass media (advertising, journalism, publishing) tended to debase national life and the natural environment. These forces worked against the quality of life and the capacity for experience necessary in literature. The decisive use of words became narrow, inflexible, and associated with advertising, journalism, publishing, the cinema, and the like. Consequently Scrutiny magazine was started “to circumvent and defeat the conditions of a mass-civilization." Scrutiny, by design and taste, became a centre of resistance.
 
This assessment of things shaped the literary criticism of Leavis and Scrutiny. The "literary-metropolitan world," as Leavis called this unnatural environment, he opposed with his own more natural environment, variously called the "organic community" or the "native English tradition." Leavis did not conceptualize this tradition; rather, he exemplified it by representative poetry and fiction. He valued (The Great Tradition) the dramatizations of small community life, often near the Midlands (Jane Austen, George Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence) and the socio-economic and isolated community enclaves respectively of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. This tradition seems almost a fictional counterpart of that rural "organic community" whose passing Scrutiny writers lament.
 
In his collected poetry criticism, chiefly New Bearings in English Poetry and Revaluation, Leavis searched out "the main lines of development in the English tradition," to exclude them from what he called "by-lines." In the "main lines" be found (Revaluation) Donne and Jonson; Carew, Marvell, and Pope; Wordsworth and (in part) Keats. In New Bearings it is Eliot, Pound, and Hopkins. The principle of exclusion is “poise.” Briefly, it means a sense of English idiom, of the developing tradition and quality of life implied, and a concrete rendering of this life. Though recognized as large historical facts, Spenser, Milton, Shelley and Tennyson are not significant in this tradition. Tennyson does not offer "very interesting local life for inspection"; Milton focuses rather "upon words than upon perceptions, sensations or things"; and Shelley "does not grasp and present anything, but merely makes large gestures towards the kind of effect deemed appropriate." "Direct vulgar living" must be rendered concretely. “Experience,"words," and "feeling" (New Bearings in English Poetry) must operate together.
 
The radical assumption in the Leavisian orthodoxy is that the writer be "impersonal." Thus T.S. Eliot’s "Gerontion" has "the impersonality or great poetry, “as does Pound's “Mauberley. And George Eliot at her best, "has the impersonality of genius.” Terms approximately analogous to impersonality are “poise,'' “decorum" and "mature." Essentially, they refer to a writer with such requisite poise as to be neither self- nor audience-conscious. Evidence indicates Leavis's indebtedness to T.S. Eliot's "theory of Impersonality." Appropriately enough, then, Eliot 's famous phrase, "tradition and the individual talent" becomes a metaphoric description of this poise or impersonality.
Subjects: F.R. Leavis, literary criticism, impersonality, Scrutiny magazine, New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation, The Great Tradition, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist
People: F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)