Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis CHThe Order of the Companions of Honour is an order of the Commonwealth realms. It was founded by King George V in June 1917, as a reward for outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion....
(14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an influential
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for nearly his entire career at
Downing College, CambridgeDowning College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1800 and currently has around 650 students.- History :...
.
Early life
Frank Raymond Leavis was born in
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, in 1895, about a decade after
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
,
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
,
D. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
and
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, literary figures whose reputations he would later contribute to enhancing. His father, Harry Leavis, a cultured man, ran a small shop in Cambridge which sold pianos and other musical instruments (Hayman 1), and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Frank Leavis was educated at a local independent private school,
The Perse SchoolThe Perse Upper School is an independent secondary co-educational day school in Cambridge, England. The school was founded in 1615 by Dr Stephen Perse, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and has existed on several different sites in the city before its present home on Hills...
, whose headmaster at the time was Dr.
W. H. D. RouseWilliam Henry Denham Rouse was a pioneering British teacher who advocated the use of the Direct Method of teaching Latin and Greek.-Life:Born in Calcutta India on 31 May 1863...
. Rouse was a classicist and known for his "direct method," a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek. Though he enjoyed foreign languages to a certain extent, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority, thus his reading in the classical languages is not particularly evident in his critical publications (Bell 3).
Leavis was nineteen when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Not wanting to kill, he volunteered for the
Friends' Ambulance UnitThe Friends' Ambulance Unit was a volunteer ambulance service, founded by individual members of the British Religious Society of Friends , in line with their Peace Testimony. The FAU operated from 1914–1919, 1939–1946 and 1946-1959 in 25 different countries around the world...
, FAU, working in France immediately behind the
Western FrontFollowing the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
, and carrying a copy of
MiltonJohn Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
's poems with him. On the introduction of
conscriptionConscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
in 1916, he benefited from the blanket recognition of FAU members as conscientious objectors. His wartime experiences had a lasting effect on Leavis; mentally, he was prone to insomnia and suffered from intermittent nightmares, whilst exposure to poison gas permanently damaged his physical health, primarily his digestive system.
Leavis was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as "the great hiatus." He had won a scholarship from the Perse School to
Emmanuel College, CambridgeEmmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay on the site of a Dominican friary...
, and in 1919 began to read for a degree in History. In his second year, he changed to English and became a pupil at the newly founded English School at Cambridge. Despite graduating with first-class honours, Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship and instead embarked on a PhD, a lowly career move for an aspiring academic in those days. In 1924, Leavis presented a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Journalism to Literature', which 'studied the rise and earlier development of the press in England’ (Bell 4). This work contributed to his lifelong concern with the way in which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and mould the cultural aspirations of a wider public (Greenwood 8). In 1927, Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and, when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was very much influenced by the demands of teaching.
Later life and career
In 1929 Leavis married one of his students,
Queenie RothQueenie Dorothy Leavis , née Roth, was an English literary critic and essayist.Born in Edmonton, England, she wrote about the historical sociology of reading and the development of the English, the European, and the American novel...
, and this union resulted in a productive collaboration which yielded many great critical works culminating with their
annus mirabilis in 1932 when Leavis published
New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published
Fiction and the Reading Public, and the quarterly periodical
ScrutinyScrutiny: A Quarterly Review was a literature periodical founded in 1932 by F. R. Leavis, who remained its principal editor until the final issue in 1953...
was founded (Greenwood 9). A small publishing house,
The Minority PressThe Minority Press was a short-lived British publishing house founded in 1930 by Gordon Fraser while he was an undergraduate student at St. John's College . Fraser was an undergraduate student of F. R. Leavis. The Minority Press was essentially the book publishing arm of the Leavis camp of...
, was founded by Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis' students, in 1930, and served for several years as an additional outlet for the work of Leavis and some of his students. Also in this year Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing College where he was to teach for the next thirty years. He soon founded
Scrutiny, the critical quarterly that he edited until 1953, using it as a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante elitism he believed to characterise the
Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
.
Scrutiny provided a forum for (on occasion) identifying important contemporary work and (more commonly) reviewing the traditional canon by serious criteria (Bell 6). This criticism was informed by a teacher’s concern to present the essential to students, taking into consideration time constraints and a limited range of experience.
New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume of criticism Leavis was to publish, and it provides insight into his own critical positions. He has been frequently (but often erroneously) associated with the American school of New Critics, a group which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry over, or even instead of, an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications. Although there are undoubtedly similarities between Leavis's approach to criticism and that of the New Critics (most particularly in that both take the work of art itself as the primary focus of critical discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable from them, since he never adopted (and was explicitly hostile to) a theory of the poem as a self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic and formal artefact, isolated from the society, culture and tradition from which it emerged.
New Bearings, devoted principally to
Gerard Manley HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
,
William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
,
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, was an attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry (Bell 6). It also discussed at length and praised the work of
Ronald Bottrall Ronald Bottrall was a Cornish poet. He was praised highly by F.R. Leavis and Martin Seymour-Smith.Education: Redruth Grammar School; Pembroke College, Cambridge.- Career :...
, whose importance was not to be confirmed by readers and critics.
In 1933 Leavis published
For Continuity, which was a selection of
Scrutiny essays. This publication, along with
Culture and the Environment (a joint effort with Denys Thompson), stressed the importance of an informed and discriminating, highly-trained intellectual elite whose existence within university English departments would help preserve the cultural continuity of English life and literature. In
Education and the University (1943), Leavis argued that ‘there is a prior cultural achievement of language; language is not a detachable instrument of thought and communication. It is the historical embodiment of its community’s assumptions and aspirations at levels which are so subliminal much of the time that language is their only index’ (Bell 9).
In 1948, Leavis focused his attention on fiction and made his general statement about the English novel in
The Great Tradition where he traced this claimed tradition through
Jane AustenJane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
,
George EliotMary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
,
Henry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, and
Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
. Contentiously, Leavis, and his followers, excluded major authors such as
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
,
Laurence SterneLaurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
and
Thomas HardyThomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
from his canon, but eventually he changed his position on Dickens, publishing
Dickens the Novelist in 1970. The Leavisites' downgrading of Hardy for a time damaged the novelist's reputation, but eventually may have damaged Leavis's own authority.
In 1950, in the introduction to
Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, a publication he edited, Leavis set out the historical importance of utilitarian thought. Leavis found Bentham to epitomize the scientific drift of culture and social thinking, which was in his view the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed (Bell 9).
1952 saw the publication of another collection of essays from
Scrutiny:
The Common Pursuit. Outside of his work on English poetry and the novel, this is Leavis’s best-known and most influential work. A decade later Leavis was to earn much notoriety when he delivered his Richmond lecture,
Two cultures? The significance of C. P. Snow at Downing College. Leavis vigorously attacked Snow's suggestion, from a 1959 lecture and book by
C. P. SnowCharles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions with the UK government...
(see
The Two CulturesThe Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures—namely the sciences and the humanities—and that this was a major...
), that practitioners of the scientific and humanistic disciplines should have some significant understanding of each other, and that a lack of knowledge of twentieth-century physics was comparable to an ignorance of Shakespeare (Bell 10). Leavis's
ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence and abilities were widely decried in the British press by public figures such as Lord Boothby and
Lionel TrillingLionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
. Leavis introduced the idea of the 'third realm' as a name for the method of existence of literature; works which are not private like a dream or public in the sense of something that can be tripped over, but exist in human minds as a work of collaborative re-constitution (Greenwood 11).
In 1962 his readership and fellowship at Downing were terminated; however, he took up Visiting Professorships at the
University of BristolThe University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...
, the
University of WalesThe University of Wales was a confederal university founded in 1893. It had accredited institutions throughout Wales, and formerly accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students, but in October 2011, after a number of scandals, it withdrew all accreditation, and it was...
and the
University of YorkThe University of York , is an academic institution located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the campus university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, covering a wide range of subjects...
. His final volumes of criticism were
Nor Shall My Sword (1972),
The Living Principle (1975) and
Thought, Words and Creativity (1976). These later works are generally accepted as the weaker part of his canon, his best cultural criticism having shown itself in the form of his literary critical practices.
Leavis died in 1978, at the age of 82, having been made a Companion of Honour in the previous
New Year HonoursThe New Year Honours is a part of the British honours system, being a civic occasion on the New Year annually in which new members of most Commonwealth Realms honours are named. The awards are presented by the reigning monarch or head of state, currently Queen Elizabeth II...
. His wife, Queenie D. Leavis, died in 1981. He features as a main character, played by Sir
Ian HolmSir Ian Holm, CBE is an English actor known for his stage work and for many film roles. He received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in The Homecoming and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear...
, in the 1991
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
TV feature,
The Last Romantics. The story focuses on his relationship with his mentor, Sir
Arthur Quiller-CouchSir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He is primarily remembered for the monumental Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900 , and for his literary criticism...
and the students.
Reputation
Leavis' uncompromising zeal in promoting his views of literature drew mockery from some literary quarters. Leavis (as
Simon Lacerous) and Scrutiny (as
Thumbscrew) were satirized by Frederick Crews in the chapter
Another Book to Cross off your List of his lampoon of literary criticism theory
The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook. In her novel Possession,
A. S. ByattDame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner...
wrote of one of her characters (Blackadder)
Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to or change it.
Criticism
Leavis in his writing was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century English literary criticism. He introduced a "seriousness" into English studies, and some English and American university departments were shaped very much by Leavis’s example and ideas. Leavis appeared to possess a very clear idea of literary criticism and he was well known for his decisive and often provocative, and idiosyncratic, judgements. Leavis insisted that valuation was the principal concern of criticism, and that it must ensure that English literature should be a living reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility (Bilan 61).
Leavis's criticism is difficult to directly classify, but it can be grouped into four chronological stages. The first is that of his early publications and essays including
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and
Revaluation (1936). Here he was concerned primarily with reexamining poetry from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and this was accomplished under the strong influence of T. S. Eliot. Also during this early period Leavis sketched out his views about university education.
He then turned his attention to fiction and the novel, producing
The Great Tradition (1948) and
D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex treatment of literary, educational and social issues. Though the hub of his work remained literature, his perspective for commentary was noticeably broadening, and this was most visible in
Nor Shall my Sword (1972).
Two of his last publications embodied the critical sentiments of his final years;
The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (1975), and
Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976). Although these later works have been sometimes called "philosophy", it has been argued that there is no abstract or theoretical context to justify such a description. In discussing the nature of language and value, Leavis implicitly treats the sceptical questioning that philosophical reflection starts from as an irrelevance from his standpoint as a literary critic - a position set out in his famous early exchange with Rene Wellek. Others, however, have argued that although Leavis's thinking in these later works is hard to classify - itself an important datum - it provides valuable insights into the nature of a language. (Stotesbury)
http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/18_19th/Leavis.pdf
On poetry
Though his achievements as a critic of fiction were impressive, Leavis is often viewed as having been a better critic of poetry than of the novel. In
New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian poetical ideal, suggesting that nineteenth-century poetry sought the consciously ‘poetical’ and showed a separation of thought and feeling and a divorce from the real world. The influence of T. S. Eliot is easily identifiable in his criticism of Victorian poetry, and Leavis acknowledged this, saying in
The Common Pursuit that, ‘It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weakness of that tradition’ (Leavis 31). In his later publication
Revaluation, the dependence on Eliot was still very much present, but Leavis demonstrated an individual critical sense operating in such a way as to place him among the distinguished modern critics.
The early reception of
T. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and Ezra Pound's poetry, and also the reading of
Gerard Manley HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
, were considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their greatness. His criticism of
John MiltonJohn Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, on the other hand, had no great impact on Milton's popular esteem. Many of his finest analyses of poems were reprinted in the late work,
The Living Principle.
On the novel
As a critic of the novel, Leavis’s main tenet stated that great novelists show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest determines the nature of their form in fiction (Bilan 115). Authors within this "tradition" were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included
Jane AustenJane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
,
George EliotMary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
,
Henry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
,
Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
, and
D. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, but excluded
Thomas HardyThomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
and
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
. In
The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set out his conception of the proper relation between form/composition and moral interest/art and life. This proved to be a contentious issue in the critical world, as Leavis refused to separate art from life, or the aesthetic or formal from the moral. He insisted that the great novelist’s preoccupation with form was a matter of responsibility towards a rich moral interest, and that works of art with a limited formal concern would always be of lesser quality.