F. R. Leavis:
Leavis' proponents claimed that 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, judgments. 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.
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 skeptical questioning that philosophical reflection starts from as an irrelevance from his standpoint as a literary critic a position set out in his famous[citation needed] early exchange with René Wellek. Others, however, have argued that although Leavis's thinking in these later works is hard to classify itself as an important datum it provides valuable insights into the nature of a language.
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. Eliot and Ezra Pound's* poetry, and also the reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins, were considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their greatness. *His criticism of John Milton,* 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. Authors within this "tradition" were all characterized by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included *Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, but excluded Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.* 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.
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