Literary Criticism, Culture and the Subject of 'English': F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot

Zhang Dandan, Dandan Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367360870
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume considers the highly convoluted relationship between F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, comparing their ideas in literary and cultural criticism, and connecting it to the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, and the two on Lawrence, the study examines how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis's literary criticism in both positive and negative ways, and investigates Lawrence's significance in relation to Leavis's changing attitude to Eliot. It also examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis's alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences between the two writers are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism/internationalism, ruralism/organicism and industrialism/metropolitanism, and relate to the two men's views on literary education, the subject of 'English' and the position of the Classics in the curriculum. It explores how Leavis's increasingly conflicted feelings about a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, result in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot as what he called a pathological 'case'.

1 Leavis’s Reading of Eliot

In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), which appeared in the same year as Scrutiny began publication, Leavis is clear that Eliot is not only the most important contemporary poet writing in English, but that his literary criticism is just as significant, and has achieved a revolution not only in the type of questions criticism should be asking of poetry but also in its reevaluation of literary history and ‘tradition’. In the ‘Prefatory Note’ to New Bearings he declares his ‘indebtedness to a certain critic and poet’ (NB, p. 13), and although this figure is not named at this point, by the end of the opening chapter it is clear that Eliot, who is the first of only a few critical sources quoted in the book, on page 17, is the figure Leavis is indebted to. The first chapter ends on the idea that it is Eliot’s poetry and criticism predominantly that ‘has made a new start, and established new bearings’ (NB, p. 28). The new start is the reintroduction of values such as ‘wit, play of intellect, stress of cerebral muscle’ (NB, p. 16) into poetry, the Romantic/Victorian prejudice that poetry is written out of the ‘soul’—a prejudice that leads to, or is the result of, an evasion of contemporary existence and a seeking in poetry of ‘a sanctuary from the modern world’ as with Matthew Arnold (NB, p. 23)—thus being contested. Nineteenth-century poetry, Leavis argues, generally creates a ‘dream world’, and it is part of Eliot’s new start that he is ‘alive in his own age’ (as I. A. Richards had argued, NB, pp. 17, 19), and his work declares the poet’s responsibility to expose ‘himself freely to the rigours of the contemporary climate’ and not try to escape from it as Tennyson did (NB, p. 21). This assessment of the literary tradition and of where it has gone wrong—‘a study of the latter end of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse leads to the conclusion that something has been wrong for forty or fifty years at least’ (NB, p. 14)—mirrors Eliot’s own rethinking of the ‘tradition’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919); indeed, Leavis openly declares in this chapter that his attack on the nineteenth-century ‘dream world’ has been anticipated by Eliot’s remarks in the essay ‘Andrew Marvell’ (1921), where ‘wit’ is also saluted as a quality in urgent need of poetic reclaim.

Chapter 3 of New Bearings is Leavis’s detailed examination of Eliot’s poetry, largely focussed on The Waste Land as Eliot’s most significant work, but New Bearings is in fact the last as well as the first of Leavis’s books to prioritise The Waste Land in this way. Leavis’s subsequent writings on Eliot’s poetry address, almost exclusively, the later work: ‘Ash-Wednesday’, ‘Marina’, the ‘Coriolan’ poems and above all Four Quartets (though some earlier poems like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘La Figlia che Piange’ also feature in his later lectures and essays). In fact, Leavis later confessed about The Waste Land: although ‘we were right in the 1920s to be immensely impressed by that now famous and familiar poem… . I think we attributed a status as an organic work to it that it doesn’t justify, and a representative significance it hasn’t’ (ELTU, p. 112). The lack of a ‘representative significance’ is explained later in this same volume in the way that The Waste Land ‘hasn’t the breadth of significance claimed and asserted by the title and the apparatus of notes’: in particular, man-woman relations depicted in the poem are characteristically debased, which is typical of the ‘highly personal’ attitude ‘we know so well from the earlier poems’—‘the symbolic Waste Land makes itself felt too much as Thomas Stearns Eliot’s’ (ELTU, p. 140; for a very similar judgement see Leavis’s LIA, pp. 40–1). It was the inability of the poem’s raising a ‘personal conviction’ to the level of ‘general validity’ or ‘inevitability’ that Leavis later identified as one of the flaws in Four Quartets (LP, p. 248). The failure of man-women relations in Eliot, which Leavis will ultimately castigate as ‘anti-life’, contrasts markedly with D. H. Lawrence’s depiction of the same subject (see Chapter 2), and Leavis’s view that in The Waste Land ‘the organisation … was not organic in the way promised by the local life of the parts’ was vindicated ‘when, later, we were told that the arrangements of the constituents into a poem was Pound’s work’ (‘T. S. Eliot’s Influence’, V, pp. 123–4).

When New Bearings goes on to consider the later work of Eliot (that is, the writings which had been published before the book appeared in 1932), Leavis’s response anticipates rather than differs from much of his later criticism on Eliot. He had already noted in an essay of 1929, ‘T. S. Eliot—A Reply to the Condescending’, despite the appreciative admiration for The Waste Land there, that there is now ‘less certain agreement’ about developments like Eliot’s ‘classicism’ and its relation to things ‘outside of literature’ (V, p. 15). In New Bearings Leavis seems to be frankly dismayed by the ‘Ariel’ poems, which he sees as too clearly at the service of a Christian ethos, but this response does not apply to ‘Ash-Wednesday’ because any Christian belief in this poem is attended by ‘doubts and self-questionings’ (P 1, pp. 85–97; NB, p. 106), just as in ‘Marina’ we have simultaneously a poetry of vision as well as the precariousness of that vision (NB, p. 109). The struggle between affirmation and doubt in ‘Ash-Wednesday’ validates this poem in the seriousness of its self-examination and self-scrutiny, presenting what Leavis calls ‘a problem in the attainment of a difficult sincerity’ (NB, p. 98), and the notion of ‘sincerity’, as we shall see, becomes a cornerstone in Leavis’s thinking about Eliot. To call the poem a ‘spiritual exercise’, a ‘disciplined dreaming’ (not the evasive dreaming of the Victorians) or ‘a training of the soul’, as Leavis does, enables him to salute the ‘directed effort that distinguishes this poetry from [Eliot’s] earlier’. The Waste Land in Leavis’s view had no ‘progression’ (NB, p. 87), but ‘Ash-Wednesday’ is making a great effort to progress somewhere, as in the ascent of the stairs in Part III (P 1, p. 91; NB, p. 104). The Christian content therefore seems to be no obstacle to Leavis’s appreciation of the poem, because the poem is fundamentally a record of the honesty or sincerity of a mind that will not smooth over the difficulties that arise in the strenuous journey that is being undertaken. This honesty guarantees the result in ‘a most subtle poetry of great technical interest’, a belief that Leavis owes to Eliot’s own belief that ‘ “technique” was a problem of sincerity’ (NB, p. 99) as argued in the latter’s essay on Blake, where ‘this honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment’ (CP 2, p. 187). The constant discussion of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ in terms like ‘exercise’, ‘training’, ‘effort’ and so forth implies a strenuous poetic gymnastics that Leavis had already identified in the energy and ‘athleticism’ of The Waste Land, and that results in poetic rhythms that ‘have so much more life than those of Ariel poems’ (NB, p. 101). In this vocabulary Leavis is again following the example of Eliot’s estimation, in a Criterion review, of his own generation, ‘which is beginning to turn its attention to an athleticism, a training, of the soul as severe and ascetic as the training of the body of a runner’ (emphasis in original, CP 2, pp. 835–6; for more of Leavis’s following this example, see NB, pp. 96, 104).

It is not the Christian landscape therefore that the poem offers, but the poetic energy and indefatigability in confronting its difficulties, and the vitality this gives to the verse, that Leavis is drawn to in his reading of ‘Ash-Wednesday’. This approach, as we shall see, clears the way for not just Leavis, but his Scrutiny associates also, to continue to endorse Eliot in his post-1927 Anglo-Catholic career and its climax in Four Quartets. Mulhern, for example, has noted Harding’s effort to accommodate the growing religious concerns in his comments on Eliot’s ‘Ash-Wednesday’, The Rock and later ‘Burnt Norton’ where ‘religious submission’ is either accepted as ‘the submission of maturity’ (S 5, p. 173) or bypassed with Harding’s counterstress on the ‘originality’ in ‘technique, interest and stance’ and Eliot’s ‘linguistic achievement’ (The Moment, p. 151; S 3, pp. 180–3; S 5, p. 175). As for ‘Ash-Wednesday’ specifically, if we look at a late work like Lectures in America (1969), the appreciation of the poem there is very little different from that in New Bearings over thirty years earlier. At the conclusion of the Eliot chapter in New Bearings, ‘Ash-Wednesday’ and ‘Marina’ are regarded as ‘more disconcertingly modern than The Waste Land’, and more to be recommended to the attention of young poets, who ‘are likely to find that the kind of consciousness … has a close bearing upon certain problems of their own’ (NB, pp. 109–10). Leavis does not suggest what these problems might be, but it seems that to him Eliot is offering a model for the sincere mind’s inevitable debate with itself in the fragmented condition of the modern age. The point is clarified at the end of Leavis’s chapter on Hopkins, another religious poet whose lesson for today consists not in his subject matter but in ‘a technique so much concerned with inner division, friction, and psychological complexities in general [which] has a special bearing on the problems of contemporary poetry’ (NB, p. 156). ‘Inner division’ and the poet’s ‘heroic’ struggle with it will become a major feature in Leavis’s reading of Four Quartets as well, discussed later.

As noted at the outset, Leavis’s admiration of Eliot is not only for him as a poet, but also as a critic. He noted in a Scrutiny review of December 1947 how, after The Sacred Wood appeared in 1920, ‘for the next few years I read it through several times a year, pencil in hand’ (S 15, p. 58). In a later essay ‘T. S. Eliot as Critic’, originally appearing in Commentary in 1958, Leavis spoke again of The Sacred Wood and Homage to John Dryden as showing ‘a fine intelligence in literary criticism’ (AK, p. 178). Indeed, there has been much debate on the degree of dependence on Eliot’s criticism in Leavis’s own early work. As Bilan points out, there are those such as René Wellek and Bergonzi who think that Leavis’s Revaluation and New Bearings are a development of Eliot’s views on poetry,¹ but he himself notes that there are some areas of disagreement in Leavis’s criticism with Eliot, such as his different assessment of Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ and Cantos in New Bearings and in the debate over Lawrence (The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis, pp. 86–7, p. 89; NB, p. 112, 126). What is undeniable however is that it was the combination of the poet-critic in Eliot that was so important to Leavis: ‘what gives Eliot his acuteness as a critic of poetry and poetic development in the seventeenth century is his diagnostic (and creative) concern with the state of things in 1920’; thus Eliot’s criticism ‘brings home to one with peculiar vividness the nature of a living relation between the past and the present’ (ELTU, p. 87). Since this aspect may immediately bring to mind Eliot’s talk of the need to understand ‘the present moment of the past’ and so on in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ of 1919, which is probably the most celebrated of his early essays, it is important to note that Leavis is not thinking of this essay here, and that indeed he becomes increasingly hostile to it, ultimately regarding it as being ‘incoherent, self-contradictory and equivocal’ in his 1966 lecture ‘Eliot’s Classical Standing’ (LIA, p. 31). In the same lecture, Leavis made it clear that it was the three essays published in Homage to John Dryden in 1924 rather than the famous 1919 essay that exemplified, to repeat his phrase, Eliot’s ‘acuteness as a critic of poetry and poetic development in the seventeenth century’ (LIA, p. 38; see also ‘T. S. Eliot’s Influence’, V, p. 122). When Eliot’s Selected Essays of 1932 was reviewed in Scrutiny, the reviewer Edgell Rickword began by welcoming especially the inclusion of ‘the three essays from the crucial Homage to Dryden pamphlet’ (S 1, p. 390), whilst Leavis, scanning ‘several years of the likely journals’ for his teaching on contemporary poetry, found that ‘the helpful review or critique almost always showed the influence of Homage to John Dryden’ (V, p. 13). Leavis’s essay on ‘English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’ that opens the December 1935 issue of Scrutiny begins with a tribute to Eliot as achieving a complete reorientation in the valuation of poets of that period (S 4, p. 236), and notes in particular Eliot’s ‘extraordinarily pregnant and decisive essay on Marvell’ (S 4, p. 246).

This enthusiasm for Eliot’s early essays (as opposed to his later ones) became a Scrutiny orthodoxy, as Rickword’s account in the same review shows: ‘Mr. Eliot’s earlier work seems to me more valuable than his later’ because the later essays on cultural and religious issues like ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’, are a ‘dilution’ of Eliot’s qualities, showing that he is ‘not outstanding as a “thinker” as he is as a literary critic … the intelligence displayed in the later essays might be matched by several of his contemporaries; the literary sensibility of the earlier essays is not matched by any of them’ (S 1, p. 392). Even the later ‘literary’ essays, like that on Baudelaire (1930), are flawed for Rickword because of Eliot’s overstepping the line between literary and moral considerations; he thus quotes Eliot’s statement that ‘the true claim of Baudelaire as an artist is not that he found a superficial form, but that he was searching for a form of life’ as an instance of the subordination of aesthetic considerations that ‘marks a cleavage between Mr. Eliot’s earlier and later criticism’ (CP 4, p. 158; S 1, p. 391). Leavis was to be much more severe about Eliot’s critical development: in his review of After Strange Gods in the September 1934 issue of Scrutiny, for example, he fiercely attacks the literary judgements exhibited in this book that are derived from Eliot’s ascending ‘t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Editions and Abbreviations Used in the Text
• Introduction: Leavis and Eliot
• 1 Leavis’s Reading of Eliot
• 2 D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Necessary Opposite’
• 3 Leavis and Eliot: Two Cultures
• 4 Leavis, Eliot and the Subject of ‘English’
• Conclusion: A Divided Self
• Bibliography
• Index