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george_r_t_c's review
2.0
This is a good book to read if you're interested in the history of literary criticism, but I found it difficult to take any of Leavis' readings or theories completely seriously because they're so different from contemporary critical methods. We should certainly read Leavis charitably (i.e. we should historicise him and I'll return to this) but the problem is that he is too loose in throwing around undefined, yet fine-grained, evaluative criteria. For example, "[Dryden] may be a greater poet than Marvell, but he did not write any poetry as indubitably great as Marvell's best" (37). I feel like this relatively complex system of comparing internally-differentiated bodies of work against each other sort of sounds convincing but would be very difficult to actually argue for and spell out. Perhaps ironically, Leavis often grapples with the question of whether a given poem admits of a coherent prose paraphrase, and in passages like this I feel like he's saying something very compressed which can't really be unpacked explicitly (perhaps like a poem, except unhelpful).
Historicising, we would clearly still value Leavis for contributing to the systematisation of English as a discipline in a university. He gestures at several points to the need for separating literary criticism from biography and for a criticism based on precise terms, and he seems to do a better job of this than a lot of other critics in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. But another issue that I have with his method of criticism is the fact that he seems to be working towards a fixed characterisation of the style of each poet under consideration. I think we see this in the odd habit he has of speculating about whether a given passage could have been written by another poet, or how much a passage is reminiscent of another. On page 64, he considers how Milton is like Shakespeare; at 245 he says of Keats "If one might justifiably call the poem Shakespearian, it would be in emphasizing how un-Tennysonian it is," which gets a little confusing. The confusion is most unintentionally humorous on page 210, where Leavis goes through all the different Shakespeare characters who could have spoken the lines of a Shelley work (even fictional speakers have an identity that Leavis can spot in latter days). I think it leads to a certain hypostatisation of the authorial proper name, which also becomes a kind of signifier in a network of proper names defined by their relationship to each other (how much Milton is in Pope, what ratio of Shakespeare-to-Tennyson characterises Keats versus Shelley, etc).
Leavis does do a few things that I agree with, though. I think that's the appeal of this book, the fact that it is an explicit attempt to go against and 'revalue' a series of critical orthodoxies. He doesn't hesitate to deflate Milton, who apparently wrote so much Latin poetry that he forgot how to write English (56). And Pope is elevated, confirmed as the one truly great (whatever 'great' is supposed to mean, other than an appeal to our intuitions) poet of the eighteenth century (lucky that my intuitions agree here).
In upending these critical orthodoxies Leavis of course creates a new series of his own orthodoxies, and I think the famous one is his dislike for Shelley, which speaks to a certain masculinism of the early twentieth century which is only resolved when the Big Six Romantic poets become central to the academy in the mid-twentieth century, when critics like Harold Bloom take up their defence. Shelley is totally trashed in this book and is probably the best case study for learning about what Leavis really cares about. In the Wordsworth chapter Shelley is described as full of "caressing, cherishing, fondling, and, in general, sensuously tender suggestions," and his eroticism comes off badly against Wordsworth's "cold … contemplation" (157). His dislike becomes progressively less veiled: "Even when [Shelley] is in his own way unmistakably a distinguished poet, as in Prometheus Unbound, it is impossible to go on reading him at any length with pleasure; the elusive imagery, the high-pitched emotions, the tone and movement, the ardours, ecstasies, and despairs, are too much the same all through. The effect is of vanity and emptiness (Arnold was right) as well as monotony" (198).
Near the end we get what I think is a clearer idea of what Leavis' deal is. Keats is better than Shelley and Byron because "The facts, the objects of contemplation, absorb the poet's attention completely; he had none left for his feelings as such. As a result, his response, his attitude, seems to us to inhere in the facts, and to have itself the authenticity of fact" (252). Of course Leavis isn't, or isn't simply, a New Critic, but we can discern here I think the same inclination towards a kind of hard objecthood for poetic form.
Historicising, we would clearly still value Leavis for contributing to the systematisation of English as a discipline in a university. He gestures at several points to the need for separating literary criticism from biography and for a criticism based on precise terms, and he seems to do a better job of this than a lot of other critics in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. But another issue that I have with his method of criticism is the fact that he seems to be working towards a fixed characterisation of the style of each poet under consideration. I think we see this in the odd habit he has of speculating about whether a given passage could have been written by another poet, or how much a passage is reminiscent of another. On page 64, he considers how Milton is like Shakespeare; at 245 he says of Keats "If one might justifiably call the poem Shakespearian, it would be in emphasizing how un-Tennysonian it is," which gets a little confusing. The confusion is most unintentionally humorous on page 210, where Leavis goes through all the different Shakespeare characters who could have spoken the lines of a Shelley work (even fictional speakers have an identity that Leavis can spot in latter days). I think it leads to a certain hypostatisation of the authorial proper name, which also becomes a kind of signifier in a network of proper names defined by their relationship to each other (how much Milton is in Pope, what ratio of Shakespeare-to-Tennyson characterises Keats versus Shelley, etc).
Leavis does do a few things that I agree with, though. I think that's the appeal of this book, the fact that it is an explicit attempt to go against and 'revalue' a series of critical orthodoxies. He doesn't hesitate to deflate Milton, who apparently wrote so much Latin poetry that he forgot how to write English (56). And Pope is elevated, confirmed as the one truly great (whatever 'great' is supposed to mean, other than an appeal to our intuitions) poet of the eighteenth century (lucky that my intuitions agree here).
In upending these critical orthodoxies Leavis of course creates a new series of his own orthodoxies, and I think the famous one is his dislike for Shelley, which speaks to a certain masculinism of the early twentieth century which is only resolved when the Big Six Romantic poets become central to the academy in the mid-twentieth century, when critics like Harold Bloom take up their defence. Shelley is totally trashed in this book and is probably the best case study for learning about what Leavis really cares about. In the Wordsworth chapter Shelley is described as full of "caressing, cherishing, fondling, and, in general, sensuously tender suggestions," and his eroticism comes off badly against Wordsworth's "cold … contemplation" (157). His dislike becomes progressively less veiled: "Even when [Shelley] is in his own way unmistakably a distinguished poet, as in Prometheus Unbound, it is impossible to go on reading him at any length with pleasure; the elusive imagery, the high-pitched emotions, the tone and movement, the ardours, ecstasies, and despairs, are too much the same all through. The effect is of vanity and emptiness (Arnold was right) as well as monotony" (198).
Near the end we get what I think is a clearer idea of what Leavis' deal is. Keats is better than Shelley and Byron because "The facts, the objects of contemplation, absorb the poet's attention completely; he had none left for his feelings as such. As a result, his response, his attitude, seems to us to inhere in the facts, and to have itself the authenticity of fact" (252). Of course Leavis isn't, or isn't simply, a New Critic, but we can discern here I think the same inclination towards a kind of hard objecthood for poetic form.
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