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No Show, Again
I was re-reading today F. R. Leavis’ “Memories of Wittgenstein”, and came across the following story. Leavis and Wittgenstein hired a boat and, after Wittgenstein had paddled for a while, he stopped...
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“The Eyelids Always a Little Weary”: Leavis on Pater—and Keats
Pater may talk of burning always with a hard gemlike flame, but there is nothing answering in his prose; it notably lacks all sensuous vitality. Indeed, to point to Pater’s prose–cloistral, mannered,...
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Leavis on ‘Importance’
Nothing of important can really be said simply–simply and safely; and by ‘safely’ I mean so as to ensure that the whole intuited apprehension striving to find itself, to discover what it is in words,...
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Eliot’s (Religious) Struggle with Words: Leavis
It is a mark of Eliot’s peculiar importance to us—that is, of his major status as a poet of our time—that he should have had his distinctive preoccupation with language. I am thinking of the...
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Leavis on Johnson the Augustan
Every word in a piece of Augustan verse has an air of being able to give the reason why it has been chosen, and placed just there. The thoughts that the Augustan poet, like any other Augustan writer,...
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