Volume 11, Number 5 · September 26, 1968
On Leavis and Lawrence
By Philip Rahv
Anna Karenina and Other Essays
by F.R. Leavis
Pantheon, 241 pp., $5.95
That F. R. Leavis is a first-rate critical personality is certain, but that is by no means the same thing as saying that he is a first-rate literary critic. No doubt he has at times achieved that stature; at other times not at all. I am here primarily concerned with him as a critic, not with his reputation as a formidable teacher, nor with his educational theories, nor with his standing as the charismatic head of the sectarian Scrutiny group, consisting in the later years of that periodical mostly of epigones who have for some years now acquired positions of influence in the British schools. In the America of the late 1940s and early 1950s the 'new critics' tried to annex him by gratuitously referring to him as one of their own, a comrade-in-arms. That was a mistaken assessment, if not something worse.
Review, 6312 words
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