ABSTRACT
‘Our time, in literature, may fairly be called the age of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot’. Leavis’s attitude towards, and changing estimate of, Eliot is inseparable from his judgement of Lawrence, and the two early essays from the Cambridge Review that stand at the head of the collection Valuation in Criticism indicate that this twin sense of the literary age is there from the start of Leavis’s career. If in 'talking about Eliot' Leavis is often talking 'primarily' about Lawrence, then this present chapter continues our discussion of Leavis and Eliot by approaching the subject via a third figure, Lawrence, who is inseparable from the discussion. Indeed, we have seen the charge of an 'American' ignorance of cultural continuity and again 'blindness' being repeated later in Leavis's diagnosis of the weakness of Four Quartets.
