ABSTRACT
In April 1978, when F.R.Leavis died at the age of 82, Williams wrote one of his most searching pieces of occasional journalism. He saluted his sometime master, and then placed Leavis’s characteristic mode of thought, or rather, his mode of being-in-the-world with a striking empathy, as well as a necessary judiciousness. ‘All I sensed…was a man confronting—I would not say contemplating nor analysing—a very particular kind of mystery, of which the relation to Cambridge was only a grievous form.’ 1 Williams is writing rapidly in the piece, and although it is clearly the product of long meditation, the writing is at times clotted and thick as he labours with saying something absolute about his own life, momentarily stopped by this death.
