ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the principal lines of F. R. Leavis's reassessment of the English poetic tradition and then looks closely at a particular occasion, a late lecture on Yeats, to see his premisses and his rhetoric in use. F. R. Leavis's understanding of the relation of language and experience is most clearly exemplified in his reading of English poetry. Leavis endorsed the new assessment of the history of English poetry which was effected in his view largely by the creative, as well as critical, example of T. S. Eliot. It follows that if poetry, in Eliot's later formulation, is 'a raid on the inarticulate', then criticism its own problems of an appropriate articulacy. Ian Robinson has referred to Leavis's use of word 'sincerity' as one of his original contributions to thought. The important difference from Lewes is that Leavis's definition is entirely inductive. It appeals to the demonstrable features of the text and seeks no biographical support.
