Lawrence as literary critic

There is a kind of wry irony (which he probably would not have appreciated) in the fact that Lawrence who as a critic was unacademic, in every possible sense of the word, should have been called ‘the finest literary critic of our time — a great critic if ever there was one’ by the outstanding academic literary critic of our time, F. R. Leavis. Though he did not write at length on Lawrence as a critic, Leavis was, as so often, the first to make a critical judgment whose validity is coming to be increasingly widely recognized.