ABSTRACT
When New Bearings goes on to consider later work of Eliot, Leavis’s response anticipates rather than differs from much of his later criticism on Eliot. Leavis openly declares in this chapter that his attack on nineteenth-century ‘dream world’ has been anticipated by Eliot’s remarks in essay ‘Andrew Marvell’, where ‘wit’ is also saluted as a quality in urgent need of poetic reclaim. In English Literature in Our Time, Eliot is considered at greater length; the focus of one of its lecture/chapters is on, to quote the title, 'Why Four Quartets Matters in a Technologico-Benthamite Age'. This chapter began with the idea that it was essentially great poet, like Eliot, who could ‘renew and perpetuate’ the English literary tradition, for example by reviving, as much through his poetry as his criticism, the poets of seventeenth century, but now, given the scarcity of such figures in the modern era, it is the ‘creative response’ of university readers that keeps the tradition alive.
