ABSTRACT
‘There are those who think D. H. Lawrence the greatest man of our time’. One interesting aspect of Eliot's 'Commentary' on Q. D. Leavis's book is his suggestion that it is however in the drama that we have 'one form which might gain new life in a new age'. Since Eliot’s scattered comments in the Criterion and elsewhere do indicate, as we have seen that, contemporaneously with Leavis’s own development, he too believed in rural/agricultural restoration and had grave doubts about the unrestrained extension of urban living, it is important to establish in more detail how Leavis’s ‘organic community’ differs from Eliot’s blueprint for a rural community, a fuller picture of which Eliot gave in The Idea of a Christian Society. Examining Leavis’s educational provisions, especially with regard to his English syllabus, will further enhance our understanding of such characteristics of English education.
