ABSTRACT
After Eliot’s death in 1965, there was the opportunity in Leavis’s words for ‘a characterisation of Eliot’s total creative achievement, and although Leavis never attempts this overview to any great degree—The Living Principle of 1975 continues to testify to his absorption, since its appearance, by Four Quartets—he now revisits to some extent Eliot’s early poetry in a series of lectures from the later 1960s. The near-contemporary lecture ‘Eliot’s Classical Standing’, from Lectures in America , echoes the previously noted judgements, in declaring ‘Portrait’ a ‘finer poem’ than even ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Ultimately, to return to Michael Black’s words in the essay ‘A Kind of Valediction’, quoted in the author Introduction, if ‘Eliot is the great poet of the [twentieth] century’, and Leavis its ‘great critic’, what we have is a complex situation of both kinship and rivalry.
