Leavis Quotes & Sayings

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response. — F.R. Leavis

Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F.R. Leavis

The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact - that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary). — F.R. Leavis

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life. — F.R. Leavis

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that — John Donne

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means. — F.R. Leavis

A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying. — F.R. Leavis

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. — Peter Porter

The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. — F.R. Leavis

A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry) — F.R. Leavis

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel
for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions
did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment. — Angela Carter