T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis

Abstract

What Leavis as a critic meant to Eliot no other critic did — not even Pound. Pound’s influence on Eliot’s poetics, on The Waste Land and on Eliot’s critical education, as it were, in general, is well known, and was recognised as such by Eliot himself, and not merely through his dedication of The Waste Land to ‘Il miglior fabbro’. Leavis’s criticism, on the other hand, both of Eliot’s own work and of others’ works in general seems to have made little or no difference to Eliot’s way of writing poetry; and yet Eliot seems to have been very much aware — at times even obsessively so — of Leavis’s presence, and of his impact as well as that of Scrutiny. Leavis, too, by his own admission, was influenced by Eliot — at least in his earlier criticism. From the very outset — say, from New Bearings in English Poetry onwards — what modernity in poetry meant to him was represented par excellence by Eliot more than by the later Yeats or by Pound.