No secondary themes Book

If nothing else, read it for the old-school literary takedowns:

"But so inferior a mind and spirit as [Robert] Browning's could not provide the impulse to bring back into poetry the adult intelligence" (p. 20).

"[Thomas] Hardy is a naive poet of simple attitudes and outlook" (p. 57).

Published in 1934, Leavis sets out to determine what is "modern" poetry. After clearing away the mediocre Victorian and Georgian poets in style, Leavis sets his sights on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, finding in them the only possible seeds of change to move English poetry forward.