The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform Book

So I've heard Leavis's name mentioned a lot in literary criticism -- he's kind of a big deal. Well, this was certainly not the best place to start (a posthumous collection of essays) but it didn't show him off in a good light. The flaws seems like flaws that would carry through to his other work, though. So I'm probably not going to follow up with Leavis for a long while.

First of all, he seems to proceed on the assumption that criticism is a kind of science or technique that can be mastered without any personal relationship with the work. One simply looks at the way the adjectives bump into the nouns and you can figure it out. I was surprised at the lack of warmth in Leavis's writing. Of course he gets pretty heated up himself, getting worked up over his opponents' opinions. But he doesn't seem to love what he writes about. He seems to consider its success or failure just a fact about it. Well, I can't say that view is categorically wrong, but it strikes me as implausible and limiting.

Relatedly, he is not a very good writer. I can't help but consider that a major flaw in a critic. In the first place, in keeping with his sense that criticism is an impersonal technique, he reverts to the same series of stock phrases to express himself (like "limiting judgment"). He is also the most infuriating interrupter of sentences I have ever read. He prefers clauses in the middle of the sentence, apparently, when they could easily have gone before or after, and even puts them in places they needn't bel. He writes things like "He, we being at the bottom of the hill, turned left" -- why put that clauss between subject and verb? That's just confusing!

Finally, after holding writers like Blake and Coleridge to a very high standard, he swallows the most bizarre canards of Eliot of Lawrence whole. His severity with the subjects of his criticism doesn't seem to extend to the authors that inform that criticism. There is something so jejune in this mismatch.

As an end note, I really enjoyed his memoir on Wittgenstein. It is full of very funny anecdotes about the philosopher.