Abstract

Leavis’s turn from a preoccupation with poetry to a preoccupation with the novel in the second part of his career has long been recognized. There is a consensus that he had a wonderful feeling for the textual particularity of poetry, the way that a poem is not just its paraphrasable content, in that the meaning is carried by the movement, rhythm, tone, and tempo of the speaking voice. Poetry intended for the eye and print reading only passed him by. It is not surprising, then, that when Leavis’s concern turned from poetry to the novel, he wanted to assimilate the novel as much as possible to poetry. He preferred to think of the novel as a “dramatic poem” and claimed...