Revaluation by F.R. Leavis (Summary)

 

Revaluation

by F.R. Leavis

(Summary) 

Revaluation was planned by F.R. Leavis when he was writing New Bearings in English Poetry. Leavis says, that the works of those in the past are alive only in so far as they are alive to those in the present. Leavis begins with the analysis of the poetry of the seventeenth century and ends with Keats and in so doing he desires to give only the main strands of development in the English tradition, its essential structure.

F.R. Leavis gives his reasons for the choice of poets from each period. Though he desired to begin with a chapter on Shakespeare, he decided it would be too much “apart” from the writers chosen for his present consideration. Donne and Dryden are chosen for they have contributed significantly to the development of the English literary tradition. Spenser’s contribution to English tradition is obvious in his impact on Milton’s verse and that both are closely associated, is reflected in the chapters on Milton and Keats. The three stars, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, are treated separately in three different chapters to highlight their uniqueness and individuality.

The Line of Wit

When Leavis begins to read the works of Donne, he finds in his verse “an extraordinary force of originality” which makes him “a living poet.” He not only recognizes the union of poetry and music in his verse but also the perfect control of gesture, movement and rhythm. Donne’s spoken idiom adds to the dramatic quality of his poetry. The fact that Donne is a living inspiration is confirmed in the verse of Thomas Carew. In assessing Carew’s works Leavis finds the element of the tradition of chivalry bound up with the contemporary culture and manners which make his work both contemporary yet traditional.

During the course of the analysis of the Metaphysical tradition, Leavis identifies Cowley as more of a representative of the Metaphysical tradition than even Marvell. But in Cowley’s ‘On the Death of Mr. William Hervey’ there is not only the touch of Spenser mingled with the elegiac tone of Milton but also the traits of the eighteenth-century Gray’s. In the wit and seriousness of Marvell the wisdom of a ripe civilization is seen crystallized. In Pope, Leavis observes “the line of tradition” which flowed from Ben Jonson and took a new turn. Leavis assesses Pope’s strength juxtaposing it with that of Dryden and in the process, Pope emerges superior to Dryden in his “finer profundity of organization,” “greater intensity of art,” and “a greater variety.” Though Dryden is rated the “great representative of the later seventeenth century” Marvell’s poetry is found better than that of Dryden’s in Leavis’s fresh “evaluation.” Leavis gives a graphic description of the socio-historic changes of the Restoration Age. The “revaluation” in Chapter I includes the merits of Donne, Jonson, Cowley, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and the uniqueness of the writers who have been in touch with the classical and the contemporary.

Milton’s Verse

Leavis takes a closer look at Milton’s Grand Style and tries to explain why readers lost interest in Milton in spite of his greatness. In his close analysis he perceives Milton’s language evoking the serene classical world which had a powerful impact on Milton’s sensibility and he did use a grand style to match the subject which came to be known for “pompous Miltonicism.” Leavis’s keenness enables him to appreciate the cadences, ‘the rise and fall, the slopes and curves of his verse. Leavis finds patches of swift diversity of associations and dramatic passages in Paradise Lost which to him sound more Shakespearean than Miltonic.

There are portions in Paradise Lost, Book Four, especially in the description of the Garden of Eden, Leavis points out the opulent use of words like “sapphire,” “Orient Pearl,” “sands of Gold’” and the like where grandeur remains in words but there is very little focus on perceptions and sensations. Leavis concludes that Milton “…exhibits a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words.”

The major drawback of Milton is that his language was totally divorced from actual speech. Milton’s Comus has innumerable instances of ejaculatory piling up of clauses. Leavis pinpoints the one major flaw which is inescapable and that is his use of Latin. Leavis expresses with regret this loss of feeling for one’s native language in such a great poet like Milton, but Leavis does appreciate the musical quality in Milton’s verse and acknowledges the moral purpose, which is an important quality of any great art.

Pope

Leavis attempts to revalue Pope’s works. Leavis begins his assessment by giving a fine example of Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady as a classic example of Pope where he is not satiric. Pope has also extended the Metaphysical tradition—he being the last of the seventeenth century as well as the first of the eighteenth century in his Satires of Dr. Donne Versified.

There is no separate chapter dedicated for the revaluation of Shakespeare’s works and Leavis is quite conscious of that. The tone of seriousness mingled with the ludicrous is quite common to the intelligence of Shakespeare which Leavis tracks in the language of Pope. Leavis feels that Pope is credited with the essential aspects of Augustan culture. Pope is the last of the poets of the Metaphysical age and yet he communicates with not only Johnson but with Thomas Gray.

The Augustan Tradition and the Eighteenth Century

The strength of the eighteenth century could be traced only in poets like Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith and Crabbe and not in the precursors of the Romantic Age like Gray, Collins, Cowper, Dyer and Lady Winchilsea. Leavis says, that though Pope was the presiding genius of that period he was not as popular as Donne. Leavis opines that the only poet who carried on the tradition of Pope to some degree was Thomas Gray. His Elegy is related to the Augustan tradition. Gray’s Elegy is a successful creative work where he expresses positive Augustan traits with his “churchyard meditations” which hold a lot of “social substance.” When Leavis begins the analysis of the poetry of Collins he finds a definite shift or a movement away from the Augustan in his verse. Augustan poetry was more about the concerns of human centrality. And the representative Augustan poems are none other than The Rape of the Lock, the Essay on Man and the Epistle to Arbuthnot in which Pope brought into his verse the vitality of his age.

Moving on to the poetry of Cowper, Leavis finds the close affinities with Johnson’s The Castaway. It is in Goldsmith that Leavis finds what Eliot welcomes “– virtues of good prose is the first and minimum requirement of good poetry.” Goldsmith showed interest in the lives of the poor and in realism. His later works bear the stamp of the Romantic rather than of the Augustan. In the analysis of Blake’s contribution Leavis acknowledges that he is “individual, original, and isolated enough” not to be influenced by the Augustan tradition. The main ingredients of Augustan poetry such as “decorum, order, elegance, consistency” were not found beyond the Augustan period and though Byron succeeded in writing satiric poetry, his mode was thoroughly different.

Wordsworth

Leavis finds Wordsworth possessing “the genius of a great philosophic poet.” In The Prelude, the doctrines concerning “the growth of mind and relation of Man to Nature,” are apparent, but Leavis’s argument is that The Prelude cannot easily be paraphrased. In Wordsworth there is extraordinary creative power which goes hand in hand with the “critical consciousness in the use of it.” The one marked difference in Leavis’s observation is that he goes beyond the usual labels attributed to Wordsworth. While many find the prime preoccupation of Wordsworth to be nature, Leavis finds the poet more deeply concerned about “human naturalness” with “sanity and spiritual health” and the living connections between man and the extra human universe.

Shelley

Shelley’s revolutionary doctrines and his ideas expressed in his poetry became a matter of disenchantment with the poet, but Leavis makes it clear that those doctrines alone make Shelley a distinguished poet. Pointing out the positive traits in the poet, he elaborates on the oft repeated criticism that Shelley is extraordinarily lyrical. Taking up the universally agreed criticism of Shelley’s genius as “essentially lyrical” Leavis points out that the term which would have meant in others an “emotional intensity” finds an alteration in Shelley whose verse in “peculiarly emotional.” Shelley expects in poetry a sensibility dissociated from intelligence. The conviction that feeling should be divorced from thought is examined further. When compared to Wordsworth, Shelley is more lyrical, for the former performed the exercise of exploring his experience thereby allowing emotions to be “recollected in tranquility.” Shelley in his poem presents an “emotion in itself,” “for itself,” “for its own sake” which is best exhibited in To a Skylark where the words exbibit a “spontaneous overflow.”

Keats

Though many have praised Keats for his poetic genius, Leavis adds a clause that his greatness is a matter of “promise and potentiality rather than achievement.” He knew as well as everyone that Keats’ wings of poesy were clipped by the cruel hand of death. Leavis openly points out the wrongness of criticism like Murry’s comparison of Keats with Shakespeare who declares Keats’ “poems comparable to nothing in English literature save the works of Shakespeare’s maturity.”

Using the Ode to a Nightingale, Leavis disputes the observations of Murry and Symons. Leavis goes to prove that the Ode is better art than what Symons has recognized and that Keats was only half in love with death, but had the “complementary desire for a full life unattended” by the disadvantages of “weariness, the fever and the fret.” The famous lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty— that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” make one believe that Keats is an aesthete, a devotee of Art and Beauty contemplating beauty above all things. But Art is not found in Keats. Leavis reiterates the fact that Keats was for that aestheticism which expressed itself in the intensity of living. The Ode to Autumn exemplifies this complete touch with the life of the outside world— “a firm sense of the solid world” instead of remaining lost in the dreamy reality. “Ripeness is all” expresses the poet’s concern with the ripeness of autumn. The critic’s “close reading” of the text enables him to appreciate the richness of life that comes alive in the last stanza of the poem where “a native English strength” pervades its every detail such us the familiar scenes of autumn and the sounds including the mourning of gnats, the bleating of the lambs, singing of the hedge crickets and the treble soft whistling of the red breasts evoke the thin sounds heard in the warm autumnal air.

Leavis goes beyond the texts of Keats to give reason for the serenity and the intensity of effect in his poems; and he attributes the merits of the poet to the “discipline and self-searching” by Keats during moments of personal disasters and blows of fate. In his Note on Beauty is Truth, Leavis quoting the remarks of a friend on this line, finds his own observation not very different from that. It is only to drive home the fact that Keats is well aware of the fact that he is talking about an Urn fully aware of the reality and has not escaped into the realm of fantasy. The main argument of Leavis throughout the essay is that Keats is no escapist.