There are obvious dangers attendant on any criticism which assumes that there are absolute standards of perfection against which we can measure works of art. The critic who starts off with this assumption is driven as he proceeds to elaborate and define his measuring rod of what art should be. Before long he is in danger of usurping the creative function: we find that he has unconsciously invented a schematic poetry of his own, which is simply the kind of poetry he might have written had he been poet instead of critic. Instead of remaining a student with limited but sensitive reactions to poetry, he has become an unconscious creator with a highly developed sense not of what poetry is but of what it ought to be….

Dr. Leavis seems not so much an example of the poet turned critic because he cannot write poetry as of the critic turned lecturer and don because he cannot write criticism. His mental habitation is a world not of what poetry but of what criticism ought to be. Poetry is his excuse for approving, attacking or reconstructing the judgments of other critics; above all for elaborating a world in which the existence of all values in poetry is made to depend on what is said about it. (p. 350)

Dr. Leavis really seems to have an almost Berkleyan view of poetry, assuming, that is, that criticism is God. Poetry, one would gather, exists simply in the minds of the critics, and poets become 'dislodged' or 'unreadable' (Shelley) if Dr. Leavis and his colleagues think badly about them. It is certainly a disquieting reflection that Messrs. Eliot, Richards or Leavis might have an unpleasant thought about, say, Shakespeare late one night which would cause him to become irreplaceably 'dislodged', even though no one else knew about it.

One reviewer has accused Dr. Leavis of having the attitude of a bookie towards literature, who gives the odds. This seems to me unfair. At all events, in [Revaluation, Tradition and Development in English Poetry] his attitude is quite clearly stated as that of a sub-contractor to other critics, who undertakes excavation, demolition and works of minor reconstruction to order. If one accepts this as Dr. Leavis's function, one has to give him high marks for work well done. Given some such starting-off point as 'the work has been done, the re-orientation effected: the heresies of ten years ago are orthodoxy', and he will translate the heresies of 1926 about the 'Line of Wit' into orthodox 1936 T. S. Eliot. His essays are careful and observant: he examines words, and he notes down every influence. Influences are very important to him, for just as he himself lives in a great stream of contemporary criticism so he imagines poets living in a great stream of contemporary words affected by certain powerful currents of influence. This is true, but it is not all: for example, it would have been to the point to mention that the cerebration of Milton's later poetry is due not only to Latin but also to blindness: and the sneer at Milton's politics is one of those sudden touches of flippant unawareness which make one doubt whether Dr. Leavis is really qualified to write about Milton at all. Yet the excavation proceeds under excellent auspices. The process of demolition one might label 'safe iconoclasm'. Dr. Leavis rushes in (on Milton and Shelley) where the angels have already trod. (p. 351)

[Leavis's analysis of Shelley's anthology piece When the Lamp is Shattered is used to show that the poet was in love with himself.] This incursion into psychology is surprising enough, but one is still more surprised when it develops into a moral storm of indignation at 'Shelley's ability to accept the grosser, the truly corrupt, gratifications that have just been indicated'. It becomes difficult to understand this tirade since it seems to be written from a purely moral point of view, unless indeed Dr. Leavis has borrowed some of Mr. Eliot's religion for the moment, just as he consistently borrows all his critical opinions. Psychologically and aesthetically I do not see how such a diagnosis of Shelley's poem can prove that Shelley's work is bad. If it did, we would have to consider all the work of Michelangelo corrupt and a great deal of the best poetry in the world beside. But the fact is that such judgments cannot be made in isolation. The analysis of Shelley's poem really undermines the whole of Dr. Leavis's own criticism, for if the psychological method can be applied to one poem, it should be applied to all. If it is a valid criticism of Shelley's poetry to say that his mental age was sixteen, one would like to know what the mental age of other poets is.

How far Dr. Leavis can go in fashionable derogation is shown by his objection to Shelley's saying of poetry that it 'is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with consciousness or will'. To reject the truth of this profound psychological intuition seems to me to show not merely a failure of critical awareness but ignorance of the nature of poetry. (p. 353)