Critical Revolutionaries - Five Critics Who Changed The Way We Read

FIVE
CRITICS
WHO
CHANGED
THE WAY
WE READ
‘A superb
introduction.’
Seamus Perry
CRITICAL REVOLUTIONARIES
i
ii
CRITICAL
REVOLUTIONARIES
FIVE CRITICS WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE READ
TERRY EAGLETON
YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
iii
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Tony Pinkney
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vi
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 T.S. Eliot 12
2 I.A. Richards 80
3 William Empson 142
4 F.R. Leavis 195
5 Raymond Williams 257
Notes 309
Index 317
vii
viii
INTRODUCTION
The conviction underlying this book is that a vital tradition of

literary criticism is in danger of being neglected. This is so to some
extent even in academia, as well as in the wider literary world. If not
many students of literature today are likely to be familiar with the
work of, say, I.A. Richards or Raymond Williams, the same may
well be true of some of their teachers. Yet the five critics discussed
in this book rank among the most original and influential of modern
times, which is why I have chosen them.
They also represent a specific intellectual formation, one of the
most remarkable in twentieth-century Britain. All but one of them
taught at the University of Cambridge. The exception is T.S. Eliot, yet
Eliot had close connections with Cambridge, not least through his
friend I.A. Richards, and as an informal consultant was a powerful
influence on the shaping of English studies there. These men were
part of what has been hailed as a critical revolution, one that trans-
formed the academic study of literature and lent it a fresh centrality in
1
C RI TI CAL R EVOLU TI ONA R I E S
Britain and beyond. Ironically, however, what one might call

Cambridge English was never the orthodox creed of the Cambridge
English Faculty. On the contrary, it was always a marginal, minority
affair, though its combativeness and evangelical sense of mission lent
it at times a presence disproportionate to its size. Despite this, the
careers of Richards, Empson, Leavis and Williams were made possible
in part by a radical reform of the Cambridge English course as far
back as 1917, sidelining Anglo-Saxon and philology for a course of
study that was overwhelmingly modern, critical and literary (rather
than linguistic) in orientation.
The new Cambridge course was entitled ‘English Literature,
Life and Thought’ – the last two terms a couple of absurdly large
abstractions, yet indicative of the fact that literature was to be
studied in its social and intellectual context. There was also a cosmo-
politan dimension to the course: the Tragedy paper in the final
examinations encompassed such dramatists as Sophocles and Racine
as well as Shakespeare, while the English Moralists paper included
such honorary Englishmen as Plato, St Paul and Augustine, along
with a host of other non-indigenous thinkers.
That the critical revolution should have its source in Cambridge,
a university with a strong scientific pedigree and a record of openness
to innovation, was not entirely accidental. There were other factors
at work as well. Like British society in general, the culture of the
university had been deeply shaken by the First World War, which
seemed to herald a break with the past and the onset of a new era.
There were ex-servicemen among the student body, while middle-
class students on state or university scholarships were making their
2
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presence felt in an institution which had traditionally been domi-

nated by the private schools and the upper classes. Only one of the
critics portrayed in this book, William Empson, enjoyed such a priv-
ileged upbringing, as the son of a Yorkshire squire and a former pupil
of Winchester College. The genteel amateurism of an older genera-
tion of upper-class literary scholars was under challenge from a new,
rigorously analytical approach to literary works, of which I.A.
Richards’s method of ‘practical criticism’ was exemplary. This
involved taking anonymous passages of prose or poetry, submitting
them to tenaciously detailed scrutiny and passing judgement on
their quality. Value was no longer simply a matter of taste; instead, it
had to be vigorously argued for. There was a paper devoted to this
practice in the final English exams, which included what was known
as ‘dating’, or assigning an approximate date to a set of anonymous
literary passages. Students today might be surprised to learn that
dating several times in quick succession was once compulsory for
Cambridge English students.
Traditional literary scholarship had been largely insulated from
society at large, whereas younger critics like Richards, F.R. Leavis
and his partner Q.D. Leavis, who stemmed from less sheltered
backgrounds, were more alive to the general culture, as well as more
troubled by the place of literary studies within it. Leavis, the son of
a shopkeeper, had lived through the trauma of the First World War.
In a period of social and political turbulence in the wake of that
conflict, English could either take the pressure of social change or
consign itself to irrelevance. Opening it up also involved setting it
in the context of other academic disciplines, which some of these
3
pioneers knew at first hand. Richards came over to English from

Mental and Moral Sciences, F.R. Leavis from History and William
Empson from Mathematics. Q.D. Leavis took a keen interest in
psychology and anthropology. Eliot wrote his doctoral thesis on
philosophy, not literature. Several decades later, Raymond Williams
was to move from literary criticism to cultural studies, a subject
which he helped to invent.
The early years of the reformed English Faculty coincided with
the heyday of literary modernism, and something of the boldness
and bravura of that experiment was part of its ethos. The Cambridge
of Richards and Leavis, for example, was also that of Malcolm
Lowry, whose novel Under the Volcano is a late masterpiece of
English modernism. The fact that world-class literature was being
produced in English at the time seemed to conspire with the
Faculty’s focus on the present day, while the august figure of T.S.
Eliot acted as a link between modernism and criticism. The two
currents had a number of other features in common: both were
tough-minded, impersonal, quick to detect sham emotion, concep-
tually ambitious and sensitively attuned to language. They also
shared a certain elitism, as we shall see later in the case of criticism.
Modernism was the product of a historical crisis, and so was the
new critical work being undertaken at Cambridge. At its centre was
the belief that the close reading of literary texts was a profoundly
moral activity which cut to the heart of modern civilisation. To
define and evaluate qualities of language was to define and evaluate
the quality of a whole way of life. As I.A. Richards put it, ‘A decline
in our sensitiveness and discrimination with words must be followed
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soon by a decline in the quality of our living also’.1 One could take
this remark as the motto of Cambridge English. To focus attentively
on the words on the page may sound like an attempt to exclude
larger concerns, but larger concerns are already implicit in it.
There is a problem with this argument. To what extent is verbal
capability bound up with moral sensitivity? If the two are really as
interwoven as Richards seems to suggest, does this imply that men
and women who lack linguistic dexterity are insensitive and imper-
ceptive in their everyday dealings? Are only the eloquent able to feel
courage and compassion? Obviously not. It is not true that those
who can produce coruscating commentaries on Rudyard Kipling or
Angela Carter are invariably more subtle and discerning in daily life
than the mass of humanity. In fact, the opposite has sometimes
been claimed – that those who are deeply versed in the humanities
may be displacing forms of feeling and attention which might more
usefully be deployed in everyday affairs. ‘Education sometimes
cohabits with such barbarity, such cynicism, that you are filled with
disgust’, remarks the narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of
the Dead. Conversely, those whose vocabulary is less than
Shakespearian in scope may be far more morally admirable than the
silver-tongued.
To imagine a language, the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein writes, is to imagine a form of life. English studies
dealt with qualities of language, and thus had a direct bearing on
matters such as broadcasting, advertising, political propaganda,
bureaucratic jargon and the nature of public discourse. As such, it
offered an alternative to what it saw as opposing errors. One could
5
tread the formalist path and treat literature as though it were an

autonomous object, attending to its verbal strategies and devices; or
one could take a broader view of the work, seeing it as an explora-
tion of the human condition or a commentary on civilisation. By
taking the moral temperature of that civilisation in the language of
the literary work, it was possible to move beyond both of these
limited approaches. The critic needed to be vigilant to what was
called ‘the words on the page’, renouncing the aesthetic waffle of an
earlier age for a rigorously detailed analysis of tone, pace, pitch,
mood, rhythm, grammar, syntax, texture and the like. What for
other subjects was a taken-for-granted medium of inquiry was for
criticism an object of inquiry in itself. Yet in the act of examining the
words, the critic was also exploring the moral and historical context
in which those words were rooted. Only by a delicate attentiveness
to the words on the page could one grasp them as symptoms of the
sickness or vitality of the civilisation from which they sprang.
By and large, Cambridge English represented a reaction to what
seemed the impoverishment of both life and language in a commer-
cial, utilitarian civilisation increasingly under the sway of film,
radio, the popular press, advertising and popular fiction. Modernism,
likewise, felt itself confronted by a drastic depletion of linguistic
resources. Literary criticism was a way of diagnosing these social ills,
but it could also pose a solution of sorts. Its task was to investigate
the workings of a different form of discourse altogether, one which
freed language from the purely instrumental ends to which a crass
technological society had harnessed it. This discourse was known as
literature, and it pointed to a different form of living – one in which
6
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language, persons, values and relationships could be treated as ends

in themselves.
It followed that the literary critic bore responsibilities as grave as
those of the priest, prophet or politician. He or she was no mere
academic, but a monitor of the spiritual health of the modern age.
Criticism had a vital moral and social function to perform, and it
was precisely because of this that its textual analyses needed to be as
scrupulous as they were. In this sense, the two distinctive keynotes
of Cambridge English – practical criticism and a concern for the
social and intellectual context of literature – were aspects of a single
project. Far from being an evasion of social responsibility, unpacking
a metaphor or registering a shift of tone were actually exercises of it.
Whether this was an absurd piece of self-aggrandisement, or a
cogent justification of literary studies to those in thrall to science
and technology, was a matter of heated dispute. It was not, one
might note, a project particularly congenial to William Empson,
who had no inclination to see the words on the page as symptoms
of a way of life in urgent need of repair. Yet as the closest reader of
all, he was a true member of the tribe.
Richards in particular saw the need to professionalise a subject
which seemed to lack all intellectual discipline. As we shall see, he
even tried to place English studies on a scientific basis. Impressionistic
prattle was to be banished from the seminar room. Yet the strength
of the new criticism lay in coupling technical expertise with a deep
vein of moral humanism, the latter at its most evident in the work
of Leavis. Cambridge English could thus draw on its tough new
professionalism to counter the genteel amateurism of the old guard,
7
while at the same time decrying fusty literary scholarship from the
standpoint of a humane concern with the general culture. Tightly
focused when faced with a literary work, yet prepared to pronounce
on the moral quality of a whole culture, it promised to reap the best
of both worlds.
Most literary critics, like most academics, hail from the middle
class; but of the five figures discussed in this book, only one, I.A.
Richards, fits this description. Even he began life as an outsider to
English metropolitan culture, having grown up in the industrial
north of England as the son of a man whose family hailed from the
Gower peninsula in Wales. Eliot, who came from Missouri, was
in American terms more upper-class than middle-class. William
Empson hailed from the English gentry. F.R. Leavis was the lower-
middle-class son of a provincial shopkeeper, while Raymond
Williams grew up in Wales as the child of a railway worker. These
were not socially typical intellectuals, a fact which is surely relevant
to their eagerness to innovate, and (in the case of all but Eliot) their
disdain for orthodoxy. Three of them (Eliot, Richards and Empson)
also took a keen interest in Eastern thought, which was among other
things a sign of their critical stance towards Western civilisation.
It is also relevant to the link between Cambridge English and the
literature of the period that all of these figures except one were creative
writers. Eliot and Empson were major poets, Richards was a mediocre
one, while Raymond Williams published several novels and wrote
drama for television. Writing fiction was at least as important to him
as literary criticism, and in the latter part of his career rather more so.
In fact, he once described himself as ‘a writer who also happened to be
8
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a professor’.2 Only Leavis stuck to criticism, though even he consid-

ered writing a novel.3 One might add that all of these men except for
the rather cerebral Empson had an intensely physical sense of writing
– of its involvement with breathing, the visceral regions, the nervous
system and so on – which among other things may be a mark of critics
who are writers themselves.
They were also public intellectuals rather than cloistered
academics, though this applies rather less to Empson. At the same
time, though Empson was somewhat less of a public figure than the
others, he could hardly be described as cloistered. All of them had an
ambiguous relationship to academia. Eliot, though much lauded in
that sphere, was never part of it himself. Instead, he moved from
being a hard-pressed freelance journalist, while also working as a
teacher and a banker, into what was then the rather more relaxed
milieu of publishing. Richards was a reluctant don who soon
launched out into more ambitious terrain; Empson enjoyed scandal-
ising the traditional scholarly mind with his racy prose and icono-
clastic judgements; Leavis, as we shall see, specifically targeted the
academic as the enemy; and Raymond Williams, who spent the first
part of his teaching career in adult education, felt a deep alienation
from Cambridge when he returned as a lecturer to the university
where he had been a student. Of the five, only Leavis spent the
whole of his career teaching in an English university.
The relation between speech and writing in the style of each of
these authors is worth a passing comment. Empson writes noncha-
lantly, in conversational, even garrulous style, while Eliot occasion-
ally writes as though he is preaching in a particularly resonant
9
cathedral. Richards’s brisk, rather bloodless prose is quite distinct

from the speaking voice; but the rhythms of that voice, with its
pattern of emphasis and irregular stops and starts, sound through
the tortuous syntax of F.R. Leavis, a writer who is constantly inter-
rupting himself by inserting queries, sub-clauses, parentheses, recur-
sions, afterthoughts and qualifications into his sentences. Like
Empson, Leavis seems deliberately to avoid the formality of academic
prose. Raymond Williams’s abstract, ponderous style of writing
might appear far removed from the living voice, but as those who
knew him can testify, he spoke in much the same way as he wrote.
Leavis writes as though he were speaking, while Williams spoke as
though he were writing.
As the reader is about to discover, this book is not an act of homage
to a pantheon of heroes. In fact, it is sometimes so critical of these
figures that the reader might well wonder whether they are worthy of
the stature assigned to them. The only way to find out is to read them.
If I may end this Introduction on a personal note: I myself never met
Eliot, but I knew a few people who did, some of whom recounted
how he would hold forth at inconvenient length not about Dante or
Baudelaire but about the various routes taken by London buses, of
which he seemed to have a voluminous knowledge. I gazed with awe
as a student on the slender figure of Richards at a Cambridge garden
party, and sat in an English Faculty meeting in which Leavis denounced
the idea of introducing a paper on the novel into the syllabus on the
grounds that it took a term to read Anna Karenina. Before that, I had
attended some of his lectures, though he was just on the point of
retirement and his voice was weak, fading at times to an unintelligible
10
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drone in which his nasal Cambridge accent was still dimly audible.
From time to time, however, the odd derogatory term would surface
from his mumblings, like a jabbing finger: ‘BBC’, ‘New Statesman’,
‘C.P. Snow’, ‘British Council’ and the like. At these carefully calcu-
lated cues, the well-drilled Leavisite devotees in the front rows of the
lecture theatre would send up a chorus of scoffing and snorting with
Pavlovian predictability, while the rest of us would simply stare at our
shoes and wait for it to stop. Empson had long since taken his leave of
Cambridge, but some years later I was to hear him lecture in his
extraordinarily contorted upper-class accent without once falling off
the stage, a mishap to which he was particularly prone. Raymond
Williams was my teacher, friend and political comrade. In this book,
then, I look back across 60 years to a critical milieu which helped to
form me, and to the later history of which I hope to have made some
small contribution.
TE
11
1
T.S. ELIOT
For much of the twentieth century, the most revered, influential

figure in English literary criticism was unquestionably T.S. Eliot. He
was poet, critic, dramatist, essayist, editor, reviewer, publisher and
public intellectual; and although he had rivals in some of these fields
and superiors in others, none of them could match his authority as
a whole. In an age when it was customary to add a title (Dr, Mrs, Mr
and so on) to the names of people still living, Eliot was often referred
to not as ‘Mr T.S. Eliot’ but simply as ‘Mr Eliot’, as though nobody
could be dim-witted enough to be in doubt about which particular
Eliot was intended. (At that time, the courtesy of a title could occa-
sionally be extended to the dead: one of my teachers at Cambridge
used to refer to the author of Pride and Prejudice as ‘Miss Austen’,
though he did not insist on ‘Mr Chaucer’.) Eliot’s consecration as
high priest of English letters was all the more remarkable given the
outrage which had greeted his early work as a poet. In the words of
one of his first champions, F.R. Leavis, he had been regarded as a
12
T.S. EL I OT
‘literary Bolshevik’, audaciously avant-garde and bafflingly opaque;

yet by the early 1930s he was being hailed as the pre-eminent literary
mind of his generation. His publicly proclaimed conversion to
royalism, conservatism and Anglo-Catholicism in 1927 no doubt
played some part in this shift of status. The more attracted he was to
incense, the more his own reputation was wreathed in its fumes.
Like many of the leading writers and intellectuals of twentieth-
century England, Thomas Stearns Eliot, as we have seen, was not in
fact English. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, the son of
a family so patrician that they refused to use the term ‘OK’, and
could trace their residence in America back over two hundred years.
The Eliots were prominent among the intellectual aristocracy of the
city, though Eliot’s own father was a businessman. His grandfather
had founded the local university, and championed an ideal of public
service by which his grandson was to be deeply influenced. We shall
see that the theme of self-surrender – of sacrificing one’s own paltry
ego to some higher cause – runs steadily throughout his work. The
current of Christianity associated with the St Louis elite was
Unitarianism, a moderate, high-brow form of religious faith at odds
with the crude evangelical passions of the Puritan middle classes.
Yet the civilised, socially responsible class to which the Eliots
belonged was being gradually displaced in the city by industrial and
commercial forces, as a philistine middle class rose to power. The
cultural leadership of the Eliots and their colleagues was in steep
decline, as St Louis became flagrantly boss-ridden and corrupt. The
Eliot who will later speak sourly of the ‘dictatorship of finance’ found
himself an internal émigré in the place where he grew up, and would
13
shortly become an exile in reality. (The poet whom he came to revere

more than any other, Dante, grew up in the wealthy burgher class of
Florence but rebelled against the city’s increasingly powerful plutoc-
racy and was finally driven into exile.) During Eliot’s childhood,
then, the ground was being laid for the clash between alternative
forms of value which would mark his later thought: a trust in tradi-
tion versus a brash faith in progress, a belief in the corporate rather
than the individualist, culture versus utility, order against anarchy,
the surrender of the self against the unconstrained expression of it.
Part of what he reacted against in his native country was too over-
powering a sense of identity: the Puritan, self-fashioning, autono-
mous ego which underpinned the nation’s industrial capitalism. In
fact, it is not too much to claim that such individualism, in which
the self acknowledges no fidelity to a larger social or spiritual order,
is Eliot’s adversary from start to finish. Human beings cannot thrive,
he maintains, without giving allegiance to something outside them-
selves. Those who feel no such loyalty to particular institutions might
end up, like some Romantic poets, identifying instead with the
cosmos; but ‘a man does not join himself with the Universe so long
as he has anything else to join himself with’ (SE, p. 131).1
After studying at Harvard, Eliot abandoned his homeland for
Paris and Oxford, and was persuaded to stay on in England by his
friend, mentor and compatriot Ezra Pound. Like a number of other
expatriate writers (Wilde, Conrad, Henry James, V.S. Naipaul, Tom
Stoppard), he compensated for his status as an outsider by seeking
to outdo the English Establishment at its own game. He worked in
a London bank and later for the distinguished publishing house of
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T.S. EL I OT
Faber & Faber, and had connections with the Bloomsbury Group.
In 1927, he sealed his loyalty to his adopted country by converting
to the Church of England and professed himself a classicist in liter-
ature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. The
divine right of kings was in his eyes a ‘noble faith’. Truly to flourish,
he maintained, meant being rooted in a single spot. ‘To be human’,
he remarked, ‘is to belong to a particular region of the earth’ (OPP,
p. 251). That the local and regional take priority over the national
and international is a familiar article of conservative faith. ‘On the
whole’, this refugee from St Louis to London shamelessly announced,
‘it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human
beings should go on living in the place in which they were born’
(NDC, p. 52).
Yet if he was something of a parody of a pukka Englishman, like
Wilde and James, he nonetheless continued to feel like a foreigner
in the English capital. Indeed, the former was partly a consequence
of the latter. He remained to some extent a spirit ‘unappeased and
peregrine’ (i.e. wandering), as he puts it in ‘Little Gidding’; and one
reason for the hostility to Jews in his early writings, over and above
the casual, pervasive anti-Semitism of the time, may be because he
saw in the stereotypical Jewish outcast and wanderer a monstrous
image of himself. He once used the pseudonym ‘Metoikos’, which
is Greek for ‘resident alien’. It is related to the word métèques, used
of Jews by the French right-wing thinker Charles Maurras, whose
work influenced Eliot considerably.
There was, however, some benefit to be reaped from living on
the margins of Europe on a small island which was formally
15
European but, like the United States, ethnically Anglo-Saxon. His

compatriot Henry James, Eliot wrote, no doubt with himself in
mind as well, was a European in the way that only a non-European
could be. He meant, presumably, that the outsider is more likely to
be conscious of the spirit and culture of a place as a whole than
those brought up within it, who tend to take it for granted and to
lack an overall view of it. So there were advantages to not being a
native European, as well as not having grown up in provincial
Britain. Eliot may have been a pin-striped London publisher: he
was jocularly known as ‘The Pope of Russell Square’, which was
where his publishing house, Faber & Faber, was located; but like
many leading modernist artists he was nothing if not cosmopolitan,
roaming freely in The Waste Land across a whole span of civilisa-
tions, appropriating chunks of them in order to cobble together a
synthesis which suited his own spiritual needs. He was an unstable
compound of bourgeois stuffiness and literary saboteur, moving
between genteel Mayfair and bohemian Soho.
Eliot put to good use the instability of selfhood which his spir-
itual and then literal exile had brought him. It meant that he could
‘decentre’ himself all the more readily into literary tradition, the
Anglican Church, a corporate culture, the resources of a collective
mythology and what he liked to call the European mind. Like his
friend James Joyce, he discovered that those who are strangers at
home are able to belong more or less anywhere. As with many a
modernist, his art was nourished by the fact that he was at once
inside and outside the civilisation in which he settled. Perhaps a
certain sexual ambiguity in his early years (he circulated some of his
16
T.S. EL I OT
gay pornographic verse among a coterie of friends) reinforced this

duality. In some ways, the alien can see more than the native: Eliot
comments of Rudyard Kipling, who spent part of his early life in
India, that his experience of another country gave him an under-
standing of England that the English themselves would do well to
heed. To choose a cultural allegiance, as Eliot did, signifies a deeper
commitment than that of the average insider; yet at the same time
the insiders have the edge over you, since – having the culture and
tradition in their blood – they do not need to make a conscious
issue out of it.
This matters particularly in England, where blood is tradition-
ally considered to be thicker than intellect and custom more cher-
ished than consciousness. The insider’s problem is parochialism,
while the outsider risks too rootless a lifestyle. Eliot resolves this
dilemma by insisting that only by inhabiting a particular region of
European culture can you gain access to the whole. Besides, émigré
writers are able to mine the resources of a specific culture and
heritage; but because they are also part-outsiders, they are released
from the constraints of that form of life and are freer to wander,
subvert and experiment. Joyce maintained that the source of his
revolutionary art lay in the fact that he was not English, and some-
thing similar can be said of his champion T.S. Eliot.
For most moderately enlightened readers today, Eliot’s social
views range from the objectionable to the obnoxious. In The Idea of a
Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(1948), he portrays his ideal social order, which seems more rural
than urban. There will be a culture of values and beliefs shared in
17
common; but though society will thus constitute an organic unity, it

will also be strictly stratified. There will be a governing elite, consisting
of the traditional English rural class along with an intellectual coterie
of men not entirely unlike Eliot himself. Elizabethan drama, he
believes, is the product of such a common culture, distinguished as it
is by ‘a fundamental homogeneity of race, of sense of humour and
sense of right and wrong’ which includes dramatists and audiences
alike (UPUC, p. 52). Like all authentic theatre, it is ‘an organ for the
expression of the consciousness of a people’ (OPP, p. 307) – a people
Eliot assumes to form a unity.
The task of the elite is to protect and disseminate the (largely
Christian) values of the society as a whole. It is a vital undertaking,
since if Christianity were to founder the whole of Western civilisa-
tion would collapse along with it. Yet since the mass of men and
women are in Eliot’s view incapable of what might properly be
called thinking, their participation in the culture will be less
conscious than that of their superiors. Instead, it will take the form
of custom and tradition, myth and sentiment, ritual observances
and spontaneous habits of feeling. All individuals will share in the
same form of life, but they will share in it in different ways and at
different levels of consciousness. The organic and the hierarchical
can thus be reconciled. If the former is an alternative to liberal indi-
vidualism, the latter is a bulwark against Bolshevism. Like the poet
W.B. Yeats, with whom he was acquainted, Eliot is shrewd enough
to perceive that elites must be rooted in the common life if they are
to flourish. Otherwise their privileged status may prove their down-
fall. Their mission is to elaborate at a conscious level the values
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T.S. EL I OT
which for most people are a matter of habitual behaviour. The

knowledge of the minority must be founded on the wisdom of
the folk.
In this way, the two main senses of the term ‘culture’ – artistic
and intellectual activity on the one hand, and the way of life of a
whole people on the other – may be conveniently coupled. We shall
see later that Eliot regards a poem in much the same way. It has a
layer of conscious meaning, rather as a common culture has a
minority whose task is to define and diffuse its values; but beneath
this, and constantly animated by it, lies what one might call the
poetic unconscious, that vast reservoir of forces and images which
eludes all conscious articulation. The same may be said of Eliot’s
ideal theatre audience, which is likely to contain a small minority of
patrons who understand what is spiritually afoot in his plays, a
middle stratum of reasonably intelligent types who can glimpse
something of their deeper meaning, and a mass of philistine ground-
lings (bankers, politicians, accountants and so on) who haven’t a
clue what is going on but who, like the Women of Canterbury in
Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, may nevertheless respond to the
meaning of the drama at some subliminal level. (The title Murder in
the Cathedral, incidentally, may well be one of its author’s impish
jokes, as theatregoers flock to what promises to be an Agatha
Christie-type whodunnit only to be confronted with an intellectu-
ally exacting drama notably short on action. A good many of Eliot’s
theatre audiences probably failed to realise that what they were
hearing was couched in verse, an oversight which one imagines
would not have troubled him in the least.)
19
The ideal, then, is a common but stratified culture; yet the social
reality is very different. Like many of his fellow modernists, Eliot
had little but contempt for most aspects of actual civilisation, with
its godless materialism, worship of the machine, cult of utility, spir-
itual vacancy and bogus humanitarianism. In this, he is at one with
F.R. Leavis, as we shall see later; but whereas Leavis’s religion is in
effect the philosophy of D.H. Lawrence, Eliot’s is staunchly Anglo-
Catholic. The love of man and woman, he remarks witheringly, is
either made reasonable by a higher (i.e. divine) love, or else it is
simply the coupling of animals. ‘If you remove from the word
“human” all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man’, he
warns, ‘you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever,
adaptable and mischievous little animal’ (SE, p. 485). He praises
Machiavelli, of all rebarbative thinkers, for his low estimate of
humanity, as well as for his promotion of order over liberty (FLA,
pp. 46, 50). It is Eliot’s conviction that the number of individuals in
any generation capable of intellectual effort is very small. Indeed, he
seems to derive a well-nigh erotic frisson from the phrase ‘only a very
few’. He would no doubt have been deeply rattled had the minus-
cule readership of his journal the Criterion shot up by 10 thousand
overnight.
Most men and women, like the Hollow Men of Eliot’s poem of
that title, are too spiritually shallow even to be damned, which means
that ‘the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of
electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform’ (SE, p. 429).
In a faithless age, the idea of hell is to his mind a considerable source
of comfort. Writing in the age of Auschwitz, he declares in the spirit of
20
T.S. EL I OT
Charles Baudelaire that it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Evil

people, as opposed to the merely immoral, are at least acquainted with
higher spiritual realities, in however negative a fashion. Humanism
overlooks what for Eliot is perhaps the most fundamental of all
Christian dogmas: original sin. Humans are wretched creatures, and
humility is consequently the greatest of Christian virtues. (For the
Christian orthodoxy which Eliot is supposed to uphold, the greatest
virtue is in fact charity, of which the other virtues are so many versions.)
The Romantic faith in the potential infinitude of humanity is a
dangerous illusion. So is the ideal of progress so zealously promulgated
by the middle classes. Eliot’s poetry is full of journeys either not under-
taken, abandoned or ending in disenchantment. It would seem that
history neither improves nor deteriorates. ‘I do not mean that our
times are particularly corrupt’, he writes; ‘all times are corrupt’ (SE,
p. 387). Yet it is clear elsewhere in his work that the modern era repre-
sents a drastic falling-off from the age of belief which preceded it. Like
many a conservative thinker, Eliot equivocates between the view that
things are getting steadily worse and the claim that they have been
pretty appalling from the outset.
One must ensure that ordinary men and women do not receive
too much education. The number of those in universities should be
cut by a third. It is preferable for a small number of people to be
highly cultivated, and for the rest to make do with some rudimentary
learning, rather than that everyone should receive an inferior educa-
tion. All education must ultimately take a religious form, and it may
prove necessary to revive the monastic orders in order to preserve
classical learning from the barbarism which lurks beyond the cloister.
21
The whole of modern literature, including a certain ‘Mrs Woolf ’, is

tainted by the secular spirit. We must read according to Christian
standards, a belief that modern literature disastrously rejects. Literary
censorship, either of the communist or Roman Catholic kind, is in
principle to be favoured. That a Catholic should feel a certain soli-
darity with communism is not surprising. Eliot reveals a grudging
admiration for Marxism, a creed he politically detests, precisely
because it is as much an orthodoxy as Anglo-Catholicism.
This is one reason why he published a range of left-wing writers
in his periodical the Criterion. In general, however, he has little admi-
ration for diversity, and regards a liberal pluralist society which
encourages contending viewpoints as less creditable than a culture
which holds its beliefs in common. The struggle against liberalism, he
declares, is the struggle to renew our sense of tradition and ‘establish
a vital connection between the individual and the race’ (ASG, p. 48).
It is, to do him justice, the human race, not simply the white-skinned
sector of it, that he has in mind. Liberalism involves tolerance, while
Eliot considers that ‘the virtue of tolerance is greatly overestimated,
and I have no objection to being called a bigot myself ’ (EAM,
p. 129). He is presumably hoping to infuriate his antagonists, though
he may also be speaking the truth.
One problem with running a conservative political journal is that
conservatives of Eliot’s stripe do not really regard their own beliefs as
political. On the contrary, they see them as springing from certain
unchanging principles which are not to be compromised by the vulgar
realm of political utility. The Criterion was thus embarrassed from the
outset by seeking to address an urgent political crisis in the 1920s and
22
T.S. EL I OT
1930s while apparently having little faith in politics. Rising above all
strident partisanship, it sought to strike a dispassionate note. A literary
review, Eliot insists, must avoid all social, political or theological bias.
It is not clear how this Arnoldian disinterestedness is to be attained,
short of drawing one’s contributors from the ranks of the seraphim.
Nor does it reflect the reality of Eliot’s editorship of his journal, where
he is often enough to be found nudge-winking a reviewer into
assuming a certain attitude.2 It is true that the publication took a rela-
tively non-partisan line on the Spanish Civil War, an issue on which
Eliot commends the kind of even-handedness recommended by
Arjuna, hero of the Bhagavad Gita. A refusal to condemn Spanish
fascism, however, is hardly to his credit, and he displayed no such
impartiality when it came to the battle against communism. He was
also less than dispassionate about another Iberian fascist dictator, the
Portuguese General Salazar, whom he blandly describes as ‘a Christian
at the head of a Christian country’.3 Salazar’s regime, he remarks, is to
be praised as enlightened.
There is an oracular, supercilious tone to much of Eliot’s prose. It
suggests an hauteur curiously at odds with the self-doubting protago-
nist of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Nor does it fit well with
his early philosophical conviction that all knowledge springs from a
specific standpoint, and that no valid judgement is more than approx-
imately true. One might claim that The Waste Land, despite its climate
of futility and fragmentation, has a similar if rather less resonant aura
of authority about it. On what Olympian peak must the poet himself
be standing to be capable of seeing so widely and deeply in a shattered
world? And why is it that this standpoint cannot be included within
23
the piece itself, but acts rather as its frame? Is the synoptic form of the
poem at odds with its fragmented content? Eliot’s lordly tone may be
distasteful to a modern reader, but later in his career it began to strike
him as objectionable as well. ‘The occasional note of arrogance, of
vehemence, of cocksureness or rudeness’ in his earlier writings was, he
confesses in a splendid phrase, ‘the braggadocio of the mild-mannered
man safely entrenched behind his typewriter’ (TCC, p. 14), which is
to say a stylistic compensation for personal insecurity. He also criti-
cises the protagonist of his play The Family Reunion as an insufferable
prig, and compares him unfavourably with the minor character of the
chauffeur. Perhaps a new, more fulfilling, marriage helped to soothe
his acerbic temper.
Even so, the majestic self-assurance of the early Eliot, or perhaps
of his critical persona, is remarkable. He is a past master of the
suavely malicious put-down. The critic George Saintsbury is ‘an
erudite and genial man with an insatiable appetite for the second-
rate’ (TCC, p. 12). ‘Akenside [the eighteenth-century poet] never
says anything worth saying, but what is not worth saying he says
well’ (OPP, p. 199). Some of Byron’s verses ‘are not too good for the
school magazine’ (OPP, p. 227). William Hazlitt, one of the greatest
critics in the English literary canon, is dismissed as ‘undistin-
guished’, a judgement doubtless influenced by the fact that he was
an ardent political radical. Horace is ‘somewhat plebeian’ in
comparison with Virgil (OPP, p. 63). D.H. Lawrence is provincial,
snobbish, ill-educated and has ‘an incapacity for what we ordinarily
call thinking’ (ASG, p. 58). If Eliot can be caustic, however, he also
enjoys a spot of roguish teasing. Writing on nineteenth-century
24
T.S. EL I OT
English poetry, he asks in typically mischievous spirit, ‘What about

Mrs Browning’s Aurora Leigh, which I have never read, or that long
poem by George Eliot of which I don’t remember the name?’ (OPP,
p. 42). No doubt it is significant that both these works are by
women. What may look at first glance like a humble confession of
ignorance is probably a calculated put-down. It is sometimes hard
to know how serious Eliot is intending to be, as when he dismisses
literature as ‘a form of superior amusement’ (SW, p. viii).
The finest of all English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes,
is disdainfully dismissed as ‘one of those extraordinary little upstarts
whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into an
eminence which they hardly deserve and have never lost’ (SE,
p. 355). It is not inconceivable that this snapshot of Hobbes as a
freakish lower-class parvenu in the world of polite letters may be
related to Eliot’s visceral aversion to his materialist philosophy. The
lower classes of Eliot’s own time ‘ride ten to a compartment to a
football match in Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which
breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust’ (SE, p. 27).
Words like ‘television’ are ugly either because of their ‘foreignness or
ill-breeding’, though Eliot fails to make it clear to which of these
contemptible categories the word ‘television’ belongs. There are
vacuous generalisations which fail to make much sense, such as
‘I believe the Chinese mind is very much nearer to the Anglo-Saxon
than it is to the Indian’ (ASG, p. 41). There is also a good deal of faux
ignorance and sham humility, as Eliot feigns not to understand some
statement whose meaning is blindingly obvious, or coyly regrets that
his mind is too ponderous to grasp certain abstractions which he
25
repudiates in any case. ‘I have no general theory of my own’ (SE,

p. 143), he declares. Others have theories; Eliot himself has beliefs,
doctrines and convictions. Throughout his criticism, there is the
shadowy sense of a poseur – of an author who may be less convinced
of his own imperious proclamations than he sounds, who has a stra-
tegic eye to the effect of his rhetoric on an audience, and who can
cobble together a persona to suit the occasion.
Rather less innocuous are some of his observations on culture and
tradition. Lecturing at the University of Virginia in 1933, he informs
his audience that the culture of the American South has been less
industrialised and ‘less invaded by foreign races’ (ASG, p. 16), and is
all the more robust for it. The population of the region is attractively
homogeneous; there is no mention of the African-Americans whose
enslaved ancestors laid the material foundations of the region he is
gracing with his presence. If two or more cultures coexist, both
become ‘adulterate’. As if this were not disreputable enough, Eliot
throws in what is perhaps his most odious observation of all, when
he adds that ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large
number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’ (ASG, p. 20). He made
no comment on the Holocaust.
By this point, the enlightened reader may well be wondering

whether anything of value can be salvaged from this full-blooded
reactionary. The answer is surely affirmative. For one thing, Eliot’s
elitism, anti-Semitism, class prejudice, demeaning estimate of
humanity and indiscriminate distaste for modern civilisation are
the stock in trade of the so-called Kulturkritik tradition which he
26
T.S. EL I OT
inherits.4 Many an eminent twentieth-century intellectual held

views of this kind, and so did a sizeable proportion of the Western
population of the time. This doesn’t excuse their attitudes, but it
helps to explain them. For another thing, such attitudes put Eliot at
loggerheads with the liberal-capitalist ideology of his age. He is, in
short, a radical of the right, like a large number of his fellow modern-
ists. He believes in the importance of communal bonds, as much
liberal ideology does not; he also rejects capitalism’s greed, selfish
individualism and pursuit of material self-interest. ‘The organisa-
tion of society on the principle of private profit’, he writes, ‘as well
as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of
humanity by unregulated industrialism, and so to the exhaustion of
natural resources . . . a good deal of our material progress is a
progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly’
(ICS, pp. 61–2). There is nothing here with which an ecologically
minded socialist would disagree. His first published review, of a
handful of books on India, is strongly anti-imperialist. He is hostile
to a social order which exalts the solitary ego, and which jettisons
the past as dead and done with. For his part, Eliot understands that
the past is what we are mostly made of, and that to nullify it in the
name of progress is to annihilate much that is precious. It is thus
that he can write that by abandoning tradition, we loosen our grip
on the present.
Radicals of the left may reject the inheritance to which Eliot
pays homage, but this is not to suggest that they are opposed to
tradition as such. It is rather that they embrace alternative lineages
– that of the Levellers, Diggers, Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes, for
27
example. ‘We Marxists have always lived in tradition’, observes

Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution. ‘A society is poor
indeed if it has nothing to live by but its own immediate and
contemporary experience’, writes Raymond Williams in Culture
and Society 1780–1950.5 The idea of tradition is by no means
benighted in itself. It encompasses both the monarchy and the
freedom to press for its abolition. If Trooping the Colour is tradi-
tional, so is the right to strike. In the modern age, Eliot protests,
there is a provincialism not of space but of time, for which history
is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their
turn and have now been scrapped – a viewpoint for which ‘the
world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the
dead hold no shares’ (OPP, p. 72). The Marxist Walter Benjamin
would have heartily agreed, along with critics of the conversion of
history into a readily consumable commodity known as ‘heritage’.
Eliot goes on to speak of ‘our continued veneration for our ances-
tors’ (OPP, p. 245); but in practice, as we shall see, his approach to
the past is a good deal more innovative and iconoclastic than such
piety would suggest. ‘Veneration’ is not quite the word for his
scathing assessment of Milton or most eighteenth-century verse.
Nor does Eliot accept the arid rationalism which underpins the
modern order, with its indifference to kinship, affection, the body
and the unconscious. Confronted with the creed that men and
women are wholly self-determining, he insists instead on their fini-
tude and fragility, an awareness of which belongs to the virtue of
humility. Human beings are dependent on each other, as well as on
some larger whole. For Eliot, as for D.H. Lawrence, we do not
28
T.S. EL I OT
belong to ourselves. The idea that we can ‘possess’ our selves like a
piece of property is a bourgeois fantasy. The attachment to a specific
place which Eliot admires may have sinister overtones of blood and
soil, but it also serves in our own time as a rebuke to global capi-
talism – to the jet-setting CEOs who feel at home only in an airport
VIP lounge. A belief in social order need not be authoritarian; it
may rather be an alternative to the anarchy of the marketplace. It
may also be preferable to a liberal civilisation in which everyone
may believe more or less what they want – but only because convic-
tions don’t matter much in any case, and because the idea of human
solidarity has withered at the root.
In this sense, Eliot is as much a critic of the social orthodoxies of
his day as, say, George Orwell or George Bernard Shaw. It is just
that his critique is launched from the right rather than the left. It is
true that the case smacks of self-contradiction, since in practice
Eliot was a loyal servant of the very capitalism which fragments
community, junks tradition and has scant regard for spirituality.
The alternative in his eyes would be communism; and when he
wonders aloud how he would choose between communism or
fascism, he plumps for the latter. He regarded the Russian Revolution
as the most momentous event of the First World War, and viewed
the conflict between the Soviet Union and ‘Latin’ civilisation as a
spiritual war between Asia and Europe. Yeats believed much the
same. In fact, the battle against Bolshevism is high on the Criterion’s
agenda.
Yet Eliot was by no means a fascist, even though his first wife
became a Blackshirt or member of the British Union of Fascists. There
29
are, to be sure, affinities between fascist ideology and Eliot’s brand of

conservatism, which is not to be equated with the tenets of today’s
Conservative Party. Both are elitist creeds; both are ready to sacrifice
freedom to order, reject liberal democracy and economic individualism
and exalt myth or custom over rational analysis. Yet conservatives like
Eliot believe in the church, tradition, the monarchy, a decentralised
society and a paternalist aristocracy, none of which is in the least
congenial to fascism. Nor is the idea of social hierarchy, since fascism
knows only one social distinction, that between the Leader and the
people. Fascism regards itself as a revolutionary creed, whereas conserv-
atism of course does not. Like all brands of nationalism, fascism is a
thoroughly modern invention, despite its invocation of Nordic gods
and ancient heroes. Conservatism has a lengthier pedigree.
Both brands of politics have a high regard for rural society; but
whereas the Nazis spoke in demonic terms of blood and soil, the
conservative thinks rather more angelically of village fetes and
Morris dancers. The conservative is devoted to the family, the local
community and civil society, while the fascist pays allegiance only
to Leader, race and nation. Fascist societies glorify violence and are
usually on a permanent military footing, which is not the case with
conservative ones. They are run by a brutally authoritarian state,
whereas Eliot’s type of politics favours regionalism rather than
centralism. In fact, it was fascism which helped to wind up the
Criterion on the eve of the Second World War. It had become clear
that the cultural equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire which the
journal hoped to see re-established was yielding in Continental
Europe to an altogether more sinister form of imperial power. The
30
T.S. EL I OT
classical ‘European mind’, Eliot laments in the final edition of the

journal, has disappeared from view, even though it was never clear
how a periodical whose circulation probably never topped eight
hundred was going to put it back on its feet.
Eliot is certainly an elitist, but we have seen already that elitism
need not exclude a concern for the common people. This unabashed
reactionary may have wanted to shut an alarmingly high number of
students out of universities, but he also taught for some years in
adult education, a largely left-wing project at the time. As far as
moral values go, the number of those who can discriminate between
good and evil is in Eliot’s view very small; but he also holds that the
company of those hungry for some kind of spiritual experience is
very large. He speaks in an essay on Kipling, chronicler of life in
India, of ‘people of lower cultures’, yet maintains that Kipling
enriched the English language to the benefit of all, whether philoso-
phers or railway porters. There must, he insists, be lines of commu-
nication between the poet and a wider public; and for poetry to
work, the two must share a common background. Poetry, for this
most mandarin of intellectuals, must be rooted in common speech
and a common sensibility. It represents the most refined point of
consciousness, and most intricate sensibility, of a whole commu-
nity, not simply of an individual author. One needs a small vanguard
of writers who are in advance of their time, but a vanguard is not to
be confused with a coterie. A vanguard is in the service of a larger
body marching behind it, which is hardly true of a coterie or clique.
The changes it effects in language and sensibility, Eliot maintains,
will eventually work their way through to the public as a whole
31
– even, indirectly, to those who don’t read poetry at all. This, at

root, is the social function of poetry.
There are times when Eliot presses this case to the point of
absurdity. He remarks in On Poetry and Poets that if Norwegians
stopped writing poetry, which is to say ceased to perfect and enrich
their own language and feelings, the consequences of this would even-
tually be felt by everyone on the planet. It would eventually affect
even those who could not name a single poet, let alone a Norwegian
one. If a nation fails to breed eminent writers, its language and sensi-
bility will deteriorate to the detriment of the species as a whole. That
the sensibility of Glaswegians would grow coarser because Norwegian
poets they have never heard of had given up writing is not the most
plausible of propositions. Rather more persuasively, Eliot maintains
that when language is in a healthy state, ‘the great poet will have
something to say to all his fellow countrymen at every level of educa-
tion’ (OPP, p. 9). In articulating the emotions of others, the writer
also modifies them, rendering them more self-conscious and making
his readers more finely aware of what they spontaneously feel. The
poet ‘discovers new variations of sensibility which can be appropriated
by others’ (OPP, p. 9). The perfect classic is one which will find a
response ‘among all classes and conditions of men’ (OPP, p. 69). Its
music is already latent in everyday speech. ‘The poetry of a people’,
Eliot remarks, ‘takes its life from the people’s speech and in turn gives
life to it; and represents its highest point of consciousness, its greatest
power and its most delicate sensibility’ (UPUC, p. 15).
There is, then, a reciprocity between poet and populace, which is
not the case with the coterie or cabal. The poet in Eliot’s view wants
32
T.S. EL I OT
to give pleasure to as large and diverse a mass of people as possible;

and in seeking such popularity he or she aspires to the role of the
music-hall comedian. Eliot took a keen interest in this brand of
popular culture, and wrote an admiring essay on the legendary music-
hall performer Marie Lloyd. The Elizabethan dramatists, he remarks,
took a form of popular entertainment and plucked some matchless
art from it, and music hall offers the modern writer a similar oppor-
tunity. A great many people, he insists, are able to reap some gratifica-
tion from poetry. He also suggests in his mock-humble, archly
provocative style that he himself would like an audience for his work
which could neither read nor write. In quite what sense they would
constitute an audience is left unclear. Maybe what he had in mind
was his declaiming his verse to them, though anyone who has heard
a recording of Eliot reading The Waste Land would be unlikely to
rank this as among his more inspired achievements. It is not, however,
as fatuous an idea as it may seem. We shall see later that Eliot regarded
poetic communication as a largely unconscious affair, which is one
reason why he is so blasé about the conscious meaning of a poem. It
follows that you do not need to be well educated to appreciate his
work. In fact, your erudition might even constitute an obstacle to
your enjoyment of it. Even so, words can only communicate uncon-
sciously if you can read them in the first place.
In this sense, Eliot is less hidebound by his conservatism than one
might expect. Nor is his attitude to tradition at all traditional. On
the contrary, his reconstruction of the concept is one of his most
renowned critical innovations, and the essay in which it is to be
found, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, one of the most
33
celebrated critical statements of the twentieth century. For such a

youthful author, it is an astonishingly bold, authoritative piece of
argument. It proposes what one might call a modernist notion of
tradition, one which has broken with a linear, one-thing-after-
another conception of literary history. The idea of tradition must be
rescued from the middle-class delusion of progress, upward evolu-
tion and perpetual improvement; and if literature is a convenient
means of challenging this self-satisfied ideology, it is partly because
there is indeed no simple upward trek from Horace to Margaret
Atwood. In Eliot’s view, tradition is a two-way street. It works back-
wards as well as forwards, since the present alters the past just as
much as the past gives birth to the present. The historical sense
involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presentness. As so often with modernism, we are speaking of a form
of spatialised time, so that a poet writes ‘with a feeling that the whole
of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of
the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order’ (SE, p. 14).
When a new piece of writing enters the literary canon, it retro-
spectively changes the relations between previous works, allowing
us to view them in a new light. One may talk of the influence of
Keats on Tennyson, but what, Eliot might ask, of the influence of
Tennyson on Keats? He writes:
The existing [literary] monuments form an ideal order among

themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new
(the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is
34
T.S. EL I OT
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after
the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if
ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values
of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is
conformity between the old and the new. (SE, p. 15)
An example of this backward transformation can be found in F.R.

Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry, in which Eliot’s own revolu-
tion in the writing of poetry allows Leavis to reassess Gerard Manley
Hopkins as a proto-modernist rather than a somewhat freakish late
Victorian. It is worth adding that Eliot’s poetic practice combines
the old and the new rather as his idea of tradition does. By being
faithful to a certain hallowed moment of the past (roughly speaking,
the period from Marlowe to Marvell), his work is able to disrupt the
conventions of the present. One can read ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ as among other things an attempt to reclaim its
author’s avant-garde literary practice for a conservative poetics.
What looks aberrant is in fact loyal to the legacy of the past, when
viewed from a long way off.
The works of the past constitute a complete, coherent order;
there is no concession that the literary canon might be marked by
conflict and dissonance. Nothing is ever lacking from it; and though
its internal relations are altered each time it offers houseroom to a
new work, it then proceeds to unfold unperturbedly as an organic
whole. In this sense, the tradition perpetuates itself by means of
change, not in spite of it. Though it is in continual flux, it ‘abandons
nothing en route’ (SE, p. 16) – though en route to what is a question
35
worth posing, since Eliot’s tradition, unlike the socialist movement

or the Victorian vision of material progress, lacks any distinctive
goal. It can never be wrong-footed by some outlandish new literary
creation, since it simply reorganises itself in order to accommodate
it. Innovation is co-opted rather than rebuffed. You cannot really
break with tradition, because this itself will turn out to be a move
within it. It is a self-adjusting, self-unifying organism with its own
autonomous life, and in this sense resembles an enormous work of
art extended in time and space. Rather as Hegel’s World Spirit works
secretly in and through individuals who fondly imagine themselves
to be self-determining, so the tradition uses writers as a cunning way
of reproducing itself. They are the humble instruments of a mighty
power whose depths they can never fathom, rather like religious
believers in their relation to God. In fact, the idea of tradition is one
of the modern period’s many surrogates for the Almighty, a less
secular version of whom Eliot will come to embrace some years after
completing his ‘Tradition’ essay.
A way of writing, Eliot observes in To Criticize the Critic, can
come to feel stale and shop-soiled, no longer responsive to contem-
porary modes of feeling, thought and speech, in which case a poetic
revolution may prove essential. Such an upheaval is greeted at first
with affront and disdain, but finally comes to be seen as vitalising
rather than destructive, lending a fresh lease of life to the heritage it
appears to undercut. Its legitimacy will finally be acknowledged,
rather like that of property stolen many centuries ago. There are
times when you need to deviate in order to stay in line. One test of a
work’s value, Eliot claims, is that it ‘fits in’ with what has gone before.
36
T.S. EL I OT
Conformity is the decisive criterion. But how exactly does ‘Prufrock’

do that, however sophisticated one’s sense of what counts as fitting
in? Eliot commends Samuel Johnson’s belief that innovation must
remain within the bounds of propriety, but this may be one instance
of a mismatch between his theory and his practice. ‘Proper’ is the last
word one would use of his early poetry.
There is another problem as well. The entry of a newcomer into
the tradition ensures that the past is kept alive; but if it does so by
altering the values, proportions and relations of existing works, then
this view of literary history opens the door to relativism. Eliot is
rightly opposed to treating works of art in isolation; instead, they
draw their significance from their place in a larger formation (tradi-
tion), and can be truly judged only by mutual comparison. (This
view may stem in part from his study of the late nineteenth-century
philosopher F.H. Bradley, for whom the reality of an object lies in
its relations with others.) Yet this suggests that no individual poem
or novel can possess an inherent, unalterable value, as a certain clas-
sical viewpoint would seek to maintain. And this classical viewpoint
is one which Eliot also seems to endorse, while at the same time
insisting that no poetic reputation ever remains exactly the same.
There are ripples and readjustments throughout the canon, as its
occupants, rather like the passengers on a crowded subway train,
shuffle around a little in order to make room for new arrivals. Might
there, then, be an innovation which retrospectively reduced Homer
or Shakespeare to minor status? Or is it to guard against this possi-
bility that the relations and proportions are changed by the
newcomer only ‘ever so slightly’?
37
It would seem that Eliot tries to combine a classical sense of

tradition, for which certain literary works are timelessly valuable,
with a more relational or historicist view of them. And this is not an
entirely coherent standpoint. There is fixity but also flux, as there is
for Eliot in an individual poem, which tends to involve a contin-
uous ‘unperceived evasion of monotony’ by constantly varying its
sounds and rhythms (TCC, p. 185). So-called free verse, for
example, continually evokes but skilfully eludes the beat of a regular
metre. The iambic pentameter plays off the irregular rhythms of the
speaking voice against a regular metrical scheme. We also learn to
our surprise that the tradition ‘does not at all flow invariably through
the most distinguished reputations’ (SE, p. 16). So it is not just a
galaxy of illustrious works. It is a matter of value, but not in the
sense that it is made up of authors who are generally agreed to be of
the highest rank. That would include Milton, Blake, Shelley and
Tennyson, who in Eliot’s eyes do not belong to the tradition at all.
We shall see later that this is because he means by the tradition a
particular kind of literary writing, whether or not the writers who
exemplify it are generally considered the most prestigious.
Thus, for Eliot as for Leavis, John Donne (a minor figure for
some critics at the time) is part of the tradition, but John Milton is
not. Donne writes in a way which is deemed compatible with a
specific use of the English language, while Milton’s poetic style
represents a mortal threat to it. So the tradition comprises not the
whole range of one’s literary ancestors but a particular, partisan
selection of them – partisan, because roughly speaking these are the
precursors who will help Eliot and others to write their own poetry
38
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in the present. This is another way in which the supposedly timeless

is relative to a specific standpoint. As Raymond Williams comments,
‘the traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to
its contemporary system of interests and values, for it is not an abso-
lute body of work but a continual selection and interpretation’.6
Tradition thus has a pragmatic value. It is fashioned in accordance
with the needs of the contemporary, which is hardly what a ‘tradi-
tionalist’ defender of it would claim. As a young poet, Eliot himself
could find no foothold in the stale late-Romantic poeticising of his
day, and was thus forced to look back over the head of this well-
groomed verse to a more resourceful past. Yet the authority with
which he invests the tradition is not quite at one with a view of it as
a convenient artifice. Besides, are there not conflicting heritages, or
writers who belong to more than one literary legacy at the same
time? Eliot’s conservative sense of the past as forming an organic
whole forbids him from confronting such possibilities, even if his
conservatism has its radical aspects as well. It involves carrying out
something of a demolition-and-salvage job on English literature,
which one critic, no doubt with Eliot’s national origins in mind,
rather more bluntly describes as ‘the most ambitious feat of cultural
imperialism the [twentieth] century seems likely to produce’.7
Those writers who do not inherit what Eliot calls ‘the accumu-
lated wisdom of time’ (SE, p. 29) must trade on their own resources,
and these in his view are bound to be scantier than those of the
tradition. Such authors are ‘heretics’ – men and women who are
unconstrained by orthodoxy, in the sense of a taken-for-granted set
of beliefs shared spontaneously in common, and therefore fall
39
victim to the cranky, fanciful, extravagant and eccentric. D.H.

Lawrence, who in Eliot’s judgement lacks a richly sustaining culture,
has no guidance except the ‘inner light’, and is spiritually sick. Even
so, Eliot protests in the teeth of conventional prejudice that no
writer was less of a sensualist. It is Lawrence’s deviation from the
main current, not his scandalous explorations of sexuality, which
thrusts him into the outer darkness. (It will be left to F.R. Leavis to
point out that the provincial, lower-middle-class culture from
which Lawrence sprang was a good deal more fruitful than the
loftily contemptuous Eliot will allow.) James Joyce, by contrast, is in
Eliot’s eyes the most orthodox of all contemporary authors. The fact
that he is an avant-garde atheist whose work was banned as porno-
graphic is less important than the fact that he draws on a stable
structure of ideas derived from Aristotle and Aquinas. No doubt
Eliot quietly relished the shock effect of ranking the author of Molly
Bloom’s steamy soliloquy alongside such classical worthies as Dante.
Joyce’s compatriot W.B. Yeats, whose lack of orthodox beliefs leads
him astray into the swamps of ‘folklore, occultism, mythology and
symbolism, crystal-gazing and hermetic writings’ (ASG, p. 45),
receives no such accolade, even though in general Eliot has a high
opinion of his work.
William Blake’s writing ‘has the unpleasantness of great poetry’
(SE, p. 128); but as the work of a Dissenter it, too, falls outside an
orthodox frame of reference and is forced to invent a quaint, home-
spun philosophy of its own. Blake is patronisingly compared to a
man fashioning an ingenious piece of home-made furniture. The
fact that he cannot rely on an established set of doctrines to do the
40
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work of belief for him means that he is too preoccupied with ideas.
He, too, is afflicted in Eliot’s view by a certain meagreness of culture,
a charge which is no truer of him than it is of Lawrence. It is simply
that Eliot cannot recognise either provincial nonconformism or
metropolitan radicalism as genuine cultures. He finds a similar
paucity of cultivation, linked once again to religious Dissent, in the
work of John Milton, in whose Puritan mythology he discerns a
certain thinness, and whose celestial and infernal regions in Paradise
Lost he describes in an agreeable flourish as ‘large but insufficiently
furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation’ (SE, p. 321).
Thomas Hardy is another author bereft of any objective system of
beliefs. No doubt he is also too Godless, plebeian and socially
progressive for Eliot’s taste.
Eliot’s desire to belong – to a church, tradition or social Establishment

– is in part a result of his émigré status. It is not surprising that one
should find such zeal for tradition in a disinherited poet who stems
from a nation not remarkable for its reverence for the past. Tradition
is among other things Eliot’s revenge on the philistines of St Louis.
Yet the immigrant artist, as we have seen, is also less likely to be
constrained by a cultural heritage than those reared within it, and
thus more ready to subject it to a scissors-and-paste job. In Eliot’s
critical essays, minor Jacobean dramatists are upgraded, the eight-
eenth century damned with faint praise and whole squadrons of
Romantic and Victorian poets sent packing. Even Shakespeare is the
target of some astringent judgements. There is also something rather
un-English about this Anglophile’s sheer intellectual ambitiousness
41
– about the way he can speak in such grandly generalising terms of

the ‘European mind’, or of European literature as forming an organic
totality. Perhaps you need to come at the place from the outside to
grasp Europe in this all-inclusive way. It is also typical of an outsider
to idealise it so much. The claim that European literature constitutes
an organic unity is surely as much a delusion as Eliot’s insistence that
one must read all of Shakespeare’s plays in order to understand any
one of them. He even suggests that world literature constitutes a
unity, as improbable a case as claiming that the stars are meticulously
arranged to spell out some momentous statement. In any case, the
belief that unity is always a positive value is one of the more question-
able assumptions of literary criticism, as well as one of the most
enduring.
Tradition, then, turns out to be for the most part a matter of
interpretation. It is a construct as much as a given; indeed, in the
thought of F.H. Bradley, the line between the two is notably blurred.
Poets must surrender their petty personalities to this sovereign power,
allowing it to speak through them; yet in doing so, there is a sense in
which they are sacrificing themselves to their own creation, rather
like those who immolate themselves before idols carved by their own
hands. The notion of self-sacrifice also lies at the root of another of
Eliot’s renowned doctrines, the idea of impersonality. Roughly
speaking, while the Romantic poet wants to express the self, Eliot
wants to extinguish it. In this, he is at one with many of his fellow
modernists. Poetry is not a matter of ‘personality’ but a question of
escaping from it. To write is a matter of constant self-surrender. An
author is no more than a ‘finely perfected medium in which special,
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or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations’

(SE, p. 18). The more perfect the artist, the greater distinction there
will be between ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’
(SE, p. 18). The difference between art, and the personal events or
sentiments it may record, is absolute. Experiences which are vital to
the author may play no part in their poetry, and what is important in
the poetry may be of negligible significance in their life. The Victorian
critic Matthew Arnold, Eliot comments, mistakenly focuses on the
feelings of the poet rather than the feelings of the poem itself.
Emotion for Eliot is to be found in the words of a poem, precisely
configured there, rather than lurking somewhere behind them in the
artist’s heart or mind.
The literary work is thus in no sense a ‘reflection’ of the mind
that contrives it. Some writers may have crude or simple emotions in
real life but subtly nuanced ones in their art. Or their feelings may be
too obscure and elusive for them to grasp at all fully. Eliot does not
assume à la Descartes that we are transparent to ourselves. What
matters is not to experience profound or original emotions but the
intensity of the artistic process itself. Originality is for Eliot an over-
rated Romantic value, and whether there are any emotions as yet
undiscovered is surely doubtful. By the time an experience has crys-
tallised into a poem, it may differ so much from the author’s initial
state of mind as to be scarcely recognisable to him. Indeed, Eliot
presses this case even further, claiming that what a poem communi-
cates does not exist outside the act of communication itself. It is as
though the experience is constituted in the process of conveying it.
Like those charismatic types moved to prophecy by the Holy Spirit,
43
poets do not know what they have to say until they overhear them-
selves saying it.
The contrast with Romanticism could not be clearer. The poet for
Eliot is not in the business of self-expression. Besides, Romantic poets
are typically agents – active subjects who recreate the world by the
power of their imagination. There is little place for such agency in
Eliot’s aesthetics, and no room for the creative imagination. Given the
pious exaltation of this modest faculty in literary circles, this is an
oversight to be welcomed. The Eliotic poet, by contrast with the
strenuously self-making Romantic, is strikingly passive – ‘a receptacle
for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which
remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new
compound are present together’ (SE, p. 19). In a much cited passage
from his path-breaking essay on the Metaphysical poets, Eliot speaks
of the poet’s mind as constituting new wholes out of experiences
(falling in love, reading Spinoza, hearing the sound of the typewriter,
smelling the dinner cooking) which for non-poetic minds are quite
distinct. It is this capacity to fuse a range of diffuse sensations into a
complex whole which distinguishes the poet, not the nature or value
of the sensations themselves. Since this process nowhere engages
conscious choice, there may be some unconscious significance in
Eliot’s choice of the name Spinoza here, a philosopher renowned for
his implacable determinism. The poet’s mind is like a catalyst in a
chemical experiment: in fusing certain gases to form a compound, it
remains neutral, inert and unaltered in itself.
There is a politics behind this poetics. Between the Romantics
and the modernists lies a historic change in the whole notion of
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subjectivity. The Romantics lived through an age of industrial and

political revolution, which called for free, self-determining individ-
uals who could forge their own history; by the early twentieth
century, with its faceless bureaucracies and anonymous corporations,
these men and women have become the passive subjects of a more
impersonal civilisation. Yet in poetry, if not in society as a whole, it is
an impersonality of which Eliot approves. It is an antidote to the
Romantic fantasy that at the nub of the world lies a self which is
potentially boundless in scope – a daydream typical of the United
States on which Eliot turned his back, with its ‘I can be anything I
want to be’ delusions of grandeur. As a conservative Christian, he
regards human beings as limited, defective creatures, who can thrive
only if they are rigorously disciplined. Order must be elevated over
freedom, which is to say conservatism over liberalism. Rootedness is
preferable to restless enterprise. Humility is a cure for the hubris of
the modern self. Tradition, orthodoxy and convention must curb a
wayward individualism which can see no further than its own selfish
interests.
It is this individualism which Eliot has constantly in his sights,
whether he calls it liberalism, Protestantism, Romanticism, Whiggery,
humanism, freethinking, moral relativism, the cult of personality or
the ‘inner voice’ of the solitary individual conscience. ‘What is disas-
trous’, he declares in After Strange Gods, ‘is that the writer should
deliberately give rein to his “individuality”, that he should even culti-
vate his difference from others; and that his readers should cherish the
author of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited
wisdom of the race, but because of them’ (ASG, p. 33). One should
45
note, however, that After Strange Gods is one of the most hard-line of
all his critical writings, full of dyspeptic remarks like ‘a spirit of exces-
sive tolerance is to be deprecated’ (ASG, p. 20) and (in what sounds
more like a tone of regret than relief) ‘social classes, as distinct from
economic classes, hardly exist today’ (ASG, p. 19). One commen-
tator, hardly noted for his radicalism, describes the book as ‘half-
demented’,8 while Eliot himself remarked to William Empson that he
was ‘very sick in soul’ when he wrote it.
We have seen already that as an émigré in Europe, in flight
among other things from American Puritanism’s too robust sense of
self, Eliot was sceptical of the unified ego in its search to subjugate
the world. In the form of the middle-class industrial magnate, it was
part of what was ousting his own more leisured social class. The
‘characters’ of his early poems are less individuals than zones of
consciousness, collections of disparate experiences looking for an
identity to attach themselves to. It is not surprising that as one
of the few English-language poets to master the technicalities of
philosophy, Eliot should have been so captivated by the thought
of F.H. Bradley, whose starting-point is not the self but what he
calls Immediate Experience or Feeling. For Bradley, it is only by a
process of abstracting from this immediacy that we arrive at the
concept of the self, along with the idea of a not-self or external
object. Consciousness is bound up with its various objects, which
means that it shifts and fluctuates as they do. The human subject is
by no means a solid substance. One might have expected that Eliot’s
conversion to Christianity would have brought him to acknowledge
the reality of the self, which is, after all, what is corrupted by sin and
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redeemed by divine grace; yet selfhood in the post-conversion Four

Quartets would still seem remarkably unstable, just as it is in the
pre-conversion The Waste Land. And the doctrine of the Incarnation
seems not to have made Eliot any more favourably disposed to the
life of the flesh.
Eliot’s theory of poetic impersonality involves severing the work
from its producer. What a poem means is as much what it signifies
for its readers as for the writer; and over the course of time the poet
becomes simply one more reader of his or her own work, perhaps
forgetting or reinventing its original sense. No writer can exert
absolute command over the reception of their poems or novels.
There is no question of proprietorship at stake here. A reader’s
interpretation may be quite as valid as the author’s own, or may
actually improve on it. There is never only one possible reading of a
literary text, and to explicate it is not to deliver an account of what
the author was consciously or unconsciously trying to say. When
Eliot remarks, no doubt in a characteristic piece of mischief making,
that The Waste Land is nothing but a piece of rhythmical grousing,
it is perfectly open to a reader to tell him that this is nonsense.
Perhaps it is a sly invitation for the reader to do so. When an actor
during the rehearsal of one of his plays gave a line of verse an inflec-
tion which seemed to alter its meaning entirely, Eliot himself,
ensconced in the stalls, remarked that this might well be what the
line meant. Nor, however, is the poem reducible to the reader’s
experience of it, a case exemplified in Eliot’s view by the work of
I.A. Richards. The significance of a poem cannot lie simply in
certain fortuitous states of mind which it happens to evoke in the
47
reader; instead, there must be a necessary relation between the work

and the reader’s response to it. The poem is a quasi-objective entity,
rather like meaning itself, which is neither purely subjective (I
cannot just decide that ‘meat pie’ means ‘Member of Parliament’)
nor objective in the sense that a taxi cab is.
Like his view of tradition, Eliot’s view of impersonality is not
entirely coherent. We feel in a great poet, he claims, ‘one significant,
consistent, and developing personality’ (SE, p. 203) – though by
‘personality’ he can sometimes mean the distinctive flavour or
pattern of sensibility of a literary work. Shakespeare’s characters, he
maintains, act out certain conflicts in the poet’s soul, a claim curi-
ously at odds with the idea of the work as independent of its author.
He sometimes speaks of one’s sense of the presence of an author in
his or her work, or suggests that we need more biographical infor-
mation about a writer. At other times, however, as in the case of
Dante, he complains that biographical information impairs his
enjoyment of the poetry. Eliot’s concept of impersonality does not
mean that the poem is a self-contained object, as it does for the
American New Criticism. If it stands free of both its author and its
reader, it is nevertheless anchored in a specific historical context. Art
and everyday life are interwoven: one’s taste in poetry, Eliot insists,
cannot be divorced from the rest of one’s passions and interests, and
the evolution of both poetry and criticism is shaped by elements
which infiltrate them from outside. One cannot draw a clear line
between the moral, social, religious and aesthetic. The critic must
take account of history, philosophy, theology, economics and
psychology, even if Eliot himself rarely engages in such inquiries.
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T.S. EL I OT
Both the form and content of literary works are bound up with their
specific time and place.
This is not in his view to license a sociological criticism.
Conservatives have commonly found sociology distasteful, and in
Eliot’s day a literary criticism which took it seriously would probably
stem from the Marxist camp. Nor, he insists, should one overlook
the eternal, imperishable elements in art. Even so, he speaks like any
Marxist of Renaissance art as being shaped to its roots by the rise of
a new social class, and claims that the function of poetry alters along
with changes in society. So does the nature of wit, a faculty illustrated
at its finest for Eliot by the work of the seventeenth-century poet
Andrew Marvell. A comment of his on the peculiar quality of
Marvell’s verse – ‘a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric
grace’ (SE, p. 293) – has justly entered the collective literary
consciousness. Wit he describes as a combination of levity and seri-
ousness, the product of a mind rich in generations of experience. It
is true that his historical approach to literature is alarmingly broad-
brush: the so-called dissociation of sensibility, a doctrine we shall
be looking at later, ‘has something to do with the Civil War’ (OPP,
p. 173), a proposition which would be unlikely to swing one a place
to read history at Harvard. Literature’s fall from grace coincides
with a conflict in which, in Eliot’s opinion, the wrong side won. His
historical commentary consists largely in a series of grandiose gener-
alities, whereas his critical observations are for the most part delicate
and precise. Witness, for example, his remark that ‘Marlowe gets
into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving
power by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period’
49
(SE, p. 76). This is the comment of a master craftsman, not simply

of an academic critic.
‘Any radical change in poetic form’, Eliot writes, ‘is likely to be the
symptom of some very much deeper change in society and the indi-
vidual’ (UPUC, p. 75). Poetic form is not simply ‘aesthetic’ but social
and historical through and through. Raymond Williams, as we shall
see later, argues just the same. Conventions in art reflect common
agreements in society. Only in a close-knit, homogeneous society,
Eliot claims, will you find the development of intricate formal
patterns, as a common set of values gives rise to certain parallels and
symmetries. A literary form like the Shakespearian sonnet embodies
a definitive way of thinking and feeling, and forms of thought and
feeling are anchored in the social conditions of their time. A different
metre represents a different mode of thought. Form and content are
mutually determining.
It is an odd feature of Eliot’s criticism that though as a classicist
he advocates impersonality, he consistently places feeling at the
centre of a poem, in the manner of the Romanticism of which he is
so distrustful. ‘What every poet starts from’, he declares, ‘is his own
emotions’ (SE, p. 137). It is hard to see how this is true of the Iliad
or Pope’s Essay on Man. Not all literature can be modelled on the
lyric. It is just as doubtful that (as Eliot argues) Shakespeare’s artistic
evolution is based on his degree of emotional maturity at any given
time, which supposedly determines his choice of theme, dramatic
form and poetic technique. If the two cases (impersonality and the
central role of feeling) can be reconciled, it is largely because the
task of the poet is to impersonalise his or her emotions rather than
50
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lend them direct expression. ‘The emotion of art’, Eliot informs us,
‘is impersonal’ (SE, p. 22). Once the poet has found the appropriate
words for his or her state of feeling, that emotional condition disap-
pears, to be replaced by the poem itself. The poet is preoccupied
with ‘the struggle to transmute his personal and private agonies into
something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’
(SE, p. 137). (One wonders why it is agony the poet starts from,
rather than, say, rancour or exuberance.) There is a hint of what
Freud would call ‘sublimation’ here, as one’s everyday tribulations
are raised to a loftier level, and what is distressing in life becomes
delectable in art. There is also a sense of the poem as a kind of
therapy, or alternatively as a way of coping with one’s feelings by
evading them. Sublimation for Freud is a form of repression.
The philosopher Bradley also views states of consciousness as
impersonal. (It is, incidentally, typical of the cordial climate of
Oxford University that though Eliot worked on Bradley, who was
then still alive, at the philosopher’s own small college, the two men
never actually met. But this may be partly because Bradley was a
nocturnal animal.) In Bradley’s view, the subjective and objective
are aspects of a single reality, with a notably fluid frontier between
them. We can identify states of feelings only by reference to the
objects with which they are bound up; and if this is so, then there is
a sense in which our emotions and experiences are ‘in’ the world
rather than simply in us. Conversely, objects are reducible to the
relations between different states of consciousness. It is on this idea
that Eliot draws for another of his celebrated doctrines, the so-called
objective correlative. In an essay on Hamlet he writes:
51
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by

finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked. (SE, p. 145)
Emotion finds its way into poetry only indirectly, crystallised in a set
of external situations which act as code or shorthand for inner ones.
Perhaps this is because spontaneous lyrical effusions would strike
hard-boiled modern readers as embarrassingly naive, rather as a poem
which explicitly tried to teach them something might seem objec-
tionable. But it is also because poetry for Eliot, being an escape from
personality, is necessarily a flight from feeling, not an outpouring of
it. This is one reason why the concept of sincerity has little place in
his criticism. There is also something rather English about the idea
that one does not wear one’s emotions on one’s sleeve, and Eliot was
English in almost everything except the fact that he was American.
Object and emotion are fused together in poetry, as they are in
the work of Bradley. Yet for Bradley the relation between subject
and object is an ‘internal’ or necessary one, whereas there is some-
thing slightly strange about Eliot’s use of the phrase ‘which shall be
the formula of that particular emotion’. One might take it to suggest
a somewhat arbitrary connection between subject and object – one
which the poet legislates into existence, as though forging a special
contract between himself and the reader. Yet it would be curious to
say ‘whenever you come across water imagery, think of envy’. There
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is a necessary rather than contingent link between most of our states

of feeling and our ‘external’ speech or behaviour, so that (for
example) we learn the concept of pain by becoming familiar with
how people in pain typically speak and behave. If there were no
such necessary relations – if everyone who was in a blind panic
behaved quite differently from everyone else in the same state – it
would be hard for small children to learn the language of feeling.
Eliot finds Hamlet an artistic failure because the hero’s state of
mind lacks an adequate objective correlative, which is a fancy way of
saying that his spiritual torment seems to have no sufficient cause.
His emotion is in excess of the facts as they appear. This, to be sure,
is not an unusual situation: ‘The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible,
without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every
person of sensibility has known’ (SE, p. 146). In fact, for Sigmund
Freud the name of this condition is desire, which is always in excess
of any specific goal. Melancholy, Freud comments, is mourning
without an object. One might even call this surplus subjectivity
itself. It is not clear, however, why one cannot turn this situation to
poetic advantage, rather than censure it as a literary defect. ‘The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in which the speaker’s feelings
appear to lack a determinate cause or object, resisting all attempts to
formulate them, might be thought a peculiarly fine example of it.
In general, however, Eliot prefers his subjects and objects to
coalesce into seamless chunks of experience. For all his admiration
for Baudelaire’s work, he finds that ‘the content of feeling (in it) is
constantly bursting the receptacle’ (SE, p. 424), so that the mismatch
between subject and object becomes a fissure between content and
53
form. Subjective emotion or experience represents the content of a

work, while form is the poet’s way of crafting an impersonal object
out of it. By contrast, F.H. Bradley’s prose style is praised for being
perfectly matched to the content of his thought, so that the philoso-
pher’s own writing is an example of what it argues for. In the prose of
the early-modern cleric Lancelot Andrewes, the emotions are in
Eliot’s view wholly contained in and explained by the subjects on
which the author meditates. Another aspect of this unity of form and
content is that sound and sense in poetry must pull together, as in
Eliot’s view they conspicuously fail to do in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In
truly accomplished poetry, the music is inseparable from the
meaning, whereas in the grand Miltonic style the two seem to move
at different levels.
‘It may be, as I have read’, Eliot writes in On Poetry and Poets,
‘that there is a dramatic element in much of my early work’ (OPP,
p. 98). It is typical of his non-proprietorial stance to his own verse that
he should pick up this fact from the critics, or at least that he should
pretend to. (Once more, there is probably some puckish humour
afoot here.) Critics can tell you what your poems are about, or what
qualities they reveal. One reason why Eliot is so airily agnostic about
what a poem means, including those he has written himself, is that
he does not regard meaning as fundamental to poetry. He is, he
confesses, devoted to a good deal of poetry which he doesn’t fully
understand, or which at first reading he didn’t grasp at all. He was,
for example, enchanted by reading Dante in the original even before
he could understand Italian. Poetry can communicate before it is
comprehended. Meaning in a poem, he declares in a wonderfully
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apposite image, is like the piece of meat the burglar throws to the
house dog to keep it quiet while he goes about his stealthy business.
The dog here is the reader and the burglar the poet; and the latter’s
task is to distract readers with some readily consumable meaning
while he proceeds to raid their unconscious.
It is ironic that Eliot is often regarded as an ‘intellectual’ poet, no
doubt because so many of his poems are difficult to decipher. But
obscurity and intellectualism are not the same thing. Dylan Thomas
is obscure, but his work is hardly packed with profound ideas.
Despite Eliot’s formidable erudition as a critic (he seems to have read
everything in literature and philosophy, including certain Sanskrit
texts in the original), it would not be entirely unfair to call him an
anti-intellectual poet. He certainly holds that all the most important
processes in poetry work at a level far deeper than reasoning. In fact,
his suspicion of everyday rationality is one link between his avant-
garde practice and his conservative opinions. The avant garde are out
to challenge received forms of reason, sometimes by the use of
nonsense, disorder, outrage and absurdity. Conservatives naturally
repudiate all such wild experiment; but they, too, are suspicious of
rational analysis, which they associate with the bloodless, blue-
printing political left. Against this, he commends the virtues of
custom, affection, loyalty, intuition and whatever has withstood the
test of time. It is thus that the author of The Waste Land, a poem
which shocked some conventional readers to the core, is also the
pontifical right-winger of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, an
essay published three years earlier, and the Anglo-Catholic Tory is an
enthusiast of perhaps the most audacious novel ever published in
55
English, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – ‘a monstrous masterpiece’,

as he describes it (OPP, p. 120).
The poet, Eliot remarks, must have a feeling for syllable and rhythm
which penetrates far below conscious levels of thought and feeling,
sinking to ‘the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin
and bringing something back’ (UPUC, p. 118). Poets must find words
for the inarticulate, ranging beyond the frontiers of everyday conscious-
ness in order to return from this uncharted territory and report on
what they have discovered there. In doing so, they unite ‘the old and
obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the
most ancient and the most civilised mentality’ (UPUC, p. 119). Poetry
may help to break up stale modes of perception, making us see the
modern world afresh; but in doing so it also dredges up ‘the deeper,
unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which
we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a conscious evasion of
ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world’ (UPUC,
p. 155). The innovative techniques of a poem like The Waste Land –
pastiche, fractured imagery, colloquial speech, recondite allusions,
snatches of mythology, typographical experiment and the like – are at
the cutting edge of the poetry of the time; but one of the ironies of the
work is that these avant-garde devices are pressed into the service of the
archaic and atavistic. By shattering our customary false consciousness,
the poem is supposed to delve below daily experience to put us in
touch with our most primordial feelings, which run back to the origins
of humanity. In a familiar modernist move, the very new and the very
old are looped together. There is a secret compact between them, and
it is from their complicity or collision that the most fertile art flows.
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Poets, in Eliot’s view, must be both the most primitive and

sophisticated of creatures. If they are more alive to the present than
others, it is largely by virtue of being the bearers of a living past.
There is a parallel here with Eliot’s concept of tradition, in which
the past still lurks as a shaping force within the present. It is this
primitive bedrock of our being to which Freud and his disciples
give the name of the unconscious – a region which is both antique
and unchanging, like the mythological archetypes which secretly
inform The Waste Land. For Freud, the unconscious is a stranger
to temporality, rather as for Eliot the most fundamental emotions
remain constant from Homer to Housman. In this way, one of
the most scandalous, ground-breaking projects of Eliot’s time –
psychoanalysis – can be yoked to a conservative view of humanity as
essentially unchangeable.
The unconscious, with its attendant myths and symbols, can
also be used to underpin Eliot’s aversion to individualism. True self-
hood lies far deeper than individual personality. It has its roots in a
submerged domain of collective images and impersonal emotions.
The individual, not least the individual author, is of relatively
trifling significance. He or she is merely the tip of an iceberg whose
depths are unsearchable. We are dealing here with an early version
of what would later be known as the ‘death of the author’ theory, or
at least with the author’s drastic diminishment. The poet, Eliot
remarks in a passage of unusual emotional intensity, is haunted by a
demon, an obscure impulse which has no face or name, and poetry
is an exorcism of this ‘acute discomfort’ (OPP, p. 107). It is a darker
version of the Romantic idea of inspiration. When authors have
57
finally arranged their words in an appropriate form, they can purge

themselves of this demonic urge and in doing so rid themselves of
the poem altogether, handing it over to their readers so that they
can relax after their labours. It sounds more like a peculiarly painful
childbirth than a piece of imaginative creation. Poetry is something
to get out of your system. And whatever its mysterious source, it is
certainly not the individual mind.
Poets cannot predict when these obscure upsurges will occur:
they must simply devote themselves to the task of perfecting their
craft in anticipation of such spiritual seizures. There is, then, a good
deal of conscious labour involved in the poetic process, but it is not
what is most essential to it. It is rather that the poem forces itself
into the poet’s consciousness like a blind, implacable force of
Nature; and when it has taken root inside them, something has
occurred that cannot be explained by anything that went before. In
a typically astute comment on Ben Jonson, Eliot remarks that the
polished veneer of his verse means that ‘unconscious does not
respond to unconscious’ in the transaction between poem and
reader. ‘No swarm of inarticulate feelings is aroused’ (SE, p. 148) –
which is to say that Jonson’s otherwise admirable work, which Eliot
finely characterises as an art of the surface rather than as simply
superficial, lacks ‘a network of tentacular roots reaching down to
the deepest terrors and desires’ (SE, p. 155). The most powerful
poetry in Eliot’s view sets up an enormous echo chamber of reso-
nances and allusions, all of which will infiltrate the reader’s uncon-
scious in a way quite beyond the poet’s control. Perhaps the most
magnificent example of this process in Eliot’s own work is
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‘Gerontion’. If modern reality is spiritually bankrupt, one can

compensate for this to some extent with a richness of experience,
and much of this is a subliminal affair. It is no wonder, then, that
Eliot is so casual about conscious understanding – about, for
example, the scholarly business of tracking down allusions and
explicating difficult passages. The Notes to The Waste Land purport
to do just this, but it is now generally accepted that they are there
mostly to fill in a few blank pages. Conscious meaning is not the
issue – indeed, readers may well be understanding a poem at some
unconscious level whether they know it or not. It is welcome news
to the student who timorously opens Pound’s Cantos or the poems
of Paul Celan.
The idea of poetic impersonality is closely related to Eliot’s self-

declared classicism. Classicism is in general less subject-centred than
Romanticism. The classic in Eliot’s view is not in the first place the
work of an individual genius. It is rather a piece of literary art which
is resonant of a specific civilisation – one whose language gives voice
to a particular culture and history at the peak of its maturity. The
unique genius which produces it is not that of an individual author
but the spirit of a particular age and a particular people. Virgil’s
greatness springs from his place in the history of the Roman Empire,
as well as in the evolution of the Latin language. The classical work
brings a national language to a point of perfection, and its ability to
do so, ironically, is what makes its appeal so universal. If works of this
kind transcend their historical moment, they do so by belonging to
it so intimately. Eliot speaks of reading the ancient Greek poet
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Sappho and feeling the ‘spark which can leap across those 2,500
years’ (OPP, p. 131). A classical age is one of stability, shared belief,
common standards and subtle shades of feeling. The world in
Virgil’s view is characterised by order, equipoise and civility, and so
must be the poetry which portrays it. The closest English literature
comes to a classical period is the eighteenth century, not least in the
poetry of Alexander Pope; but the range of feeling of the age is
too constricted for Eliot’s taste, lacking the amplitude and versatility
of the genuine classic. The period suggests a certain feebleness of
spirit, and Eliot is notably lukewarm about even its most exemplary
literary art.
There is, however, a problem here. A classical civilisation repre-
sents Eliot’s social and cultural ideal, and the classical author who
moulds his mind most deeply is Dante. Yet though he produces a
stunning pastiche of Dante’s verse in a passage in Four Quartets, the
influence is strictly limited when it comes to the composition of his
own work. There are two reasons why this is so. If the classical work
thrives on shared values and standards, the liberal pluralism which
Eliot finds so displeasing in modern society means that there can be
precious little of this. Poets can no longer assume that they and their
readers share the same sensibility. There is no longer a community
of meaning and belief. At the same time, if a classic is to capture the
spirit of an entire civilisation, it must be in touch with its common
life and language. Poetic discourse should not be identical with
daily speech, but it should display the finest virtues of prose, which
brings it close to the everyday. But to stay faithful to the common
life and language of early twentieth-century Europe involves
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registering a sterility and spiritual devastation which is nearer to

Baudelaire than to Dante. It is thus that Eliot announces that the
modern poet must see not only the beauty and the glory but also
the boredom and the horror of human existence.
For Eliot to be loyal to one criterion of a classic, then, is to flout
certain others: order, balance, harmony, nobility and the like. It
means producing a poetry marked by spiritual disorder, sordid
imagery, broken rhythms, banal snatches of speech and barren inner
landscapes. It was from Baudelaire, Eliot tells us, that he learned
that the poet’s business was to make poetry out of the unpoetical.
Order and harmony can be hinted at only obliquely, either by dim
allusion, ironic juxtaposition or (as in The Waste Land ) through a
mythological subtext which intimates the possibility of regenera-
tion. Baudelaire, Eliot remarks, draws some of his most striking
imagery from the common life, but at the same time makes that life
gesture to something more than itself. It is a familiar strategy in his
own early poetry. By presenting a situation in all its squalor, you can
suggest the need to transcend it without having to spell out an alter-
native, which might demand a verse with too obvious designs on
the reader. It is not until Four Quartets that this negative form of
transcendence becomes explicitly thematised. If poetry must cling
to the unregenerate nature of the present, it is partly because its
language must be wedded to everyday experience, and partly
because literary works which propose an abstract ideal will fail to
engage sceptical modern readers. Instead, their language must infil-
trate their reader’s nervous system, sensory organs and unconscious
terrors and desires, all of which a remote ideal is unlikely to
61
accomplish. We shall be looking more closely at this aspect of Eliot’s

poetics later.
The classical, then, is more to be admired than imitated. More
relevant to the modern age is a period which in Eliot’s view is
distinctly unclassical, that of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. There
is, he claims, no framework of order to this civilisation, as there is in
his opinion to the world of Sophocles and Racine. On the contrary,
it strikes him as an era of anarchy, dissolution and decay – of
a wayward, extravagant individualism which refuses to brook
constraint. There is a kind of ‘artistic greediness’ abroad – a desire to
explore every conceivable form and bizarre effect, which in time will
culminate in the unbridled egoism of modern Europe. ‘The age of
Shakespeare’, Eliot comments, ‘moved in a steady current, with back
eddies certainly, towards anarchy and chaos’ (SE, p. 54). It is an era
of muddled scepticism and clashing faiths, along with a confusion
over what counts as a literary convention. Even Shakespeare indulges
in strained and mixed figures of speech, displaying ‘a tortured
perverse ingenuity of images’ (SE, p. 74). Samuel Johnson thought
much the same. His is too prodigal and undisciplined a genius for
Eliot’s taste, in contrast to the neo-classical Racine, whose work he
highly esteems.
Yet it is just these aspects of the early-modern period which Eliot
can bring to bear on his own tumultuous times; and literary history
must be rewritten to highlight this affinity. In the language of
Walter Benjamin, a state of emergency in the present evokes a
moment of the past, and the two form a ‘constellation’ across the
centuries. The ‘anarchism’ of the Renaissance is also the unleashing
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of a wealth of complex feeling and exhilarating new modes of

language, so that, to adopt a phrase of Karl Marx, history progresses
by its bad side. For Marxism, early capitalism is ‘progressive’ as well
as exploitative because it releases new forms of creative energy,
which brings Eliot’s case incongruously close to a theory of history
he abhors. ‘If new influences had not entered’, he remarks, ‘old
orders decayed, would the language not have left some of its greatest
resources unexplored?’ (SE, p. 91). It is this fertile legacy that
authors like Eliot himself will inherit some centuries later. The loss
of social and cosmic order may be a spiritual disaster, but it also
represents an inestimable gain for language and sensibility, which
break through traditional constraints to become more subtle,
diverse, volatile and exploratory. The textures of poetry grow finer
and their images more richly compacted. It is a language close to the
bone yet fast-moving, packed with perception but intellectually
agile. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bear witness
to ‘a progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of
feeling, and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing
these variations’ (SW, p. 67). That this stretch of time is also the
matrix of much of what Eliot detests – materialism, democracy,
individualism, secularisation – is an instance of the cunning of
history, which takes with one hand what it gives with the other.
Eliot was a seminal influence on F.R. Leavis, who as we shall see
later locates the so-called organic society in the seventeenth century;
so it is tempting to assume that Eliot is the source of this Leavisite
doctrine. But this is the opposite of the truth. Eliot’s social and reli-
gious ideal is to be found in the world of Dante, writing in a period
63
which (so we are told) manifests a unified sensibility more strikingly

than any other age. But it is precisely because that world is imploding
in early seventeenth-century England that the latter era represents
Eliot’s literary high ground, since the erosion of the traditional, along
with the turbulent emergence of the modern, re-energises both
language and sensibility more thoroughly than anything we have
witnessed since. It is an era of ‘decomposition’, but in the most nour-
ishing of senses. In any case, Eliot’s religious view of the corrupt
nature of humanity means that there can be for him no entirely
sound social order, as there can be for the secular-minded Leavis. The
civilisation of Dante may be exemplary, but it includes a lively sense
of sin and damnation.
The protagonist of Eliot’s thought from beginning to end is
language – more specifically, the way in which its evolution reflects
certain advances or regressions in the quality of feeling of a whole
culture. Every development of language represents a shift of feeling
and sensation as well. Thought can remain constant across different
periods and languages, but the affective life is far more culturally
particular. Sensibility alters all the time, Eliot points out, but it takes
a writer of genius to invent the formal means of articulating these
changes. (We do not need to inquire too deeply into who performs
this task for the early twentieth century.) In some Jacobean drama-
tists, we witness ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words
perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings
perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings, which evidences a very
high development of the senses, a development of the English
language which we have perhaps never equalled’ (SE, p. 209).
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Sensory and linguistic development are sides of the same coin. It is

as though these playwrights prefigure such modernist techniques as
montage, elision, estrangement and ambiguity. Cyril Tourneur’s The
Revenger’s Tragedy reveals ‘a highly original development of vocabu-
lary and metric, unlike that of any other play [of Tourneur] and
every other dramatist’ (SE, p. 186), as the horror of human existence
finds exactly the right words and rhythms to reveal itself. (We now
know that one reason why the play is unlike Tourneur’s other work
is because it was co-authored with his colleague Thomas Middleton.)
One might suggest, then, that Eliot’s subject is less language in
itself than language as a record of the history of sensibility. He is in
quest of what Stefan Collini calls in a different context ‘a qualitative
history of experience’.9 The business of criticism is to evaluate
various nuances of feeling, whether ‘decadent’ or sentimentalist,
ebullient or enervated, sardonic or sublime. Certain tones and
cadences are signs of a distinctive sensibility. Eliot is more interested
in ‘the system of Dante’s organisation of sensibility’ (SE, p. 275)
than he is, say, in his cosmological beliefs or theological idiosyncra-
sies. In this sense, his criticism belongs to a body of twentieth-
century writing, one which stretches from I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis
and George Orwell to Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams,
which seeks to detect in the quality of language the quality of the
civilisation from which it springs. It is a distinctively English preoc-
cupation. Eliot’s interest is not so much in what a poem says –
indeed, he is often remarkably indifferent to what we normally call
content – as with the ‘structure of emotions’ it embodies. We shall
see later that the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ is central to the
65
criticism of Raymond Williams, an adversary of Eliot in most other

respects. What is at stake for both critics is not some shapeless
sprawl of emotion but precisely organised patterns of feeling. It is a
question of what Eliot calls a ‘logic of sensibility’ (SE, p. 269).
The home of feeling is language, at least when it comes to poetry.
Language, writes Raymond Williams, ‘is as much the record of the
history of a people as political institutions and religions and philo-
sophical modes’.10 The task of the poet for Eliot is not quite to purify
the language of the tribe, as Mallarmé proposes, but to preserve and
enrich it so that it can offer a more sensitive, diverse range of tone
and feeling. Language is like a living organism which is ceaselessly
mutating as well as constantly being corroded, and the literary artist
is engaged in an endless battle against this deterioration, as Four
Quartets makes clear. One reason why a language declines as it
evolves is because it offers only a limited range of literary possibili-
ties, many of which will already have been exploited by past authors.
Every modern writer is in this sense belated. So though language is
the poet’s medium, it is also his or her antagonist. At moments of
seismic historical change, we need a form of speech which is ‘strug-
gling to digest and accept new objects, new feelings, new aspects, as,
for instance, the prose of Mr James Joyce or the earlier Conrad’ (SE,
p. 327). In Eliot’s own lifetime, the name of this upheaval is
modernism, and only modesty forbids him from adding his own
name to those of the authors he mentions. Yet though forms need to
be broken and refashioned from time to time, language imposes its
own laws and limits on such transformations, determining speech
rhythms and sound patterns in a way which restricts the possibilities
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of innovation. We are the servants of our discourse, not its masters;

and the poet is simply the instrument by which it may be bequeathed
by one generation to the next in the sprightliest possible shape.
The verse of the era from Marlowe to Marvell has in Eliot’s eyes a
subtlety and complexity which remains unmatched. From there,
however, it has been downhill all the way – or at least all the way until
we arrive at Eliot himself and a clutch of his modernist colleagues. All
ages may be corrupt, but linguistically speaking some are more corrupt
than others. Blank verse degenerates from Shakespeare to Milton,
becoming less capable of expressing shades of sense and intricacies of
feeling. Milton, with his outlandish Latinisms, tortuous syntax, ritual-
ised verse forms, remoteness from everyday speech and lack of sensuous
specificity, wreaks a degree of damage on the English language from
which it has yet to recover. He is a ‘Chinese Wall’ which blocks off our
return to a time when we could feel our thought as immediately as the
odour of a rose. Once again, it is not inconceivable that Eliot’s hostility
to this Puritan regicide is bound up with a dislike of his revolutionary
politics. Yet here, too, form predominates over content. By the time of
John Dryden, so Eliot declares with a typically magisterial flourish,
‘the mind and sensibility of England has altered’ (UPUC, p. 22).
There is a decline in vigour from the writings of Montaigne to the
style of Hobbes, and from there to what Eliot sees as the desiccated
prose of Gibbon and Voltaire. Language and affect, however, are not
always so closely coupled: in the eighteenth century, poetic diction
becomes more urbane but the feeling it registers grows cruder, so that
with poets like Thomas Gray and William Collins a sophistication still
evident in the language has faded from the sensibility.
67
We are speaking, in other words, of what is probably Eliot’s best-

known article of faith: the ‘dissociation of sensibility’. The idea was
seized upon so eagerly by other critics that Eliot came to profess
himself both bored and embarrassed by it. It is a dissociation which
supposedly set in some time in the mid-seventeenth century,
marking off writers such as the Metaphysical poets and Jacobean
dramatists, who are able to invest their language with a complex
unity of thought, feeling and sensory experience, from later, ill-
starred authors who were incapable of achieving this fusion. It is the
moment when literary art signals a more general Fall into the
debased modern age. It represents the defeat of royalism, the rise of
secularism, the triumph of scientific rationalism, the demise of the
catholicity of the church, the loss of a sense of cosmic order and the
emergence of an uncurbed individualism. A turbulent civil war had
beheaded the monarch, lower-class Puritanism had disrupted the
church, and while some poets could think but not feel, others,
mostly labelled Romantics, could feel but not think.
Viewed in this light, it becomes easier to grasp how the literary
tradition can be said to bypass some of the most renowned reputa-
tions. For what that tradition really signifies, as we have suggested
already, is a specific kind of writing, one which reflects a supposedly
non-dissociated sensibility. For Dante, medieval philosophy consti-
tutes a system of ideas which are lived, perceived, felt on the senses.
The Elizabethans and Jacobeans also reveal ‘a quality of sensuous
thought’ (ASG, p. 19). By contrast, ‘Tennyson and Browning are
poets, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour
of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his
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sensibility’ (SE, p. 287). In the drama of George Chapman, ‘there is

a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought
into feeling’ (SE, p. 286). Eliot’s quest is for a marriage between two
meanings of the word ‘sense’: as meaning, but also as sensation.
The most gifted writers of Donne and Chapman’s period were
equipped with ‘a mechanism of sensibility that could devour any
kind of experience’ (SE, p. 287). It was a time when ‘the intellect was
immediately at the tip of the senses. Sensation became word and
word became sensation’ (SE, pp. 209–10). We gain a sense in these
authors of the necessary difficulty of poetry in a diverse, fragmented
age. Poetic obscurity is thus a historical product. ‘The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect,
in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’
(SE, p. 289). Poetic language becomes peculiarly condensed, vibrant
and allusive, marked by a compacting of images and spawning of
associations. Eliot is speaking here of the Metaphysical poets, but he
might just as well be describing his own literary work, or indeed
modernist poetry in general.
The Metaphysical poet, confronted with dissonance and dissolu-
tion, seeks to forge unities out of fragments; but he does so ironically,
self-consciously, aware that in a disintegrating social order these
resemblances are bound to seem arbitrary and inorganic. This is
what we know as the Metaphysical conceit. There is a fine example
of it in the opening lines of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, which present us with
a notoriously incongruous image: ‘Let us go then, you and I, / When
the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised
upon a table’. The simile asserts an affinity at the same time as it
69
flaunts its oddness. There is no given correspondence between its

two parts, unless they are meant to be linked by the colour red
(sunset and blood). They are forced into alliance, but in a way which
deliberately highlights their disparity. Or, to quote Samuel Johnson’s
legendary description of the Metaphysical poets, as Eliot himself
does in his essay on these writers, ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are
yoked by violence together’ (SE, p. 283). Part of the meaning of
Eliot’s image lies in the flagrantly synthetic way in which it is manu-
factured. It is an example of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls
Fancy, as opposed to the organic unities of the Imagination. In the
medieval world of Dante and Aquinas, at least in Eliot’s rose-tinted
version of it, reality is composed of certain divinely given corre-
spondences on which the poet may spontaneously draw. In the
modern era, however, this is no longer the case, so that all relations
between things become fortuitous, products of the mind rather than
inherent in reality. What holds the world together is a capricious act
of consciousness, which is what we have in the Prufrock simile. It is
worth noting, however, that in a statement in On Poetry and Poets
Eliot seeks to have it both ways, announcing that art ‘gives us some
perception of an order in life, by imposing an order upon it’ (OPP,
p. 93). Perhaps he means that by organising the bits and pieces of
human existence into a somewhat arbitrary shape, one can allow a
deeper pattern to emerge, one which is somehow given. It is not a
bad description of The Waste Land.
There is a historical subtext to the dissociation of sensibility thesis,

though it is not one which Eliot himself spells out. In the modern
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age, with the growth of science, rationalism, technology, commer-

cialism, bureaucracy and the dominance of utility, language is
bound to become more abstract, and thus less hospitable to poetry.
Yet this verbal anaemia also inspires a Romantic revolt, which can
tip the balance too far towards the subjectivist and self-indulgent.
The two tendencies are sides of the same coin. As Marx points out,
Utilitarianism and Romanticism are terrible twins. What is needed,
then, is a mode of feeling which is toughened by being sensuously
objectified, as in the objective correlative, but also a form of thought
which avoids the dryly conceptual by sticking close to the senses.
Eliot’s conservatism leads him to be distrustful of the purely cere-
bral (arid blueprints are for Jacobins and Stalinists), but also to keep
his distance from undisciplined splurges of sentiment.
In the end, poets are distinguished not so much by a sense of
truth or beauty but by the degree of sensitivity of their psycho-
physical constitution. One must do more than look into the heart;
one must also ‘look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system,
and the digestive tracts’ (SE, p. 290). We shall see a similar neuro-
logical bias in the work of Eliot’s friend I.A. Richards. We are
speaking of the physiology of poetry, not simply of its extractable
meaning. In a striking passage, Eliot comments that Dante’s sensory
images suggest that ‘the resurrection of the body has perhaps a
deeper meaning than we understand’ (SE, p. 250). ‘Nowhere in
poetry’, he adds, ‘has experience so remote from ordinary experi-
ence been expressed so concretely’ (SE, p. 267). By contrast, the
verse of the Carolingian dramatist Philip Massinger, who writes
after the Fall in Eliot’s scheme of salvation, suffers from a certain
71
verbal pallor. Literary style should chart ‘the involutions of a mode

of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions’ (SE, p. 211),
whereas Massinger’s work is ‘not guided by direct communication
through the nerves’ (SE, p. 215). One thinks of a couplet from
‘Prufrock’: ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a
magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen’.
Poetry, then, works by sensation and suggestion, not by a blood-
less rationalism. If it does involve ideas, they should be fleshed out
in sensory form. There is a relation between this poetic creed and
the nature of ideology. The most persuasive political creeds, though
abstract enough in themselves, succeed by embedding themselves in
men and women’s lived experience. In fact, any ruling ideology
which fails to accomplish this project is unlikely to survive very
long. It is thus that power converts itself into everyday culture, so
that we come to obey its edicts habitually, spontaneously, by custom
rather than intellectual conviction. Assumptions that are felt, Eliot
writes in After Strange Gods, are more compelling than those that
can be formulated. It is a typical article of conservative faith –
conservative, because if ideas and beliefs are as immediate as the
smell of lavender, then they are far harder to refute than if they can
be argued over. And this spontaneous acceptance of ideas can prove
convenient for the ruling powers. In any case, the view that what
matters most about poetry is its sensuous specificity should not pass
unquestioned, as we shall see later in the case of F.R. Leavis. It is
only really with Romanticism that it comes into its own. It is
scarcely the first impression we are likely to gather from reading
Horace, John Clare or Robert Graves.
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T.S. EL I OT
If language is rammed up tightly against the world, then there

would seem no room for it to act as a critique of it. A critique must
establish a certain distance from its object in order to appraise it. So
poetic language can represent experience or reality, but it cannot pass
direct judgement on it. It cannot give us the world and evaluate it at
the same time. In Eliot’s poetry, the author’s own attitudes must there-
fore remain for the most part implicit, hinted at by tone, rhythm,
allusion, suggestion or ironic juxtaposition. They can be shown but
not said. This is fortunate, since the modern age, fatigued by preaching
and propaganda, will not take easily to conceptual or didactic literary
art. Poetry has become the opposite of rhetoric. We moderns, Eliot
argues, distrust the kind of verse which aims to edify, instruct or
persuade. His colleague I.A. Richards observes that ‘disordered feel-
ings cannot be purified by preaching’.11As Barry Cullen puts it, ‘the
new poetry has to be a reflector of fractured consciousness, not a vessel
of elevated sentiment’.12 For a doctrinal author like Eliot, this might
seem to pose a problem; but we are dealing with the doctrine of a
conservative, who, as we have seen, is likely to be suspicious of abstract
conceptions. A discussion of general ideas is siphoned off instead into
his prose, leaving a curious contrast between it and the poetry. The
difference comes through most notably as one of tone.
The poetry of an integrated sensibility is one in which language
is wedded to its object. The two, so to speak, form an organic society
in miniature. ‘Language in a healthy state’, Eliot writes in an essay on
the poet Swinburne, ‘presents the object, is so close to the object that
the two are identified’ (SE, p. 327). Signs cling to their referents,
unlike in Paradise Lost – a work which Eliot believes you have to read
73
twice: once for the music and once for the meaning. Words and
things, seamlessly unified in the work of Shakespeare or Donne, have
fallen apart in the modern era, and must be stitched together by a
new poetic practice. Yet this is not quite consistent with Eliot’s own
early poetry. At that time he was influenced by the French Symbolist
movement, from which many of his critical tenets are derived: the
autonomy of the artwork, its multiplicity of meaning and resistance
to everyday rationality, its evocative rather than declarative nature,
the elusiveness of truth, the irrelevance of authorial intentions, the
central role of myth, symbol and the unconscious, the poem as a
fleeting revelation of some transcendent reality. We shall see later
that most of these principles are vigorously rebutted by that most
ferociously anti-Symbolist of critics, William Empson.
In the Symbolists’ view, the sign or word is more or less autono-
mous – a material reality in itself, not simply the vehicle of a meaning.
Accordingly, there are passages in Eliot’s poetry which appear to refer
to some object or situation but which are really just verbal concoc-
tions, self-referential snatches of language with nothing in the real
world to latch on to. In ‘Gerontion’, for example, we read of
‘Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians’, but we are not meant to
inquire who Hakagawa is, or what he is up to bowing among the
works of a Venetian master. In ‘A Cooking Egg’, we encounter terms
like ‘red-eyed scavengers’ and ‘penny world’, phenomena which exist
only at the level of language. Phrases like this have resonances rather
than referents; and since they are relieved of the burden of denota-
tion, they are free to breed among themselves to trigger fresh rever-
berations in the reader’s mind. Yet since the word as a thing in itself
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T.S. EL I OT
is not the same as the word as wedded to an object, it is hard to make

coherent sense of Eliot’s aesthetics. Both techniques materialise
language, but in quite different ways.
His reflections on the place of thought or ideas in poetry are
similarly inconsistent. He maintains at one point that thought,
feeling and sensory experience should blend into one, but argues
elsewhere that poets do not think in their work at all. Instead, they
express what he calls the emotional equivalent of thought. Art
should not embody a philosophy or act as a medium for argument.
Wisdom is more important than theory. Dante has a coherent
system of thought behind him while Shakespeare does not, but
from a poetic viewpoint the distinction is irrelevant. Neither author
does any real thinking, since as poets this is not their job. Shelley is
plagued by too many intangible ideas for Eliot’s taste. It is their
abstraction that he finds offensive, he insists, not the fact that most
of them are politically repugnant to him, a claim that only the most
charitable of readers is likely to credit. John Donne, by contrast,
probably believed nothing at all, simply picking up ‘like a magpie,
various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye’ (SE,
pp. 138–9), but his work is none the worse for that. Yet though
Eliot is sceptical of the role of ideas in poetry, his late masterpiece
Four Quartets is hardly short of them, and we have seen already that
he upbraids the work of D.H. Lawrence for being incapable of
thought. He also maintains that Agamemnon and Macbeth are as
much works of intellect as the writings of Aristotle, which is hard to
square with the claim that poets do not think in their verse. There
is a modernist poet even finer than Eliot – Wallace Stevens – whose
75
poems are quite often about epistemology, hardly the sort of subject
that one feels as palpably as the scent of perfume.
What matters, Eliot insists, is not so much an author’s beliefs as
his or her ‘orthodoxy of sensibility and the sense of tradition’ (ASG,
p. 38). Yet a writer who values such things is likely to share a number
of Eliot’s own convictions in any case. The reader, he declares, need
not agree with a poet’s opinions in order to find their work persua-
sive; but in case this concession opens the floodgates to the writings
of too many shaggy-haired Trotskyists, he also insists on a difference
between mature, well-founded beliefs (whether one endorses them
or not) and feeble or childish ones, which ruin one’s response to the
poetry. He does not seem to recognise that what counts as mature
or childish is a controversial matter, as well as sometimes hard to
distinguish from what you consider true or false. Detesting a poet’s
ideas, he holds, is bound to affect one’s estimate of their art, as
opposed perhaps to simply dissenting from such notions. No doubt
he has such figures as Milton and Shelley in mind. It is impossible,
he holds, to sever one’s personal beliefs entirely from one’s
response to a work of art; and though one can of course grasp a
poet’s views without taking them on board oneself, it is likely that
absorbing the poet’s vision of things at the deepest emotional level
will involve committing yourself to it morally and intellectually as
well. There are times when beliefs in poetry strike Eliot as having a
merely pragmatic value (do they enhance the overall poetic effect?),
and other times when he warns that a writer must not adopt for
purely poetic reasons a system of concepts he holds to be untrue.
Dante the man is not identical with Dante the poet; but if we
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T.S. EL I OT
suspected that he thought the theology behind The Divine Comedy

was nonsensical, our enjoyment of the work would be gravely
diminished. And if the views poets advance are vile or meaningless,
they are not writing poetry at all. One source of these discrepancies
is a clash between Eliot’s poetics, which as we have seen allots a
lowly place to general conceptions, and his conservative politics,
which make him ill-disposed to radical ideas in poetry and anxious
to rebut them. But that means accepting that there is indeed thought
in poetry, which in other moods Eliot is reluctant to accept.
One of the benefits of writing like Dante against the backdrop
of a taken-for-granted creed is that it can do the work of believing
for you, allowing you to get on with the business of poetry. As we
have seen already, William Blake supposedly lacks ‘a framework of
accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him
from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his
attention on the problems of poetry’ (SE, p. 322). The classical
work, as we have seen, depends on just such a community of convic-
tion; and its absence in the case of Blake leaves his hands free for
private fantasy and political mischief. In a culture in which values
and principles are held in common, the poet is saved a tiresome
amount of intellectual labour. In Eliot’s view, Samuel Johnson is a
critic bred in precisely such conditions, writing as he does in the
‘settled’ civilisation of Augustan England. In modern times, by
contrast, sociology, psychology and kindred specialisms enlarge our
sense of a poem’s relation to the culture as a whole; but they also
involve dispute and dissent, displacing our attention from the work
itself.
77
Genuine criticism, then, requires a common culture. So Eliot

argues in an essay on Johnson in On Poetry and Poets. Dante, he
asserts, thought in a way that was shared by every cultivated indi-
vidual of his time, a perilous generalisation. Yet in The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism Eliot appears to advance just the opposite case
– that it is the breakdown of such common criteria which results in
the rise of criticism in the first place. ‘The important moment for the
appearance of criticism’, he writes, ‘seems to be the time when poetry
ceases to be the expression of the mind of a whole people’ (UPUC,
p. 22). In the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, certain
deep-seated historical changes mean that the critic can no longer take
poetry for granted but must look into its deeper social and philo-
sophical assumptions. Theory emerges when practices find themselves
in trouble. It is when a literary or social activity can no longer take
itself as natural, but is forced by historical circumstance into a new
kind of self-consciousness, that criticism or theory begins to take
hold. Indeed, theory is that self-consciousness. We only need to think
hard about things when they stop working as they should. Yet criti-
cism, Eliot maintains, can also become a problem in its own right. In
a liberal pluralist society, our aesthetic enjoyment of a literary work
may be at odds with our ideological censure of it; a variety of view-
points is bound to conflict; and the din of such critical contention
may drown out the music of poetic art.
It follows from this argument that in a settled culture with
common beliefs, criticism would wither away. The aim of critics,
like that of political radicals, is to do themselves out of a job by
helping to bring about the conditions in which they would no
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T.S. EL I OT
longer be necessary. Nevertheless, while criticism still exists, it

represents a communal, collaborative enterprise, rather like language
and civilisation themselves. As such, it provides an antidote to an
atomised society. It consists in ‘the common pursuit of true judge-
ment’ (SE, p. 45); and we shall see later that F.R. Leavis will pluck
from this phrase the title of one of his most influential works.
More or less single-handedly, this mild-mannered ex-banker and
churchwarden inaugurated a literary and critical revolution which
still reverberates across the globe. If some of his social views are
offensive, and some of his critical ideas are not to be probed too
rigorously, it is with his reflections on literature that a distinctively
modern criticism is forged. His recasting of the English literary
canon is breathtakingly bold, his cosmopolitan breadth of knowl-
edge remarkable, and his sensibility light years removed from that
of the thin-blooded, straitjacketed verse he encountered on first
coming to London. He moved from Missouri to Mayfair, literary
Bolshevik to national institution, in a drastic shift of allegiance and
identity; yet it is hard to shake off the suspicion that in all these
roles he was a consummate performer, who, like the music-hall stars
he admired, never ceased to keep a canny eye on his effect on an
audience, and who could always be relied upon to produce a stun-
ning impersonation of himself.
79
2
I.A. RICHARDS
In his Selected Essays, T.S. Eliot quotes from a writer he commends

as ‘one of the most acute of younger psychologists’, and describes
him elsewhere as ‘of cardinal importance in the history of literary
criticism’ (‘The Modern Mind’, RC, p. 213).1 The psychologist in
question was Ivor Armstrong Richards, who took the Cambridge
English Faculty by storm in the early 1920s. The son of a works
manager who was also a chemical engineer, Richards had come to
Cambridge from his private school intent on studying History; but
he soon concluded (to use his own words) that history was some-
thing that ought never to have happened, and decided to study
Mental and Moral Sciences instead. He was to retain his hatred of
the past as a saga of cruelty and destitution for the rest of his life, a
loathing which contrasted sharply with his optimism about the
future.
The Cambridge English Faculty of the time was not exactly a
hub of rigorous critical inquiry. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
held the Chair of English, spent most of his time in the Cornish
village of Fowey as commodore of the local yacht club, conde-
scending to visit Cambridge for a few weeks each term. It was his
custom to address as ‘Gentlemen’ a lecture hall containing a large
number of women, before proceeding to rhapsodise for an hour or
so about the twin mysteries of the soul within and the exquisitely
designed universe without. He habitually lectured in morning dress.
What mattered was literary gossip, good taste and elegant belles
lettres, not disciplined critical intelligence. T.S. Eliot, hardly a fan of
professionalism, comments on the ‘British dislike of the specialist’
as one cause of the nation’s intellectual mediocrity.2 Towards the
end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist Émile Durkheim
wrote that ‘the time has passed when the perfect man was he who
appeared interested in everything without attaching himself exclu-
sively to anything, capable of tasting and understanding everything,
finds the means to unite and condense in himself all that was most
exquisite in civilisation’.3 The age of the dilettante was drawing to a
close.
It is scarcely surprising that in the genteel-amateur milieu of
Cambridge English, the young I.A. Richards considered becoming
a mountain guide in the Hebrides rather than throwing in his lot
with academia. (He was a highly skilled mountaineer, and once had
his hair set on fire by lightning during a climb. He also forced a bear
in the Canadian Rockies to back off by urinating on it from a
balcony.) He was diverted from spending his life scrambling up
Hebridean rock faces by being invited to lecture in the English
Faculty in 1919. Like his slightly younger colleague F.R. Leavis he
81
was paid by the head, that is, according to the number of students
who attended his sessions.
Two path-breaking works, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
and Practical Criticism (1929), became world-renowned and estab-
lished their author as an international star. One might claim that he
more or less single-handedly professionalised a subject which until
then had consisted largely in waffle, impressionism and textual
scholarship. He was also well aware of his own significance in this
respect. Some of his colleagues were averse to the whole idea of
evaluating literary works, as opposed to a scholarly discussion of
them. The Oxford English professor Helen Gardner described such
evaluation as ‘a folly, if not a crime’. Richards was also one of the
earliest examples of what we would call today a literary theorist,
which is to say someone who feels that most literary critics fail to
reflect in any systematic way on what they get up to. ‘Critics’,
Richards writes, ‘have as yet hardly begun to ask themselves what
they are doing or under what conditions they work’ (PLC, p. 202).
From the viewpoint of a theorist, critics do not start far back
enough. Whereas the critic asks (for example) whether the poem is
effective, the theorist wants to know what we mean by a poem in
the first place, and by what criteria we judge its success.
Richards’s lectures in Cambridge were so popular that he was
sometimes obliged to deliver them out of doors, perhaps the first
time the university had witnessed such an event since medieval
times. He visited Japan and China, conducting courses on practical
criticism in Beijing, and returned to China some years later before
taking up a Chair at Harvard. His frame of mind, like that of his
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
most eminent student William Empson, was decidedly cosmopol-

itan. On his first visit to the East, he and his partner Dorothy first
climbed in the Alps, then visited Moscow where they met Sergei
Eisenstein, took the Siberian Express to Vladivostok, travelled by
ship to Japan and Korea and then set out overland to China via
Manchuria. The couple picked up some basic Chinese in the course
of their visit. Eliot’s cosmopolitanism, by contrast, was mostly
confined to Europe, along with a handful of ancient Sanskrit and
Buddhist texts.
Richards’s international outlook was shared to a lesser degree by
the Cambridge English school of the time. The Faculty, as we have
seen, emerged alongside the experiments of European modernism
and was by no means insulated from them. Nor was it remote from
new developments in American literature and criticism. Richards
himself spoke up for modernism, and was one of the first critics to
champion the poetry of Hopkins and Hardy. He once smuggled a
copy of Joyce’s Ulysses into the United States, while F.R. Leavis had
his collar felt by members of the Cambridge constabulary for being
in possession of the novel. The matter in Leavis’s case went all the
way up to the Home Office, who feared that anyone degenerate
enough to read the book might be a corrupting influence on the
young ladies whom he taught. Since Leavis had a low opinion of
Joyce, whom he described privately as a ‘nasty Irishman’, the inci-
dent is not without irony.
For the last four decades of his life Richards abandoned literary
criticism almost entirely, attending instead to problems of pedagogy
(including in high schools), world literacy, the teaching of English
83
as a foreign language, technology and communication. Among his

many anticipations of the future was his founding role in today’s
global industry of English-language teaching. It was communica-
tion, not criticism, he remarked, which had been his concern from
the outset; and it was by this route that he passed from literary
criticism to international politics. Language was the nexus between
the two, since a training in foreign languages, as well as in English
as a foreign language, would in his view promote international
peace and understanding in an era of aggressive nationalism. He
paid little regard to the structural factors (material interests, for
example, or the power of ideology) which disrupt dialogue and
thwart consensus. He also believed that without literacy, men
and women in weaker, poorer nations were condemned to social
and economic misery. His work had a profound influence on educa-
tion, both in schools and universities.
Much of his time he spent promoting so-called Basic English, a
simplified form of the language invented by his colleague C.K.
Ogden, and founded an institute in the United States, Language
Research Inc, to help propagate it. It is probable that the sinister
Newspeak of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a parody of the project.
Ogden was a pacifist, feminist and collaborator with James Joyce, as
well as a notorious Cambridge eccentric: he deeply disapproved of
fresh air and exercise, and thought conversations could be conducted
more efficiently if the participants wore masks. Richards’s campaign
for the role of Basic English in advancing mutual understanding on
a global scale, which eventually brought him to the attention of both
Churchill and Roosevelt, involved him in frequent international
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
travel and negotiations with various governments. He was intent on

nothing less than reversing the curse of Babel.
The crusade also took him to the Walt Disney studios in Los
Angeles, where with the help of cartoonists he created the first
simplified figures for language instruction manuals, to be used in a
US Navy programme for Chinese sailors. It is hard to imagine, say,
T.S. Eliot at work alongside the creators of Donald Duck. Bizarrely,
Richards’s Basic English version of Plato’s Republic was distributed
to US troops, while the CIA was later to make use of his techniques
of close verbal analysis. He was also hired by the Rockefeller
Foundation to draw up a statement on the practice of reading. This
most worldly of dons had morphed from academic to global activist,
speaking rather grandly of his desire to unify the planet. It was an
admirable vision, though one which involved the liberal-rationalist
mistake that conflict is essentially a matter of miscommunication. If
only we understood each other better, we would abandon our
antagonisms. Among other misconceptions, this fails to account for
the fact that a good many adversaries understand each other only
too well, indeed conflict with each other precisely for this reason. It
was not misunderstanding that caused the Wall Street crash or the
rise of fascism in Richards’s own day. One of the drawbacks of social
media is that there is too much communication rather than too
little.
As a student at Cambridge, Richards was reputed to be some-
thing of an anarchist, and became a member of the celebrated
Heretics society. He was, in fact, not an anarchist but a liberal, for
whom freedom was perhaps the most precious value, a case
85
sometimes easy to confuse with a more militant libertarianism. Yet

in some respects his liberal creed did indeed lead him to radical
conclusions. He harboured a deep suspicion of English studies, not
least as a subject fit for examination, and thought it ‘iniquitous,
profanation, to use literature for such purposes’ (FA, p. xxxiv). He
also believed that scholarly research in English was largely a waste of
time, and wrote in a private letter that he despised literary types. In
his view, English failed to provide sufficient discipline for the intel-
lect, and his experiments with students’ capacities for critical anal-
ysis, which we shall be touching on later, convinced him that levels
of proficiency in reading were so dismayingly low as to render the
subject pointless as a form of education. In fact, he came to regard
academic criticism as his enemy, a view shared by his colleague F.R.
Leavis, and announced that ‘the worst threat to the world’s critical
standards comes just now from the universities’ (CI, p. lx). He
himself was a pioneer of so-called practical criticism, as we shall see
later; but he was also a literary theorist, psychologist, philosopher of
language, aesthetician, educationalist, cultural commentator and
second-rate poet. Given this assortment of interests, English as
Cambridge conceived of it struck him as lamentably parochial.
At the same time, Richards’s intellectual interests proved useful
to a Faculty in search of some rather more plausible way of legiti-
mating English as an academic subject than Quiller-Couch-like
appeals to the mysteries of soul and universe. Richards’s work was
vital in helping to put the subject on a sound disciplinary footing.
Cambridge was accordingly grateful: a later English professor there,
Basil Willey, describes him as the founder of modern literary
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
criticism, and maintains that nobody since Samuel Taylor Coleridge

had done such deep-seated thinking about the subject.4 It is true
that no English critic since Coleridge had brought such funda-
mental concepts, or such an armoury of theoretical instruments, to
bear on the study of literary works. Richards had a most un-English
interest in first principles. One might claim that his work consti-
tutes the most systematic defence of poetry to be found in the
English language. Coleridge, who had similar theoretical interests
and on whom Richards wrote an impressive book, was one of his
most vital sources of inspiration, as was, more remotely, Confucius.
In fact, in the view of some commentators, the influence of
Coleridge led Richards to abandon, or at least to modify, his
Benthamite ethics. Critics in the future, he declared prophetically,
would feel the need for theoretical resources not previously thought
to be necessary, and he himself conducted a more or less single-
handed campaign against the anti-theoretical literary scholars of his
own day, prominent among whom was the Oxford medievalist C.S.
Lewis. Lewis once sardonically handed Richards a copy of his own
work Principles of Literary Criticism in order to help him get to
sleep.
Seen from a traditionalist standpoint, Richards’s views of
language are startlingly heterodox. He rejects the idea of correct
usage – ‘this social or snob control over language’, as he calls it (PR,
p. 51) – insisting instead that how people actually speak and write
is also how they ought to do so. If those around you habitually drop
their aitches, then it is correct usage for you to do so as well. The
precept that one should use a word in the way the ‘best’ writers do
87
(but who decides who is best?) strikes him as the most pernicious
dogma in the teaching of English. In The Meaning of Meaning, he
denounces as ‘the Proper Meaning superstition’ the idea that words
are in some sense part of what they stand for, or have a fixed meaning
independent of their specific uses. There is no inherent relation
between a word and a thing. To imagine that such a relation exists
is a species of ‘word magic’ – the ‘primitive’ belief that a name is part
of what it denotes, and can conjure it up like a spiritual presence.
On this view, to manipulate words is to manipulate things. For
Ogden and Richards, by contrast, words only attach themselves to
objects within a specific context or situation. Only when this
context is considered can the connection between sign and object
be established. To demonstrate the point, Richards produces a
famous diagram – a picture of a triangle with ‘Symbol’, ‘Thought’
and ‘Referent’ (or object) at its respective corners – to show that the
relation between the first and the third is always mediated by the
second. (The American philosopher C.S. Peirce anticipates this
insight, referring to what Richards calls the Thought as the
Interpretant.)5 To put the point another way: the relation between
language and reality is always a question of interpretation, rather
than one which is given, natural, immediate or intuitive. Even so,
the ancient idea of word magic lives on in Richards’s view in the
hypostasising of certain abstractions which have a formidable power
to mould reality: Church, State, Order, Liberty, Leader, Nation,
Democracy and so on. In Ken Hirschkop’s judgement, ‘The modern
version of the sacred was, in short, politics, for there was where one
found abstractions worth dying and killing for’.6 In this sense, The
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
Meaning of Meaning folds a politics wary of idols and fetishes into

its theory of meaning.
Whatever the grammarians may imagine, Ogden and Richards
claim, there are many different grammars used for various purposes,
and grammar itself can tell you nothing of the social situation or
discursive context which gives rise to an utterance in the first place.
Grammarians tend to treat their own classifications as fixed and
absolute, and so do logicians. They do not recognise that how you
classify depends on what you are trying to do. Notions such as
subject and predicate, or universal and particular, are not inherent
in human thought but convenient for certain ends. Our grammat-
ical categories ultimately reflect the way we carve up the world as
part of our struggle for existence, so that thought is rooted in our
biology and language is part of our bodily behaviour. If we had
different bodies and sensory organisations we would inhabit a
different world altogether, as no doubt congers and kangaroos do;
and if we happened to be congers and kangaroos who were able to
speak, our language would no doubt be unintelligible to the crea-
tures we are right now. Our feelings and attitudes are shaped by our
social and physiological needs. For Richards as for Friedrich
Nietzsche, the supposedly objective structure of the world is in fact
a projection of our grammar, and a different grammar would yield
us a different reality. Traditional grammar teaching, which fails to
grasp this point, should be banned from schools. What should be
studied instead is what Richards calls in Speculative Instruments ‘the
laws of the elasticity of language’ (SI, p. 80), its supple, loose-limbed
nature – though one might note that if a law is elastic enough, it
89
ceases to be a law. As a liberal, Richards is hostile to all types of

rigidity and conformism. Public opinion, ‘good form’, social codes
and conventional moral norms are alike suspect.
There is more than a touch of the obstreperous young iconoclast
about the early Richards. Existing linguistic theories, he airily
announces, are almost all to be jettisoned. The whole aesthetic
heritage from Immanuel Kant onwards is briskly discarded. Most
critical dogmas of the past are either nonsense or obsolete, and far
more of the great art of the past is inaccessible to us than we care to
imagine. The fact that works of art are products of their historical
moment may limit their durability, which for Richards (but not, as
we have seen, for Eliot) is true to some extent of Dante. The greater
part of ancient Greek tragedy, like almost all Elizabethan tragic
drama apart from Shakespeare, should be written off as pseudo-
tragedy. The belief that there is a special aesthetic state, one clearly
distinguishable from the rest of our experience, is a ‘phantom’. On
the contrary, ‘the world of poetry has in no sense any different
reality from the rest of the world and it has no special laws and no
other-worldly peculiarities’ (PLC, p. 70). Works of art deal in
commonplace pleasures and emotions. Artists may differ from their
fellow citizens, but only because the experiences they share with
them are in their case more delicately organised. It is a difference of
degree rather than of kind. We shall see later that F.R. Leavis simi-
larly dismisses the whole concept of specifically literary values.
Unlike Eliot, Richards is an egalitarian rather than an elitist,
maintaining that ‘no man should be so situated as to be deprived of
all the generally accessible values’ (PLC, p. 56). As we shall see, the
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
influence of Utilitarianism underlies this conviction that everyone

should count as one, and no more than one. The most complete
mode of human utterance – poetry – must be made widely avail-
able, since ‘the salvation we are seeking is for all’ (SI, p. 71). Mass
education may be our only hope; and if ordinary men and women
find modern poetry unintelligible, it is the fault of a defective social
and educational system, not the upshot of their own stupidity.
When it comes to culture, there is a ‘gulf between what is preferred
by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most quali-
fied opinion’ (PLC, p. 34), and protecting such standards of excel-
lence against the debased taste of the masses is one reason why
criticism needs a dose of professional rigour. Yet Richards is insistent
that this gap must be narrowed. He also takes leave to doubt whether
those educated in the humanities are in general more morally admi-
rable than those who are not. Still, to read well is to cultivate one’s
sensibility; and if this were to happen on a broader scale, one would
expect it to breed positive social effects.
What makes Richards a genuinely radical thinker, however, is the
fact that he is a self-avowed materialist, and this at a time when the
literary air was heavy with pseudo-religious forms of criticism.
Cambridge in the 1920s, however, was peculiarly hospitable to the
scientific spirit, as Richards’s work testifies. Emotion and imagina-
tion are for him matters of the brain and nervous system, not of the
soul. All forms of Platonic Idealism – a belief in Beauty, Goodness
and Truth, for example – are sent packing, along with such suppos-
edly outmoded metaphysical notions as essences, natures, substances,
attributes, universals, eternal verities, absolute values and the like.
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Humanism is to be reconstructed on a secular, scientific basis.

Deeply influenced by the philosophy of William James, Richards is
a pragmatist whose habit is to ask not what things are but how they
work. ‘An idea, or a notion’, he writes, ‘like the physicist’s ultimate
particles and rays, is known only by what it does’ (PR, p. 2). Truth
in a broad sense is what promotes our interests and enhances our
powers. Theories are to be regarded as speculative instruments rather
than ends in themselves. One is always finally obliged to go beyond
a set of ideas in order to make an existential choice (is this poem
really as bad as I suspect it is?) which theory itself cannot make for
us. All the same, Richards sees theory, at least of an embryonic kind,
as implicit even in our most apparently raw perceptions. Unlike the
empiricists, he does not believe that there is first of all sensory expe-
rience, and then a translation of it into concepts. On the contrary,
interpretation is at work from the outset. It goes all the way down.
Besides, our perceptions and responses are shaped by our entire
history, not simply by what strikes the eyeball or the eardrum at any
particular moment.
Criticism, likewise, has its limits. Nowhere but in poetry, unless
perhaps in mathematics, do we confront ideas so closely packed and
interwoven that any investigation of them is bound to prove intermi-
nable. Not even the finest of critical instruments can unravel the intri-
cate interactions of sound, mood, feeling, tone, pitch, pace, rhythm,
cadence and so on, each of which modifies the others to generate
inexhaustible possibilities which cannot be schematised. The poem
represents what Richards calls in Practical Criticism a ‘fabulous
complexity’. In this sense, a poetic text is never fully closed. There will
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always be a spectral swarm of potential meanings around any specific

reading of it. ‘Inference and guesswork!’ Richards remarks. ‘What else
is interpretation?’ (PR, p. 35). Our sense of value turns on differences
and affinities too microscopic to be consciously perceived, and it is
here that criticism must acknowledge its incompleteness. In the end,
understanding is a hazardous, hit-and-miss process.
‘Man’, Richards writes, ‘is not in any sense primarily an intelli-
gence; he is a system of interests’ (PLC, p. 299). Like Eliot, he
downgrades the intellect while upgrading the nervous system.
Before we come to grasp the meaning of a poem, we are already
responding subliminally to the sound and texture of its words, to
the feel of their movement, to their tones and rhythms, and all this
before the mind has had time to spring into action. The parallel
with Eliot’s similarly neurological poetics is plain. The difference
lies in the fact that whereas for Eliot the significant life of a poem is
conducted at a visceral and neural level far deeper than the mind,
the materialist Richards suspects that the mind and the nervous
system are actually identical. We are our bodies – more specifically,
our neurological constitution. In the teeth of the quasi-religious
poetics of such currents as Symbolism, aestheticism and the
American New Criticism, he is a thoroughly naturalistic thinker
who places a supreme value on art while at the same time finding
nothing in the least transcendent about it.
Poetry, then, is too unfathomably complex to be scientifically
explained. But Richards does not rule out the possibility that when
the science that matters to him most – psychology – has evolved
from its currently rudimentary condition into a more sophisticated
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state, such comprehension might be in principle within our grasp.

Literary criticism is, or should be, a branch of the science of
psychology. Indeed, Richards seemed to believe that in the future the
sciences may take over from the humanities, so that we might one
day be able to lend our humanistic values a scientific foundation. All
the same, poetry for Richards is a far richer form of communication
than science, which is necessarily reductive. In fact, it is the finest
form of communication of which we are capable. But this is not to
endorse the churlish, sometimes snobbish distaste for science of the
traditional humanist, traces of which can be found among the post-
modernists of the present. By the early twentieth century, science
had become such a dominant discourse in the West that some
humanists felt obliged either to beat it or join it. F.R. Leavis chose
the former strategy, while Richards, like the structuralists and semio-
ticians some decades later, opted for the latter.
Psychology studies the mind, but how is the mind accessible to us?
Richards’s answer to this question is really Eliot’s as well: in language.
It is through language that we learn certain nuances of sentiment and
desire, along with our concepts and values; and it is in language, with
its intricacies and ambiguities, that we find the most faithful image of
our minds. ‘The whole abstract world of moral values’, Richards
writes in his essay ‘Our Lost Leaders’, ‘is held for us by a framework
of words’ (CSW, p. 337). As the critic Joseph North puts it, ‘language
[is] the sediment of a collective historical effort to come to terms with
the world’.7 It encodes the ways in which humanity has classified and
controlled its environment over the millennia, so that for Richards, as
for his Cambridge contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein, to imagine a
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
language is to imagine a practical form of life. Language is the psycho-

logical record of humanity, the imprint of our history in sound and
sign, rather as for Eliot it represents a storehouse of riches accumu-
lated over vast tracts of time. And since other forms of continuity with
the past (family, church, community and the like) are being under-
mined by modernity, language in Richards’s view is rapidly becoming
the main rapport we have with our ancestry. In his eyes, however,
there is no one strand of continuity at stake here – no one venerable
tradition à la Eliot, but a prodigal diversity of legacies. It is the differ-
ence between a liberal pluralist and a conservative.
Literary criticism concerns itself among other things with the evalu-
ation of literary works. Yet how does one come up with a materialist
concept of value? Formulating such a theory ranks among Richards’s
most innovative moves, though it is not, as we shall see, without its
problems. Taking his cue in Principles of Literary Criticism from the
ethical thought of Jeremy Bentham, founder of the creed of
Utilitarianism in the late eighteenth century, he sees the human
mind as divided between two different kinds of impulse: appeten-
cies (or desires) on the one hand and aversions on the other; and
whatever satisfies the former is valuable. To live well is a matter of
ordering one’s appetencies so that as many of them as possible can
be gratified. Morality is essentially a question of organisation. Value
is economy. Rather as a virtuous action for Bentham is one which
promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number of individ-
uals, so for Richards an effective work of art is one which fulfils the
greatest number of appetencies. One problem for Bentham is that
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ethics must necessarily be retrospective: you can only know how

many people’s happiness was promoted by looking back at the
consequences of your action. This is not a problem for the
Richardian critic confronted with a poem.
More precisely, what is valuable is what fulfils an appetency
without frustrating some equally or more important want. Richards
clearly needs to define the word ‘important’ in a way which avoids
an appeal to some non-Utilitarian standard such as duty, the law of
God, love of humanity, the ultimate Good, the revelation of some
higher Truth and so on. He is impatient with terms like ‘ought’,
‘must’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, along with most of the rest of conventional
moral discourse. So the importance of an impulse is defined instead
in terms of how far its non-fulfilment would frustrate other impulses
– the damage, in short, that it would wreak within the whole system.
It is, in effect, a quantitative ethics, though Richards denies
this charge. The most desirable organisation is the least wasteful,
meaning one in which least is sacrificed and suppressed and as much
as possible of one’s personality is realised. Fullness of life is Richards’s
moral ideal, as it is for F.R. Leavis. To live morally is to live not duti-
fully or self-denyingly but to flourish in the plenitude of one’s
powers. Immanuel Kant would have demurred, but Aristotle, Hegel
and Marx would have largely agreed. ‘The ultimate value of equilib-
rium’, Richards writes in The Foundations of Aesthetics, ‘is that it is
better to be fully rather than partially alive’ (FA, p. 77). The less
lop-sided you are, the more experience you can savour.
What bearing does all this have on poetry, and more particularly
on how good or bad a poem might be? The answer is that good
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
poetry represents the finest, most delicate and efficient organisation

of impulses available to humanity. Words, Richards observes, are not
a ‘medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life to
order’ (PR, p. 90). In everyday existence, our impulses tend to be
confused and disorganised, not least in the turbulent modern era;
but in art they enjoy a complete systematisation, achieving an equi-
librium which brings the whole personality into play. The result is a
feeling of wholeness, fullness, clarity, unity, freedom, integration,
poise, balance, stability and autonomy. Richards speaks of the
’organisation of our feelings’, as Eliot writes of the ‘structure of
emotions’ and Raymond Williams would later coin the phrase ‘struc-
ture of feeling’. It is not hard in Richards’s case to feel the influence
of Confucius behind this poetics. Art is a form of mental hygiene. It
allows us to maintain a certain poise and equanimity amid the shocks
and buffetings of everyday life. In fact, the poise in question may be
literal, as when Richards tells us with a straight face that to achieve
balance in one area of one’s life may have salutary effects in another,
such as the ability to stand on one foot without unsteadiness. Reading
Goethe can do wonders for your imitation of a stork.
Art, then, does not instruct us in how to live by what it says, but
by what it shows – by its unity, harmony and equipoise. One might
say that its very disinterestedness is didactic. The supreme value
is to find oneself in a state of perfect self-possession and self-
sufficiency, which Richards also regards as the highest form of
freedom; and it is this that a successful poem or painting accom-
plishes. It is from its form rather than its content that we learn how
to live. Richards is disdainful of what he calls ‘message hunters’,
97
meaning those who raid literary works for their moral content. The
moral lesson they fail to recognise is the poem itself. A poem is not
a sermon or bulletin but an experience put into words; and in
Richards’s view its words are not just expressive of the experience
but constitutive of it. It is as though the experience forms in the act
of communication, and cannot be abstracted from it.
There are problems with Richards’s Benthamite case, as there are
with any ethical theory. It seems to assume, for example, that all our
so-called impulses are inherently positive, and that only the frustra-
tion of them is wrong. William Empson, who accepted this view of
value in general, inquires in his book Milton’s God whether it applies
to the desire to inflict pain. It is, in short, too innocent a view of the
mind, compared, say, with the Gothic horrors that Freud excavates;
but Richards, despite his Eliot-like belief that poetry springs from
the deepest roots of the psyche, harbours a typically English scepti-
cism of psychoanalysis, one common among academic psycholo-
gists both then and now. Yet if all our appetencies are intrinsically
worthy, what of my overpowering urge to strangle my bank
manager? Richards would retort that such an appetency is illicit
because it thwarts a number of my other desires. But there is also
the question of the bank manager’s right to fulfil his needs, which
would not be easy if he were dead.
Besides, it is strongly counter-intuitive to claim that, say, genocide
is wicked simply because it throws us into psychic disarray. The theory
is curiously self-centred. The fact is that genocide is immoral because
of what it does to others, not primarily because of what it does to the
perpetrators. Richards argues that unjust or aggressive behaviour
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
deprives us of a whole range of important values, so that in behaving

injuriously to others we inflict damage on ourselves. But not all those
who harm their fellow humans are morally bankrupt themselves.
There is always the case of the sensitive, compassionate con man. To
commit a monstrous act does not necessarily mean that one is a moral
monster. It is also far too convenient for the virtuous to claim that
deep down the villainous are miserable because of their wickedness.
Anyway, one could tolerate a spot of moral misery if it meant living for
the rest of one’s days off the proceeds of a lucrative bank robbery.
Would we say that Martin Luther King was morally admirable
because he had satisfactorily organised his psychological impulses?
We commend King because he dedicated his life to others, but this
kind of value plays little role in Richards’s system. He acknowledges
the importance of friendly relations with others, but this does not
take one far beyond the Senior Combination Room. It overlooks
the fact that the deepest self-fulfilment is reciprocal, achieved in and
through the self-realisation of others. The name we give to this
mutuality at its most fruitful is love. The name Marx gives to it
politically is communism. Richards’s ethics, by contrast, are too
individualistic to have such a rich social dimension, as indeed one
might expect of a liberal thinker. He is adamant that each person’s
good is an absolute end in itself. He also opens the door to moral
relativism by declaring that what is valuable for one individual may
not be so for another. The case works well enough if one is thinking
of, say, tennis or chocolate pancakes, but looks less persuasive if one
has justice or truth-telling in mind. The argument applies to litera-
ture as well. Different readers respond to the same poem in different
99
ways, but they do so, Richards is careful to add, only within certain
limits. Otherwise one is faced with the embarrassment of there
being as many Waste Lands as there are readers.
Richards denies that his theory of impulses is calculative and
mechanistic, but it is hard to see how he can plausibly do so. If
impulses are to be in equilibrium, then this must surely involve some
form of calculation. William Empson remarks in his facetious way
that psychologically speaking we have about a million impulses a
minute, so that the calculations involved might be pretty heavy. In
any case, how does one identify an impulse? And how can it be ‘satis-
fied’ by a poem? One reason why Richards denies that appetencies are
calculable is because he sometimes seems to think of them as innu-
merable, fathomlessly complex and intricately interrelated. But there
may be two meanings of the word ‘impulse’ at work here: on the one
hand, the common-or-garden sense of an urge to laugh or scream,
and on the other hand the more technical sense of electric and chem-
ical charges along the nerve fibres, which is presumably what Empson
has in mind. Yet Richards, the champion of practical criticism,
provides us with little actual analysis of poetry to demonstrate this
theory of value, thus leaving a host of questions unresolved.
‘Order’ is a key term for Richards, as it is for Eliot. The most
commendable individual is one who is stable, balanced, controlled
and coherent. It sounds dismayingly like a British District
Commissioner in Punjab. Along with these virtues goes a distaste for
inefficiency, the vice of those who fail to coordinate their impulses
in the most productive way. Perhaps one can detect the son of the
works manager in this aversion to waste. In a calculatedly outrageous
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
.
comment, Richards writes of John Keats that he ‘is a more efficient

poet than [Ella Wheeler] Wilcox, and that is the same thing as saying
that his works are more valuable’ (PLC, p. 182). It was remarks of
this kind that inspired T.S. Eliot to write in the journal The Dial that
Richards’s system of thought was rather like a mental version of a
Roneo Steel Cabinet. Yet why should order, balance and economy
always be viewed as positive? Richards commonly writes as though
the greatest danger to civilisation is chaos, a claim which is far from
obvious. In his own time, a more immediate peril was posed by a
pathological version of order itself – by the autocratic regimes of
Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and other dictators, which were nothing if
not highly organised. Scientology and the North Korean secret police
are no doubt superbly organised as well, but this is no reason to
admire them.
It is true that the young Richards was writing in the wake of the
First World War, a period in which he feared that the whole fabric
of Western civilisation was unravelling at the seams and heading for
unprecedented catastrophe; but his contrast between order and
chaos is far too simplistic. The economic depression of the 1930s
certainly gave birth to a degree of disorder in Britain, not least in
the form of hunger marches and political battles in the street;
but much of this disorder was in a just cause, while the dominant
social order was destroying livelihoods and entire communities.
Richards, however, seems to have perceived only tumult and futility
around him.
As for equilibrium, of which Richards never ceases to sing the
praises, there is no great merit in striking a judicious balance
101
between, say, racism and anti-racism. In this sense, disinterestedness

itself can be covertly prejudiced. The centre ground is not always
the appropriate place to stand, not least when it comes to the
conflict between, say, oil companies and ecologists. Liberals like
Richards tend to be wary of partisanship, as though all commit-
ment is cripplingly one-sided. But liberalism itself champions
freedom over tyranny, the diverse over the monolithic, flexibility
over intransigence and so on. The French Resistance was quite
properly partisan, and so are those who object to forced marriages
and domestic violence. Richards, by contrast, sees poetry as the very
model of disinterestedness, or ‘impersonality’ as he sometimes calls
it, viewing an object from a diversity of angles, no more predisposed
to one perspective than to another. But this is surely not true. A
great many poems privilege one viewpoint over another, and may
be quite right to do so. Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ does not regard a
burst of uproarious laughter at the death of the poet’s friend Arthur
Hallam as just as appropriate as tears. And what of ‘committed’ art?
Does Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ portray the bombing of a Basque town in
a soberly dispassionate way, or feminist theatre present a non-
committal view of misogyny?
The well-organised, self-sufficient human subject sounds uncom-
fortably like Bourgeois Man. It is also a psychologised, ‘scientific’
version of a familiar form of classical humanism, for which the
virtuous life consists of realising your various powers and capabilities
in as full, harmonious and well-rounded way as possible. This, one
presumes, is what the critic Geoffrey Hartman has in mind when he
describes Richards as ‘a classicist of the nervous system’.8 He has
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dressed an antique ethics in modern scientific garb. The greatest

Victorian advocate of this vision is John Stuart Mill, not least in his
magnificent essay On Liberty. Yet the well-rounded individual is a
specimen of humanity which the sociologist Max Weber fears is
fading from the world, and one might wonder in any case whether
well-roundedness is always worth aiming for. What of the individual
who shuns all other activities in pursuit of a single goal, and in doing
so produces the finest tuba playing or most spectacular snooker of
their time? In any case, there is no reason to assume that our capaci-
ties are mutually harmonious. It is also a standpoint more appro-
priate to the contemplative rather than active individual, since action
involves predilection, orientation, the exclusion of certain possibili-
ties for the sake of others. The case does not fare particularly well if
one starts from the self as agent. If the truth is one-sided, as Marx
argues, so are our practical interventions in the world.
One might claim that Richards makes use of a radical theory, in
the sense of a materialist one, for conservative ends: the need to
preserve order. Like many a liberal (though a left-leaning one
himself ), he tends to assume that discord is inherently undesirable.
This is why the supreme achievement of the poem is to reconcile
antitheses and resolve contradictions. Yet some antagonisms are
surely essential, and seeking to resolve them can be far from impar-
tial. A struggle between democrats and neo-Nazis is unavoidable, as
is one between patriarchs and feminists. Conflict can be productive
as well as injurious, as with slaves who rise up against their masters.
It is usually in the interests of those in power that such conflict
should be quelled. No doubt it would come as a relief to Prince
103
Charles if his critics ceased to object to his pampered, petulant

behaviour and were united in their esteem for his wisdom. Liberal
thinkers like Richards tend to overlook the question of whose inter-
ests are served by order and reconciliation. Ideology has been
defined as the imaginary resolution of real contradictions, and it is
this, in effect, that Richards sees poetry as achieving.
The 1920s were this critic’s most productive years, the period
when he was at the peak of his form. Yet they were also a time when
Europe had felt the impact of the various artistic avant gardes
(Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism and
the like); and these groups were not out to resolve contradictions in
the name of stability. On the contrary, most of them produced works
of art which were dissonant, fragmented and self-divided, staging
antagonisms rather than resolving them. Far from cultivating a sense
of wholeness and serenity in an audience, they sought to shatter their
routine certainties, and in doing so to place them in a more critical
relationship to the prevailing social order.
In culturally traditionalist Britain, by contrast, there was little
such artistic experiment, and Richards’s criticism reflects the fact.
Western civilisation, he held, was enduring its greatest historical
change ever, with the development of science, technology, mass
culture, secularism and global warfare; but human psychology has
still to catch up with these transformations. This is not far from
the vision of the various European avant gardes; but whereas they
are intent on using their art to produce a revolutionised human
subject, one adapted to a fragmented, strife-ridden world, Richards
asks how the subject is to maintain its classical poise and balance in
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
the midst of this historical upheaval. His answer, in a word, is

poetry. Like the avant gardists, he calls for the evolution of a thor-
oughly modern mind, one with the suppleness to switch tack,
process dissonant bits of sense data and undergo rapid shifts of
stance; yet the point is to be capable of this while retaining one’s
composure.
It is important to see that Richards’s notion of art is a non-
cognitive one. It is not the function of poetry to yield us any kind of
knowledge. It is more of a form of therapy than a mode of under-
standing. Tragedy, he remarks in a deliberately provocative comment,
doesn’t persuade us that all is right with the world, but that all is right
with our nervous system. It does so chiefly by harmonising our anti-
thetical responses of pity and fear. There is a sense, then, in which art
never allows us to get outside of ourselves. In one sense, to be sure,
poetry is something we use for real-life ends. It is not simply an end
in itself, but shows us how to live. Yet it fulfils this function not
by being didactic or moralistic but simply by being itself. It is its
autonomy and self-completion which teach us how to be human,
the aim of life being simply to realise one’s being as fully as possible.
The barriers between the aesthetic, the moral and the social are thus
dismantled.
To call art non-cognitive means that though literary works
appear to make propositions about the world, they really present
the reader with what Richards calls pseudo-statements. Pseudo-
statements may be true, as when a novel informs us that the port of
Rijeka is in Croatia. But this is not the point. Propositions like this
earn their keep in a work of art only by the part they play in releasing
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and organising our impulses – or what Richards calls our attitudes,

meaning our disposition to act in a certain way. They are not offered
simply as information, and neither are ‘moral’ statements such as
‘All the world’s a stage’, ‘A terrible beauty is born’ or ‘We must love
one another or die’. The correct response to such assertions is not
‘How true!’ or ‘What a load of rubbish!’. Instead, we are invited to
grasp them as part of a larger poetic context in which our impulses
are balanced and harmonised; and as far as that goes, a piece of
blatant nonsense might do just as well. There can even be mutually
contradictory references or systems of reference in a poem, since
truth in the everyday sense is not at stake. Behind this case one can
detect the presence of Matthew Arnold, who sought to combat the
growing atheism of the Victorian masses by claiming that proposi-
tions such as ‘There is a Divine Being’ may be factually false, but
that this is to mistake the force of such claims. Their purpose is to
reinforce moral values such as reverence, awe and obligation. The
socially disruptive consequences of religious scepticism might thus
be avoided. Religion for Arnold becomes a species of edifying
poetry, rather as for Richards poetry becomes a form of redemptive
religion. The idea of pseudo-statements has its source in the Death
of God.
On this view, the ‘truth’ of a poetic statement is measured by its
internal appropriateness – by how it cooperates with other aspects
of its context to evoke a certain response. The poet’s control of our
thoughts, Richards observes, is often his or her main way of control-
ling our sentiments. As with Eliot, the role of the intellect is played
down, which is not to say that the meaning of a poem is
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unimportant. Its importance, however, lies in the way it can evoke

feelings, just as rhythm, tone, rhyme, mood, metre and so on may do
as well. Poetic language for Richards is emotive rather than referen-
tial. More precisely, it is language in which the latter is subordinated
to the former. The emotive includes not simply feelings but moods,
attitudes, appraisals and beliefs. You can have emotive beliefs, in the
sense of convictions which satisfy some impulse or other, without
assenting to such convictions intellectually. The cry ‘Justice will be
done!’ is a way of stimulating certain passions and dispositions, not a
verifiable or falsifiable prediction of what will happen. ‘Referential’
for Richards really means ‘factual’ or ‘empirical’, and the paradigm of
this form of language is science. Scientific propositions are supposed
to be emotionally neutral. Chemistry textbooks do not tend to
provoke great surges of lust or loathing in their readers. In science,
the mind is subjected to things, while in the emotive realm the mind
moulds things to its own ends and desires.
Even so, Richards understands well enough that the neutrality of
science is relative – indeed, we shall see later that he regards science
as one myth among many. There are situations (performing brain
surgery, for example) in which to be dispassionate is essential. The
same goes for much that takes place in the laboratory. A lack of
feeling is by no means always objectionable. One does not want one’s
dentist to become frustrated and enraged in trying to pull a tooth,
placing a foot against your chest for extra leverage. Even so, science
has an emotive and evaluative dimension. Brain surgeons would no
doubt feel that they were wasting their time if they believed that
human life was entirely worthless. In writing a scientific paper, one is
107
providing factual information to others for certain purposes within a

broader social context; the facts themselves are inevitably selective;
and they are established only within certain conceptual frameworks
which are historically specific. Besides, science (though Richards
does not comment on the fact) reveals phenomena of breathtaking
beauty, and can do so with something of the aesthetic elegance and
imaginative brio of the finest works of art. There is, then, no hard-
and-fast distinction between the emotive and the referential, and
probably no purely referential statement. Simply to convey factual
information raises the question of why you are doing so, what you
hope to achieve by it, why you are choosing to focus on these facts
and not others and so on.
All the same, there is a difference between saying ‘It’s just turned
red’ and ‘He’s a lousy Red’. There is a working distinction between
the emotive and the referential, even if it is not set in stone; and for
the pragmatist Richards, the fact that a distinction does some
productive work is enough to justify its existence. The difference,
however, is never an absolute one. In poetry, feeling and meaning
are always mutually modifying. Perhaps this represents Richards’s
response to Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. In any case, it is not
always easy to distinguish what we are thinking from what we are
feeling, or to demarcate either from what we want to do. Most uses
of language in Richards’s view mix the emotive and referential (or
‘symbolic’, as he sometimes confusingly called it); and the purely
referential, if there is such a thing, constitutes a minor part of our
speech. We have, he remarks, enormously exaggerated the impor-
tance of factual propositions. Sentences like ‘An irregular heart
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rhythm can be effectively treated by the judicious use of bisoprolol

fumarate’ are not typical of our daily discourse, not even in health
centres. Ludwig Wittgenstein was another who saw the language
game of reference as a misleading model for language as a whole,
which is not primarily propositional. In most of our verbal activity,
greeting, joking, thanking, cursing, questioning, disputing and so
on tend to trump the indicative. Some commentators on Richards
claim that he finally overcomes the distinction between the emotive
and the referential by means of the Coleridgean idea of Imagination,
which represents both an emotional revelation and a form of truth.
It is not true, then, that the world is carved down the middle
between facts and feelings, or facts and values. This is not only
because facts can be identified only within conceptual frameworks
which are by no means value-free. It is also because there are argu-
ably such things as moral facts, which constitute a category distinct
from both scientific observations and emotional responses. Richards
himself would not endorse this claim. When it comes to moral
matters, he is a so-called emotivist who holds that moral values, far
from being objective, simply register the way we feel about certain
forms of behaviour. For an emotivist, there is a factual situation –
let’s say, a man hanging a child – and then a subjective response to
it, such as ‘This is wrong’. For a moral realist, by contrast, the
wrongness of the action is not simply a question of what you and I
happen to make of it. It inheres in the action itself. The moral realist
might even be able to judge whether an action is moral or immoral
simply by looking at a photograph of it – though in the case of
someone hanging a child you would need to know whether he was
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of sound mind in order to call it a crime, which a photograph would

not establish. On this theory, however, hanging a child remains
immoral even if there is universal agreement that there can be no
more supremely virtuous way to behave. On this (disputable) view,
it is possible for everyone to be mistaken in moral affairs, just as
everyone once believed that the world was flat. There was, after all,
a time when torture was almost universally acceptable. To call an act
‘murder’ is to claim that it is a fact that it is murder. Murder is not
just in the mind. It is not a question of a neutrally describable act
plus a subjective evaluation of it. Fact and value cannot be neatly
divided, as both the positivists and the emotivists claim from oppo-
site sides of the fence.
For the moral realist, then, moral assertions can be said to be
true or false, just like descriptive ones. There may be interminable
debates over whether a particular piece of behaviour is reckless or
prudent, generous or self-serving, but it is the facts we are wrangling
about, not our feelings. It follows on this theory that when someone
announces that ‘A terrible beauty is born’ it would make perfect
sense to reply ‘No, it isn’t’, just as ‘Give me a break!’ would be a
coherent enough response to ‘All the world’s a stage’. It is part of the
critic’s task (though not in Richards’s opinion) to pass judgement
on such assertions – to inquire into whether a literary work reveals
some important moral truths, which may be one reason why we rate
it highly. Conversely, if a poem or novel strikes us as full of silly,
vicious or wrong-headed moral assumptions, this might limit our
enjoyment of it as much as would a supposedly realist work which
for no obvious artistic purpose continually got the topography of
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Liverpool grotesquely wrong. Richards concedes that a truly offen-

sive moral statement can ruin the aesthetic effect of a poem, but
maintains even so that a false moral assertion might serve to organise
our psyches more efficiently than a true one. One of the most vital
functions of poetry, he believes, is to deepen our sensitivity to
language in an age in which advertising and political propaganda
have grown insidiously powerful; yet this is ironic, since in adver-
tising and propaganda what matters is not so much what you say as
the emotive effects it produces, which is also true for the most part
of Richards’s conception of poetry.
There is a relation between Richards’s concept of pseudo-state-
ments and the nature of ideology, in the sense of a body of feelings
and ideas which helps to support an objectionable form of power.
Not all ideological statements are false: it is true, for example, that
the Queen of England is a conscientious, hard-working woman, not
much given to shoplifting and vandalising police stations. But
someone who thought this point worth making would probably be
using it to help justify the institution of monarchy, rather than
simply providing a piece of information. As with Richards’s pseudo-
statements, it is the way the proposition behaves within a larger
context which counts, not its inherent truth or falsehood. The
slogan ‘White Lives Matter’ states a truth; but it is also racist, since
it was dreamt up to denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement.
As a pragmatist, Richards believes that words signify nothing in

themselves. Words acquire meaning only when they are used by
speakers for a specific purpose. When it comes to language, he is also
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a resolute anti-essentialist: terms like ‘poetry’ and ‘aesthetic’, for

example, have no fixed, inherent meaning but cover all the things
known by those names for all kinds of reasons. The theory is techni-
cally known as nominalism, and involves various problems which
Richards fails to address – one of the more obvious being why, if all
the things we call elephants have nothing in common except the
name ‘elephant’, we call them all elephants. Words for Richards
correspond not to things, but to thoughts and feelings – or as the
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure would put it, to signifieds (concepts)
rather than to referents (objects or situations in the world). The
study of signs, for which Richards uses the unlovely word ‘semasi-
ology’, must be placed at the heart of science and philosophy, though
the less ungainly term that would emerge some decades later was
semiotics. In this way as in others, he is something of a prophet.
All meaning, then, is contextual: a single phrase activates the
whole of language rather as a motion of one’s hand involves nearly
the whole system of muscles. Of no type of language is this truer
than poetry, in which each word is shaped and sustained by all the
others in a process that Richards, stealing a term from the poet John
Donne, calls ‘interinanimation’. Words, he believes, gain their effect
from the multiple contexts in which they are used, so that they are
the means by which different discursive powers exerted in different
situations may be brought together. They are nodes of diverse
forces. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes points out rather more
pessimistically in his work The Elements of Law that because the
contexts in which words occur are so variable, it is hard to rescue
them from equivocation and ambiguity. One reason why Hobbes
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believed in an absolute sovereignty was because it was needed to

determine precise meanings.
Richards distinguishes between four aspects of discourse: inten-
tion, feeling, tone and sense (or meaning). The first three he some-
times groups together as ‘gesture’, which can predominate over
sense. By intention he seems to mean less a mental act on the
part of an author than the way a piece of language is organised to
produce an effect, which is publicly available to us in the way that a
so-called mental act is not. The ‘intention’ of a chair is the way it is
structured in order to be sat on. One may speak of the intentions of
the poem itself – the way it deploys certain techniques to attain
certain effects – but not in Richards’s view of the poet, who may not
remember what he or she intended, or who intended a number of
different, perhaps mutually contradictory things, or who had
nothing much in mind except the act of writing. The American
New Critics, much influenced by Richards’s thinking, would adopt
this idea of intentionality. Tone is first defined as implying an atti-
tude to the reader, but later expanded to include an attitude to the
subject matter itself. In the case of all speech or writing, Richards
insists, one must pay due attention to the mode, occasion, context
and purpose.
In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards argues that a piece of
language can be understood only in terms of the complete utterance.
It is not a question of understanding the meaning of single words
and then building them like bricks into an edifice. ‘Free, discursive
thinking, and its expression’, he writes in Interpretation in Teaching,
‘are much more widely serviceable to us than the strict, explicit,
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checkable articulation of discrete, separately definable meanings’

(IT, p. 302). Meaning, whether poetic or otherwise, results from ‘the
interplay of the interpretative possibilities of the whole utterance’
(PR, p. 37). This includes words which lurk unspoken in the back-
ground, so that the meaning of a term, like the job of a doorman at
the Ritz Hotel, may depend quite as much on what it keeps out as
what it allows in. In fact, all signification involves such absence, since
we understand a word by calling to mind some concrete context in
which it makes sense but which is not present here and now. The
word, so to speak, is an abridgement of this context, a sign standing
for what is lacking. Even experiences can act as signs, in the sense
that they, too, evoke past contexts.
In all these respects, Richards anticipates what would later be
called discourse theory, as well as modern hermeneutics or the art of
interpretation. He even prefigures the thought of Jacques Derrida
in claiming that the meaning of words is always deferred or
suspended, awaiting those phrases which come after them. Words
have no meaning in isolation from other words; and if their sense
seems stable, it is only because of the constancy of their contexts. It
is context alone which lends meaning some firm foundation, a view
which is at least as old as the thought of St Augustine. The same
applies to feelings and attitudes. But contexts themselves are not
always easy to determine. In which of a host of potential settings
should one situate a word, and where do such settings begin and
end? Context can sometimes be called upon to do too much work,
as in such familiar self-apologias as ‘The phrase “disgusting little
hypocrite” that I used of you was taken out of context’.
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It belongs to the nature of a sign to be portable, capable of

being shifted from one location to another; and the fuzziness of
meaning which can result from this, far from being a defect, is part
of what makes it work. In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig
Wittgenstein compares speaking a ‘pure’ language to trying to walk
on ice, and recalls us instead to what he calls the rough ground of
our everyday speech. (There are, incidentally, a good many points
of contact between Richards’s ideas and Wittgenstein’s, though
Richards, who found Wittgenstein’s autocratic manner distasteful,
denies that he was influenced by him.) In his study of Coleridge,
Richards speaks of the ‘roominess’ of certain meanings, a theme
which runs throughout his work. He is interested in how certain
key terms like ‘being’, ‘cause’, ‘have’, ‘same’ and so on shift their
meanings – an interest which, as we shall see, is inherited by
William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words, as well as by
Raymond Williams in his Keywords. Meaning is fluid, diverse,
multiple and sometimes impossible to pin down. We find ambi-
guity almost everywhere. There is no one correct construction of
any sentence, since its sense depends on its various uses. In fact,
Richards published a popular work, How To Read A Page, devoted
to this subject.
Perhaps Richards, like the post-structuralists who follow in his
wake, makes too much of semantic instability. Against the phantom
of immutable meanings he wields his doctrine of Multiple
Definition, and there are times when this is obviously appropriate.
The word ‘lunette’, for example, can mean an arched aperture or
window in a domed ceiling, a crescent-shaped or semi-circular
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alcove containing a painting or statue, a fortification with two faces

forming two flanks and a projecting angle, a holder for the conse-
crated host in a monstrance or a ring on a vehicle by which it can be
towed. Yet words like ‘marmalade’ or ‘myxomatosis’ are a lot less
pliable. Besides, if words completely changed their sense when shut-
tled from one context to another, it is hard to see how a small child
could learn to speak. Children pick up language not by learning
words in isolation but by grasping how they are deployed in certain
practical situations; but if there were no continuity across such situ-
ations, they would surely be at a loss. Language involves both iden-
tity and non-identity, as is evident enough when we claim that the
same word is used in different ways. Pure difference would be no
more intelligible than pure identity.
As Michael Moriarty remarks, ‘one wonders how the sign could
be adapted and its novelty in context assimilated if there were not
some relatively stable unit there to be recognised on the semantic
level’.9 In ‘The priest placed the host in the lunette’ and ‘the
mechanic looped the tow-rope through the lunette’, the word
‘lunette’ alters its meaning entirely. Yet this is not the case with ‘The
finest marmalade on the market is undoubtedly Frank Cooper’s
Oxford thick cut brand’ and ‘In a moment of madness he would
come to regret, he emptied the jar of marmalade down the police
officer’s trousers’. The importance of context is a matter of degree.
Nor do all contexts carry equal weight. ‘Dog’ can mean all sorts of
things, but its most common reference is to a species of animal.
Language, Richards argues, ‘is the supreme organ of the mind’s
self-ordering growth . . . an instrument for controlling our becoming’
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
(SI, p. 9). It is the means of all our distinctive development, ‘of every-
thing in which we go beyond the other animals’ (PR, p. 88). Elsewhere,
he calls it ‘man’s chief coordinating instrument of the service of the
most integral purposes of life’ (CI, p. 176), and announces that
linguistics is the most extensive and fundamental of all inquiries.
Statements like these are typical of what one might call the linguistic
revolution of the twentieth century, one which may well have inflated
the role of language in the act of stressing its centrality. The other
animals live primarily by their sensory experience, but it is a mistake,
Richards rightly considers, to think of language in these terms.
Sensory images, for example, are not essential for verbal communica-
tion. Those who think so fall victim to the picture theory of language.
But what picture pops into your head when someone says ‘Hi there!’
or ‘Can you come back next Wednesday?’ What visual image is
conjured up by ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’? There are,
however, what Richards calls ‘tied’ images, meaning those which are
produced by the physical process of language, its sounds, rhythms and
textures. An ‘auditory’ image is the sound of words in the mind’s ear,
while an ‘articulatory’ image is the feel of how it would be to speak
them, the sensation they make in the mind’s lips, tongue and throat.
Other forms of imagery he calls ‘free’. As far as the physical process of
language goes, it is worth noting that Richards was said to be one of
the most superlative speakers of verse of his time. There is a contrast
between his talent in this respect and his charmless, rather bloodless
prose style.
Richards’s reservations about sensory images came at a time
when there was much literary preoccupation with the sensuous or
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concrete. One thinks of the Imagist poets, Eliot’s poetics or the

criticism of F.R. Leavis. On this view, language is at its most forceful
when it appears as dense and palpable as things themselves,
conveying their distinctive flavour and texture. But it is not a defect
of the word ‘apple’ that it does not convey the tang and chunkiness
of the fruit itself. It is not supposed to. Words are not to be mistaken
for things. Richards also points out that the concrete, which we
usually imagine as simple and immediate, is in fact complex. It
derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to grow together’, and signifies
the convergence of a number of different features. Thus what makes
a piece of paper a ‘concrete’ entity rather than an ‘abstract’ one is the
fact that it is square, pink, flimsy, lightweight, semi-transparent and
so on. The abstract, by contrast, is a more simple notion. This, as it
happens, is precisely the definition of the concrete offered by Karl
Marx in his Grundrisse, a work that was still undiscovered when
Richards was writing.
There is, then, no need for language to evoke visual, aural or
tactile images in order to work. Indeed, words represent the meeting-
point of types of experience which in some cases could never be
combined in sensation or intuition. You can have a garbage can
which makes an excellent prime minister at the level of language,
but not in the everyday sensory world. In this sense, language frees
us from being imprisoned within our senses by opening up possi-
bilities which a slug could not imagine. In fact, a slug cannot
imagine very much at all, since to dream up alternative scenarios
depends on having language. Even so, slugs have their own form of
intelligence, which may lack a certain Einsteinian grandeur but
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which Richards ought to take note of more than he does. This is

because he contends at one point in his work that there is no such
thing as non-verbal intelligence. Perhaps he never encountered a
spaniel or a one-year-old child. The linguistic views of a number of
modern philosophers may have been shaped by the fact that they
had little or no acquaintance with children. It is also true that the
body has its own intelligence, of which the mind may know nothing.
Richards has a pioneering approach to the concept of metaphor. Far

from treating it as a mere embellishment, or as a deviation from a
normative use of language, he regards it as the ‘omniscient principle
of language’ (PR, p. 61).‘We all live, and speak’, he writes, ‘only
through our eye for resemblances’ (PR, p. 59). All intellectual oper-
ations, he maintains, are described in language drawn from the
physical, and are in that sense metaphorical. Thought itself proceeds
by difference and comparison, so that metaphor is of its essence.
Besides, everything is apprehended under some sort of category, so
that seeing is always ‘seeing as’, and this, in a broad sense of the
word, is a metaphorical activity. We transpose an individual object
to the class to which it belongs, whereas (to borrow an example
from Martin Heidegger) a lizard does not see the rock on which it
is lying as a rock. The rock is part of its perceptual world, but not
part of a world of meaning. Metaphor, which fuses two or more
thoughts or images together, is a microcosm of the pluralistic nature
of language as such. It consists in Richards’s view of a ‘tenor’, which
is the underlying idea or subject; a ‘vehicle’, which is the mode in
which the tenor finds expression; and a ‘ground’, which denotes
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whatever the two have in common. Thus ‘warrior’ might be a

tenor, ‘tiger’ its vehicle and ‘strength or courage’ the ground which
connects them. Tenor and vehicle constantly interact, as sometimes
the one is thrust to the fore and sometimes the other. A tenor can
have a single vehicle or a multiplicity of them, and a tension or
contrast between the two may be as significant as a fusion. The two
aspects may also cooperate to produce a more powerful, diverse
meaning than either of them taken in isolation. In this sense, meta-
phor is a transaction between contexts, since like all terms tenor and
vehicle are only intelligible as part of a wider linguistic landscape.
One metaphor, as in some of the richest passages of Shakespeare,
can be ‘mounted’ on another, and that on another, without the
whole self-generative process ever, so to speak, touching down on
non-figurative terra firma.
This sense of a ceaselessly creative process is vital to Richards’s
conception of poetry. A poem is essentially meaning in motion, and
the motion (rhythm, pace, metre and so on) can either enhance the
meaning or work against it, running counter to the sense or
reflecting it. In his later work, as the influence of Coleridge becomes
more deep-seated, Richards continues to see the poem as a structure
of harmonised impulses, a view which Coleridge holds as well, but
also as an organic growth – one which the reader ‘realises’ in the
sense of recreates, and in doing so realises his or her whole person-
ality. The final goal of reading is self-creation. Readers become
aware that they are bringing the poem into being at the same time
as they are exploring, ‘becoming’ or comprehending it, and the
ambiguous verb ‘to realise’ captures both of these activities. We are
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so intimately bound up with the work that it becomes impossible to

say where it stops and we start, or whether we are producing it or it
is producing us. Knower and known, or knowledge and being, are
identical. There is a hint of Confucius behind this doctrine, which
represents a momentary surrender by a materialist critic to a semi-
mystical idea. There is also an anticipation of late twentieth-century
reception theory.
Metaphor for Richards is more than a verbal device. There are
times when he uses the term as synonymous with ‘myth’, meaning
the way our minds model the world and render it intelligible. We
project certain metaphors onto reality in order to make sense of it;
but reality is itself already metaphorical, since it is the result of
previous such projections. Metaphor, then, for Richards as for
Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida, goes all the way down.
You cannot peel it off, layer after layer, to arrive at a brute reality. All
you can do is overlay one set of metaphors with another. To put the
point more technically, Richards is a materialist in so far as he
believes in a Nature which is independent of the mind; but he is not
a philosophical realist, in the sense of one who maintains that this
world can be known as it actually is. We ourselves project values,
meanings and sentiments into the inert stuff of reality, so that all we
can ever truly know is ourselves. Nature is always Nature-for-us.
The constructive activity of the mind enters into the simplest-
seeming sense data, so that there is nothing which is simply given.
It is a view typical of philosophical Idealism, with its belief that the
mind creates the world, and so would seem to be at odds with
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Richards’s materialism. Yet the mind for Richards is itself material,

more or less identical with the nervous system.
What we live by, then, is myth, meaning a specific way of
ordering reality which allows us to adapt to it and therefore to
flourish. Indeed, science itself in Richards’s eyes is simply our latest
form of mythology, one which organises the world in ways which
enhance our control over it. Yet though we need the myth of science
for our practical existence, we need other forms of fiction for our
spiritual well-being. Through such life-giving fables, ‘our will is
collected, our power unified, our growth controlled’; without it,
‘man is only a cruel animal without a soul’ (CI, p. 134). Such myths
unify our existence, endowing us with a wisdom of which science is
incapable, and binding us to a Nature with which we are rapidly
losing touch. In fulfilling these functions, modern myths inherit the
role of previous fictions (metaphysics, absolute moralities, a faith in
tradition and authority) and above all religion – so that there is a
sense here, too, in which Richards, like Nietzsche, is a Death-
of-God thinker. How are we to maintain order and value in a world
from which the Almighty has vanished, and which no longer puts
its faith in moral absolutes? T.S. Eliot, unusually for a modern
writer, moves from atheism to Christianity; Richards finds a form of
ultimate value in the progress of humanity; William Empson (to
anticipate a little) hates God as though he believes he existed; F.R.
Leavis discovers a surrogate for him in the vitalism of D.H.
Lawrence; while Raymond Williams, who refused the church ritual
of confirmation as a child, is indifferent to the whole issue.
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Richards’s response to the disappearance of the Deity is unequiv-

ocal: the most effective way of creating stability and significance in
a post-theistic universe is poetry. Poetry, he insists, in a comment
probably meant to scandalise and certainly intended to be quoted,
‘is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of over-
coming chaos’ (Science and Poetry, in PLC, p. 330). It is the most
remarkable example of mental and emotional order that we have,
and ‘the necessary channel for the reconstitution of [social] order’
(CI, 174). Poetry will remake our minds, and with them our civili-
sation. As with Matthew Arnold, the poet now assumes the mantle
of the prophet or priest. T.S. Eliot, who as a Christian scorns any
attempt to substitute art for religion, comments sourly that this is
like saying that the wallpaper will save us when the walls have crum-
bled. The idea that poetry, which involves only a minuscule fraction
of the population, will redeem us from the ‘chaos’ of modernity is
so absurd as to be mildly comic. At least religion, whatever its crimes
and delusions, has secured the allegiance of billions of ordinary men
and women throughout the world. Richards, as we have seen, hopes
to disseminate the study of literature more widely, but even then it
is likely to remain a minority pursuit.
Poetry, he argues, might seem inferior to religion, morality,
science or metaphysics since it is simply a fiction. Once, however,
we recognise that religion, morality, science and metaphysics are
fictions as well, we can lay this prejudice to rest. Besides, poetry is
self-consciously fictional, which is what any authentic myth must
be. Myths must be aware that they are mythical, and so must those
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who place their faith in them. Their relation to them must thus be
ironic, a question of believing and not believing at the same time.
Otherwise we are in danger of mistaking the work of our own hands
for absolute reality, which is a form of idolatry. In The Sense of an
Ending, the critic Frank Kermode distinguishes between myths,
which regard themselves as true, from fiction, which does not.
Myths are fictions which take themselves as fact. Richards must
proceed here with caution: he was a liberal who proclaimed the
need for myth in a fascist age, and myth in fascistic hands was
rapidly becoming noxious. Men and women must therefore lend
only a limited credence to their symbolic worlds, refusing to grant
exorbitant authority to any of them. It is not obvious that people
can really live like this for any length of time. Othello believes that
Desdemona is faithful to him and disbelieves it at the same time,
but this is the sign of a mind in pieces, not of an ironist.
We must, then, create a kind of second Nature, given that Nature
itself, in the sense of things as they really are, is impenetrable to us.
This second Nature is the practical domain in which we conduct our
daily lives, a world of passions and values, actions and perceptions;
and scientific inquiry represents only a small sector of it. Science
can’t satisfy our metaphysical questionings, which to Richards’s mind
is no great loss since he believes that metaphysics is bogus; but it does
represent certain affective needs which must be satisfied, and this is
the function of art and culture. Through language, we construct a
reality to satisfy our needs as a whole, so that ‘the fabrics of all our
various worlds are the fabrics of our meanings’ (PR, p. 12). Far from
constituting a solid fact, reality is a product of our conventions,
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which vary from place to place and time to time; and the arbitrari-
ness of these conventions is obvious enough if one encounters a
culture sufficiently alien to one’s own, as Richards did when he
visited China. This, he admits, is an unsettling truth to digest, since
it seems to mean that our existence lacks a sure foundation. He is
what we would call today an anti-foundationalist thinker, as well as
a precursor of some other aspects of postmodernism. Cultural rela-
tivism is one of them.
If the world is a projection of ourselves, then so, inevitably, must
be the poem. Like some later reception theorists, Richards maintains
that much of what we regard as being ‘in’ a literary work is actually
put there by the reader. For perhaps the first time in the history of
English criticism, the underprivileged reader emerges from the wings
and is placed at the centre of the literary stage. The literary text is a
transaction with a reader, not a stable object. Nor is it to be treated
as part of its author’s biography, a form of criticism which Richards
distrusts. He is a forerunner of semiotics, discourse theory, herme-
neutics, neuroscience, post-colonial studies and so-called close
reading; but he is also one of the first practitioners of what would
later become known as reception or reader-response theory, and his
enormously influential book Practical Criticism is one of the great
classics of that current even before it had properly got under way. Just
as reception theory examines the activity of the reader in helping to
construct the literary text, so Richards argues that all interpretation
involves our filling in connections which are not made by the work
itself, and that in the case of poetry our freedom to forge these rela-
tions is the primary source of the work’s power. No writer can supply
125
the full context of what he or she says, so that readers will bring their
own frame of assumptions to it, each of them rather different from
the others. Beauty, for example, lies in the eye of the beholder. As in
the case of pseudo-statements, what looks like a statement about an
object turns out to concern the subject. As far as beauty goes it is a
convincing enough case, given how much of what counts as beauty
alters from one time or place to another, though whether rape and
torture also lie in the eye of the beholder is a problem we have glanced
at already.
Generally speaking, Richards thinks that what we say of a poem
is really shorthand for describing its effects on us. We may speak of
a piece of verse as having a jocular tone or a clunky rhythm, but for
him this is a consequence of the way we read it, not a quality of the
work itself. The sense of equilibrium which a successful poem
creates lies in the reader’s mind or nervous system rather than in the
words on the page. The plot of a play or novel is simply ‘a series, an
intricately wrought system, of thoughts, feelings, expectations,
surprises, desires, hopes, disappointments and the rest’ (CSW, p.
161). Rhythm is similarly a matter of surprises, anticipations and so
on. So plot and rhythm are just in the mind as well. Is there anything
in a literary work which isn’t? The black marks on the page, perhaps.
But to identify something as a black mark involves an act of inter-
pretation, so is this simply a mental event as well? Even literary
judgements for Richards tell you more about the readers – their past
history, current interests and so on – than about the work at hand.
The fact that there is no beauty, envy, agony, commas, apostro-
phes or line-endings in a work without an interpreter doesn’t mean,
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however, that to describe a poem is to describe the reader. The

opposition between what is given by the poem and what is
constructed by the reader is a misleading one. When we say that the
word ‘mother’ is ‘in’ the poem, we don’t mean that it is in it in the
way that brandy is in a bottle. We mean that in the English language
these six black marks are commonly agreed to have a specific
meaning or cluster of meanings, and that the reader cannot simply
decide that they mean ‘porridge’ instead. So meaning is in this sense
objective. You can be wrong about it, just as you can be wrong
about whether a narrative features a character called Julia or how
many words there are in a line of verse; and this is one sense in
which such matters are not purely subjective. (Though you can be
wrong about the subjective too – not in the sense that you don’t
know whether you are having a particular experience or not, but in
the sense that you may, say, take it for anger when it is actually fear.)
Even so, meaning is not objective in the sense that waterfalls are.
Waterfalls would exist even if human beings didn’t, but meanings
would not. Mount Etna does not exist simply because we all agree
that it does, whereas if we did not agree that six black marks have a
certain meaning, they would not do so. Perhaps in some other
language they mean ‘tractor’. Some things are part of the world’s
furniture, whereas others are not. There is nothing in Nature called
‘property’, which is purely a social construct, but there are things in
the world called trees, a few of which might belong to me. In his work
on Coleridge, Richards seeks to resolve the conflict between what is
given in a text and what we project into it with Coleridge’s notion of
a ‘fact of mind’, which involves an interaction of subject and object.
127
Richards sees a poetic work as the way in which the poet conveys
an experience from his or her own mind to the mind of the reader.
But this is a strange way to think of it. Take, for example, the
opening of John Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heavenly Muse . . .
What experience are these lines trying to communicate? And how

would we know that what we experience as we read them is what
Milton was experiencing when he wrote them? The fact is that the
passage does not present us with an experience which could be
described independently of its words. It offers us instead a set of
meanings – and meaning is not an experience, any more than prom-
ising, intending or expecting are experiences. One can speak, to be
sure, of the experience of words – of the way their sound, shape,
rhythm and texture reverberate in the mind – but the words are not
simply a medium for an experience which lies ‘behind’ them. What
is the experience behind ‘We’ve just run out of sardines’? One is
tempted to say that the whole idea of experience is misleading in
this context, a hangover from an empiricist tradition that tempts us
into modelling non-sensory activities on sensory ones. I could say
that I had the experience of shutting a drawer, but all I mean by this
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
is that I shut a drawer. There is another residue of the empiricist

legacy in the way that Richards speaks of a poem as a ‘mental state’
(CSW, p. 230), and of meaning as a mental process. But a poem
exists on paper, not in the first place in the mind. It is in our minds
that it comes alive, to be sure; but would we call a conversation a
mental state just because it involves our minds? Might a crafty
defence counsel get his client off by describing his act of chewing
someone’s ear as a mental state?
As for meaning, Wittgenstein points out that it is a social prac-
tice, a way of doing things with words, not an invisible occurrence
in our heads. Because meaning is a social affair, ‘There’s a maniac
with a blood-stained machete creeping up behind you’ means what
it means whatever happens to be going on in my head as I pronounce
the words. Of course the words of a poem may give us what we
might call a virtual experience, so that we seem to feel the sensuous
delights of reclining in a leafy bower sipping a glass of Chardonnay
and stroking a cat; but this experience is not separable from the
language of the poem, and it does not matter whether the poet actu-
ally had it or not. For all we know the poet might be a teetotaller
with a pathological aversion to touching animals.
It has been claimed that Richards was the first critic to attend to
tone in poetry, tone being one of the chief ways in which feeling
enters into language. It is also an exemplary case of the point we
have just tried to make. Tone is not objective in the sense that a
semi-colon is. We can argue over the tone of a passage, but not over
whether it contains a semi-colon. Yet it is objective in the sense that
we cannot just read any old tone we like into a series of words. It
129
would be perverse, though not impossible, to hear Lear’s ‘I am a very

foolish fond old man’ as jovial or sarcastic. This is because feelings
are in one sense as social as meanings. ‘In one sense’, because some
of our emotions are also natural. Feeling your military honour to be
impugned is a purely cultural sentiment, but it is natural for human
beings to grieve over the death of their loved ones, panic when
falling accidentally from high buildings or scream when under
torture. These are not simply cultural matters, as some theorists
would claim. Some of them, like how people laugh or grieve, are
natural but with different cultural inflections, while others are more
or less universal. How Canadians scream under torture is pretty
much how Cambodians do. But just as we learn gradually how to
mean, so we also learn conventionally established names for our
‘private’ emotions, which is how we come to identify them not only
to others but to ourselves. We also learn what it is culturally appro-
priate to feel in particular circumstances. We can still argue over
tone, as we can argue over meaning: are Lear’s words, for example,
to be taken as poignant or self-pitying? But it would be odd to claim
that they should be delivered as though the king is stifling a fit of
giggles as he speaks them, unless one is playing him as completely
out of his mind.
In 1932, Richards published a book entitled Mencius on the Mind

which encapsulates a good deal of his thought. Mencius was an
ancient Chinese philosopher, second in intellectual stature only to
Confucius, and with some assistance from Chinese colleagues
Richards was able to decipher a portion of his writings. In some
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
ways he felt more at home in China than he did in Cambridge, and

at one point considered taking up a permanent academic post there.
He was not immune to certain sentimental illusions about the
despotic Chinese regime, remarking in 1968 that the country’s
people had a deeply ingrained horror of violence and were closer to
achieving the good life than their Western counterparts. This obser-
vation was made only two years after Mao Zedong launched the
Cultural Revolution, in which a great many Chinese citizens were
murdered, driven to suicide or otherwise ruined, and only a decade
after the so-called Great Leap Forward, which resulted in one of the
most terrible famines in modern history.
Even so, the Mencius book represents a fascinating encounter
between one of the West’s leading intellectuals and a very different
culture, one whose distinctive style and structure of thought he is
eager to grasp. Different peoples, Richards thinks, may have vastly
different mental constitutions, and the findings of Western psychology
might be far more culturally specific than we are aware. He does not
seem to find such cultural relativism as much of a problem as one
might expect, given his goal of greatly improved international
communication. There is a danger, he believes, of forcing a Western
mentality onto modes of thought to which it is inappropriate, a view-
point that anticipates some post-colonial theory. What he calls
‘nationalism in thought’ (MM, p. 90) is to be avoided. He was a
strong supporter of the League of Nations (the precursor of the
United Nations), advocated world government and was deeply
committed to international understanding. With these new forms of
internationalism came a need for mutual comprehension on a scale
131
never previously envisaged, so that questions of interpretation had

now become thoroughly political.
Perhaps one thing Richards thought the West could learn from
China was how to cultivate order without the need for a religious
foundation. What also attracts him to Chinese writing is the fact that
it seems not to be governed by an explicit logic or clearly articulated
syntax; and this, he believes, yields us an insight into the workings of
language in general, allowing as it does for a number of different
interpretations, no one of which can be said to be definitive.10 It is as
though he has stumbled upon a language which practises what he has
always preached. There is a fluid, unstable quality to Mencius’s work
which Richards, with his distaste for the clear-cut and rigidly classi-
fied, finds especially gratifying. Whole sentences in Chinese can have
an indefiniteness of expression, so that their meaning is not settled.
Concepts have a vagueness which lends them power and coherence,
and the language, he considers, pays no attention to certain distinc-
tions crucial to the West. Mencius, much to Richards’s approval,
steers clear of metaphysical notions, dispensing with universals,
particulars, substances, attributes, essences, classes and the like. An
interest in what a thing is in itself, as opposed to what moral and
social significance it may have, strikes Richards as a recent, Western-
based style of thought. He also claims that in Mencius’s writing the
emotive takes precedence over meaning, as it does for Richards in
poetry, and that in the Chinese language more generally we some-
times have to choose between the different possible senses of a term
according to their emotional resonances. Words do not behave as
fixed, independent units of discourse, and meaning seems highly
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
context-dependent. What matters, as in the Western tradition of

rhetoric, is the force or ‘gesture’ of an utterance, the purpose it seeks
to achieve, rather than the bare proposition; and this means in
Richards’s view that verbal forms have to be grasped in terms of the
effects and intentions of a piece of language, not the other way round.
In all these ways, Richards the pragmatist finds Mencius’s work
congenial. His arguments seem to turn on practical interests directed
to specific ends. Among these ends is the maintenance of social order,
which as we have seen is one of Richards’s own most precious values.
A certain system of social practices, involving honour, respect, hier-
archy and so on, is taken for granted, and the aim of an utterance is
how to sustain it. What matters is not that a statement is in accord
with the facts, but in accord with such facts as are compatible with
the governing social structure. This, Richards suspects, might also be
truer of Western psychology than it cares to acknowledge. Mencius’s
primary concern is not knowledge or reflection but virtuous action.
What looks at first glance like referential language is really ‘a series of
overt or disguised imperatives’ (MM, p. 64).
Disturbingly, Richards seems thoroughly to approve of this subor-
dination of truth to power, examples of which could be found in
abundance in the fascist regimes of the time. They are also increas-
ingly apparent in advanced capitalist ones. What we need, he remarks,
is a ‘fictional account of human nature in the interests of a finely
ordered society and of reasonably unwasteful living’ (MM, p. 66). We
should harness psychology (by which he really means manipulate the
mind) to the cause of social stability, which is to say that psychology
should become ideology. For this purpose, he distinguishes between
133
the concept of equilibrium, which is profoundly disinterested and

predisposes you to no one course of action over another, and the
notion of harmony, which coordinates one’s impulses in such a way
as to bring about beneficial action. The beneficial action both he and
Mencius have upmost in mind is the maintaining of social cohesion.
So harmony is a question of partisanship, given that social cohesion
is usually in the interests of our rulers. There is a tension, however,
between the conservative politics implicit in this case and Richards’s
interest in ambiguity, since ambiguity is in a sense the opposite of
authoritarianism. It is probably no accident that at a time when polit-
ical nationalism was on the rise, the topic of ambiguity should play so
crucial a role in the work of Richards, Empson and others. Among
other things, ambiguity can be a coded kind of anti-chauvinism. To
be hospitable to different meanings may involve being open to a
diversity of cultures.
It would seem a far cry from the Mencius study to Richards’s
most celebrated work, Practical Criticism. Yet there are important
connections between them. The latter book is the record of a
legendary experiment which Richards conducted with a group of
Cambridge students, in which he handed them poems without
informing them of their authors or contexts, and asked them to
analyse and evaluate them. It is worth noting that although
Richards’s name is therefore indissolubly linked with so-called prac-
tical criticism, a term he actually invented, he does rather little of it
himself in his published writing. It is a form of inquiry which
involves so-called ‘close reading’, which is not to suggest that every
critic before Richards read only an average of two or three words a
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
line. You can read a work with scrupulous attention and then
proceed to waffle about it. A barrister reads a brief carefully, but not
usually in the sense of grasping its layout on the page, or the odd
piece of alliteration or assonance, as part of its meaning. Close
reading in criticism means the kind of reading which clings tena-
ciously to the shape of the sentences – to their rhythm, sound, tone,
texture, syntactical form and so on – and comes up with judge-
ments and interpretations on this basis. Some traditionally minded
critics at the time denounced the approach as too myopic, missing
the wood for the trees. It was too much like what Eliot called
‘lemon-squeezing’, offensive to one’s sense of decorum and propor-
tion. A gentleman like Quiller-Couch relaxed with a book rather
than scrutinising it like an officious ticket inspector.
The general response to the handed-out passages was one of
dismal ineptitude. One critic characterises Richards’s report as a
modern Dunciad. It would seem that what was traditionally the most
literate section of the population was effectively unable to read.
Richards speaks of the ‘reckless, desperate’ nature of some of the
contributions, and comments with a mildly mischievous air that they
are the work of expensively educated students. (There were, however,
some reasonably perceptive insights, perhaps in part because William
Empson and F.R. Leavis were among the participants.) A number of
myths have clustered around this project, one of the few attempts to
turn literary criticism into a collaborative enterprise. First, Richards
himself did not invent practical criticism. It had already been part of
the Cambridge English Tripos for some time, though it was Richards
who put it on the map. Second, he did not believe that reading a
135
work in ignorance of its author, circumstances and historical context

was the ideal critical method, as did most of the American New
Critics who came under his influence. He withheld these reference-
points from his students not because he thought them irrelevant but
in order to demonstrate how ready his guinea pigs were, once deprived
of such pointers, to mark up a piece of slipshod Victorian sentimen-
talism while marking down Donne and Hopkins.
Thirdly, Richards did not regard the exercise as being primarily
about criticism. He saw it rather as about communication, and
described it somewhat obscurely as ‘a piece of field-work in compara-
tive ideology’ (PC, p. 15). The only goal of criticism, he insisted, was
to improve communication. He wanted to know more about the
chief impediments to it, and his students provided him with an
embarrassing profusion of evidence. It is the idea of communication
which links Practical Criticism to Mencius on the Mind, since mutual
understanding between two very different cultures seems as hit and
miss an affair as a group of tin-eared students’ understanding of a
poem. Indeed, in Richards’s view it is misunderstanding which is the
norm and understanding the exception. Rhetoric is chiefly the study
of misinterpretation. His case is confirmed by those modern linguis-
ticians for whom human language is so complex, and the factors
involved in decoding it so numerous, that any act of comprehension
would seem like a small miracle.
Practical Criticism uses the material it gathers to examine certain
common causes of misapprehension: stock responses, excessive
literalism, purely subjective associations, emotions inappropriate to
the occasion and so on. Some of this Richards attributed to the
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
baleful influence of mass culture, which in his day meant for the
most part film, radio, popular fiction and popular newspapers. A
pervasive decline in the quality of speech, along with a ‘levelling
down’ of sensitivity and critical intelligence, was under way, with
potentially disastrous historical consequences. One wonders what
he would have made of the so-called social media. There was a ‘deli-
quescence’ of traditional culture. A secular, scientific, urban and
industrial society had ‘neutralised’ Nature. It had also invalidated
traditional notions of the universe and of humanity’s place within
it. The human psyche had accordingly been thrown out of kilter,
but no new vision had emerged to rebalance it. It was essential,
then, to cast off the last vestiges of religion, metaphysics and philos-
ophy, accept that God is dead, and place the psyche on a firm foun-
dation by turning to a discourse that was as emotionally potent as
religious belief but without its gross improbabilities. That discourse
was of course poetry. It was a pity (though Richards does not exactly
say so) that hardly anyone read it, and that the majority of people
were deprived of the means to appreciate it. It was also untrue that
secularisation had spread as widely as Richards imagined. Millions
of his fellow citizens still believed in God, not to speak of societies
elsewhere in the world in which religion remained solidly entrenched
as an everyday practice. There was one such nation only a few miles
to the west of Britain.
Richards, then, shares much of the cultural pessimism of Eliot and
Leavis. He speaks of the ‘sinister potentialities of the cinema and the
loud-speaker’ (PLC, p. 35), not as absurd a statement as it sounds if
one thinks of the uses to which the Nazis put such technology a decade
137
or so after Richards was writing. The masses are assailed by advertising,

propaganda, popular journalism, radio and cinema, with a consequent
cheapening of their experience. The less well-educated, he believes,
inhabit chaos, thereby posing a threat to social stability in an age of
political turbulence. Richards is aware of the extraordinary capacity of
language to manipulate the mind, and like Wittgenstein sees it as
capable of exerting a bewitching power over us. Words, he believes, are
the most conservative force in the world, and the mass of citizens must
learn how to break their spell. It is not enough that a cultivated elite
remains immune to their seductions. Poetry, as we have seen, will play
a major role in this transformation. To suggest that only those who are
sensitive to poetry are morally admirable in everyday life is clearly too
elitist a claim, so Richards admits that one can be a sensitive reader but
unpalatable as a person. Yet if he presses this point too far, he would
undercut the need for poetry’s supposedly redemptive power; so he
also maintains that there is a certain correlation between fineness in
criticism and fineness in life.
This largely negative stance to contemporary culture leads to the
occasional outbreak of nostalgia. The ceaseless roar of modern
transport, he remarks, ‘replacing the rhythm of the footstep or of
horses’ hoofs, is capable in many ways of interfering with our
reading of verse’ (PC, p. 306). He also observes that ‘there are plenty
of individuals, of course, whose lives are fairly stable and consistent,
whose desires are orderly and whose outlook is clear. But this, in
most cases, is because they are not really contemporary with the
automobile and the radio’ (‘Why I Am A Literary Critic’, CSW,
pp. 164–5). Despite his fondness for the clopping of horses’ hoofs,
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
however, Richards, like Raymond Williams, is a thoroughly modern

thinker in a way that Eliot and Leavis are not. He does not believe
with Eliot that human nature is unchangeable. A new social order
must emerge, which will in no sense represent a mere return to the
old. The critic must be midwife to this new dispensation, and
psychology and the study of language must provide us with a new
comprehension of and control over our minds. Such an under-
standing would then allow us to reconstruct education and achieve
a saner, richer and more stable culture – one which would not only
be strong enough to withstand the forces working against civilisa-
tion, but harness them to our service. He is prepared, in other
words, to use a scientifically based psychology to counteract the
more degrading effects of a scientific-technological society.
The latter emphasis is what truly distinguishes Richards from the
cultural pessimists. The new technologies are not to be written off as
simply oppressive; instead, in the spirit of the European avant gardes,
productive uses must be found for them. Richards’s own career is
testimony to his faith in media technology, mass communication and
institutions of learning. There is more than a dash of Enlightenment
rationalism to his trust in the mind, education, scientific inquiry and
the possibility of transforming our environment. It is an affirmative
spirit which is shared in different ways by William Empson and
Raymond Williams. Yet Richards combines it with a sense of cultural
decline which is closer to the thought of Eliot and Leavis. The more
widely communication spreads, he warns, the more levelling down
there will be. Writing in 1974, he maintains that the literature of the
time represents a drastic falling-off from that around 1920.11 A
139
gradual climb back, however, is not out of the question. Science has
for centuries been constrained by religion, ethics and the humanities,
and needs to be given its head. Properly understood, it is an emanci-
patory force.
Richards is surely right that over the course of British history it
is science, by and large, which has promoted the cause of social
progress, and the humanities which have acted often enough as a
bulwark against it. The postmodern scepticism of science is simply
the latest manifestation of an age-old historical prejudice. In any
case, Richards’s rationalism, as we have seen, has its limits. Though
he is much given to listing, classifying and diagram drawing, this
rigour is the service of an end which it knows is bound to elude it:
an exhaustive explanation of the work of art. What the painstaking
analysis of a critic devoted to order finally reveal is the fluid, unstable
and indefinite. In one sense, perhaps, this is not as paradoxical as it
seems: for the science of the time, not least as it was practised at
Cambridge, the notion of indeterminacy played an important role.
Few critics have been both as wide-ranging and tightly focused as
Richards. On the one hand, his work spans what was later to become
a growing gulf between literary and scientific cultures, roaming
across literature, rhetoric, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, linguis-
tics, educational theory, cultural diagnosis and some hair-raising
accounts of his mountaineering exploits. On the other hand, no
aspect of a poem is too microscopic to merit his attention. He is
probably the first literary critic to have paid attention to the actual
look of the poem on the page – to the role played in its overall effect
by typographical devices such as fonts, line breaks, spacing and the
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I .A . R I CHAR DS
visual character of words. His pupil William Empson inherited only

part of his teacher’s intellectual versatility, but pressed his techniques
of close analysis well beyond anything Richards accomplished
himself – indeed beyond the constraints of any previous critic. It is
to the work of this enfant terrible that we may now turn.
141
3
WILLIAM EMPSON
‘Anyone who reads me also reads Richards’, writes William Empson.1

There is a curious echo in these words of Jesus’s ‘Whoever has seen
me has seen the Father’, a suggestion that this embattled atheist
would no doubt have found grotesquely inappropriate. He also
states in a note to the most ambitious of his works, The Structure of
Complex Words, that Richards, his teacher at Cambridge, is the
source of all the book’s ideas. The more senior critic, however, didn’t
always return the compliment. Whereas Empson’s allusions to
Richards’s work are respectful even when he radically disagrees with
him, a few of Richards’s references to Empson are only grudgingly
complimentary. Maybe the master felt overshadowed by the bril-
liance of his former pupil, perhaps the cleverest critic England has
ever produced.
Empson’s father was a Yorkshire landowner in possession of over
2,000 acres, while his mother, in his own words, was a ‘terrific class-
addict’, so that he could only bring home upper-class friends whom
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
she approved of and he himself didn’t like.2 Perhaps this was one
reason for what might have been his unconscious wish to see her
ripped to pieces, which we shall be noting later. This son of the
squirearchy attended one of the most prestigious of English private
schools, Winchester College, which by being so ostentatiously priv-
ileged helped to move him to the political left. Indeed, this is
perhaps the only worthwhile function such places have ever served.
From there he won a place at Magdalene College, Cambridge to
study mathematics, later abandoning the subject for English. As a
student, Empson published poems which won the praise of F.R.
Leavis, became interested in Marx and Freud and helped to run an
experimental literary journal which had the distinction of turning
down a poem by Ezra Pound. Like his mentor, he was a member of
the Heretics society, of which he became president, and knocked
around with an assorted bunch of rebels, misfits and eccentrics.
Empson was expelled from Magdalene for being found with
contraceptives in his room, and, furnished with a modest financial
allowance from his father, conducted a hand-to-mouth existence in
London, enjoying some riotous nights on the town with T.S. Eliot,
Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and other
literary luminaries. Eliot proved to be a generous patron, inviting
him to review for the Criterion. At the age of 24 he published one
of the greatest critical works ever to appear in English, Seven Types
of Ambiguity, some of it cobbled together from his undergraduate
essays. It was hailed by the American critic John Crowe Ransom as
the most imaginative account of reading ever published. Its author
was scruffy, shy, kind-hearted, free of airs and graces, and lived in
143
squalid conditions that Robert Lowell described as having a certain

‘weird, sordid nobility’. He was also an alcoholic, actively bisexual,
experimented with opium and lived in an open marriage with the
South African sculptor Hetta Crouse, who was a member of the
Communist Party. Their home in London became something of a
bohemian commune, frequented by literary and political dissidents
as well as those simply in search of a drink.
From 1931 to 1934, Empson taught at the Japanese National
University in Tokyo. His time in Japan was not without a touch of
drama: trying to climb into his hotel through a window one night
while hopelessly drunk, he got stuck and had to be hauled out by his
legs. He also smuggled a friend out of a Japanese prison by disguising
him in sunglasses and a false moustache. He was thrown out of the
country for making a pass at a male taxi driver, implausibly main-
taining in his own defence that he found Japanese men and women
hard to tell apart. From 1937 to 1939 he was a professor in Beijing,
where his drinking gained him revered status as one of a classical
tradition of intoxicated Chinese poets. His educational work in the
country, to which he returned some years later, deeply shaped the
future course of English studies there, and he was said to be a devoted
teacher both in China and in Japan. He was robbed by bandits in
China, developed a passionate interest in Buddhism and enthusiasti-
cally witnessed Mao Zedong’s triumphal entry into the capital.
During the Second World War he returned to England and
worked as a propagandist alongside George Orwell at the BBC, later
becoming the Corporation’s Chinese editor. He thought Orwell’s
novel 1984 ‘horrible’ since it underrated the power of the human
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
mind to withstand the manipulations of authoritarian language.

The novel, in short, offended his rationalist faith. His war work led
him to feel a certain affinity with the otherwise detestable God of
Paradise Lost (‘a pompous old buffer’, as he called him in Milton’s
God ), whom he saw as essentially a propagandist. In 1953 he was
appointed Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University, a
post he accepted partly because the city was in his home county of
Yorkshire. He was knighted in 1979, five years before his death.
Empson and Richards are alike in many respects, though there are
divergences between them as well. Empson shares his mentor’s
progressive view of history and rejects the Eliotic theory that a
dissociation of sensibility had led to a decline in literature and civi-
lisation since the seventeenth century. In fact, he explicitly and
unfashionably embraces the so-called Whig theory of history, which
sees English history as a steady expansion of liberty, prosperity and
enlightenment. It is not true, he argues, that things have been
constantly growing worse, a belief which for many intellectuals of
the time was almost an article of faith. Like Richards, Empson
taught for a while in Eastern Asia, and was fascinated by Buddhist
thought. He considered his book on the subject, The Face of the
Buddha, one of the best things he had written.3 An interest in
Eastern thought marks much of the modernist period. Empson was
also an advocate of Basic English, and as cosmopolitan in outlook
as his teacher. On his return from China, the Eng. Lit. establish-
ment in Britain struck him as stuffy and parochial. Yet he did not
learn any Chinese or Japanese while abroad, and was later to regret
145
that he had not integrated more fully into Chinese society. He was
always at some level the Englishman abroad. His range of literary
reference, like Richards’s, is almost exclusively English. In fact, of
the five critics considered in this book, only Eliot roams habitually
beyond the confines of English literature, while F.R. Leavis gives the
impression that the only non-English-language work he ever read
without boredom or displeasure is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
Like Richards, Empson is a rationalist who has a briskly
dismissive way with Symbolist, Imagist or New Critical notions of
the poem as a self-enclosed object cut adrift from everyday life and
language. He is a relentless demythologiser of such doctrines,
presenting himself in one critic’s words as ‘the bluff squire, with his
keen English nose for nonsense’.4 He is no fan of the aesthetic, as his
own depthless, off-hand prose style bears witness. Poetry must be
judged by the same rational standards of argumentation that we
draw on in daily life. There is nothing mystical or transcendent
about it. Its truth, whatever Eliot and the Symbolists may consider,
does not finally elude language. Empson’s first and most famous
book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, received a fair amount of flak from
critics and reviewers for this plain-minded approach. He was clearly
out of step with the literary orthodoxy personified by Eliot, taking
issue with the whole modernist programme of poetry as portraying
states of feeling with sensuous particularity, or of using language to
gesture beyond itself. Like Richards, he plays down the ‘visual
image’ idea of poetry. A poem in his opinion is as open to being
paraphrased as a piece of legislation, a case which smacks of heresy
for the Symbolists and American New Critics. Paraphrasing a poem
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
may mean losing something of its unique effect, but it may also
allow us to return to the work with a deeper, richer sense of its
meaning. Whereas Eliot added notes to The Waste Land simply to
fill in a few blank pages, and perhaps to bamboozle the reader even
more thoroughly, Empson sometimes appended notes to his own
poetry in order to elucidate its meaning for the reader. He was not
afraid of desecrating the mystery of his art by explaining what it
means in prosaic terms.
This, then, is a critic who places his trust in rational argument,
critical reason and open public debate. If he revels in the technical
intricacies of a Donne or Marvell, another side of him is thoroughly
at home in the eighteenth century, which he sees as the very sanc-
tuary of rationality. To paraphrase the critic Christopher Norris, he
works on the assumption that the human mind, however complex,
baffled and self-divided, is essentially sane; and to interpret a text is
to make as large-minded, generous an allowance as one can for the
way in which a particular poetic mind, however broodingly idiosyn-
cratic, is striving to work through and pluck some sense from its
conflicts.5 Any contradiction, Empson maintains, is likely to have
some sensible interpretation. It is the critic as therapist, approaching
knotted meanings and fractured images while coolly maintaining
his own good sense as a tacit example of the well-ordered human
mind. Science, he remarks, has held a monopoly on reason in the
modern era, yet the belief that reason should be brought to bear on
the arts is as old as criticism itself, and is fundamental to its work-
ings. Analysis is only the refuge of the emotionally sterile when it
is poorly performed. Given enough practice, you can respond
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simultaneously to the music and the meaning of a poem, which in

Eliot’s terms is the mark of an undissociated sensibility.
No explanation of a literary work can be exhaustive, but vigorous
arguments over it are still worth conducting. The fact that there is no
ultimate truth does not mean that there is no truth at all. It is worth
recalling that Empson lived through the barbarous irrationalism of
fascism, in the light of which a trust in the fundamental rationality
of men and women becomes an implicit form of politics. Like Freud,
he is aware of the limits of reason – of the conflicts and chronic
illusions of the human mind – without ever losing faith in its
sense-making capabilities. The problem is how to acknowledge the
muddled, contradictory nature of human affairs without devaluing
reason and thus selling the pass to a motley array of irrationalists:
Symbolists, neo-Christians, the ‘loathsome’ Imagists, intuitionists,
Romantic sentimentalists and other reach-me-down Empsonian
bugbears. And just as Empson puts his trust in the sanity of the mind
– its ability to stretch itself around any situation without losing its
integrity – so he has a belief in the vigour and resilience of language
which is very far from the distrust of the word typical of modernism.
When confronted with a literary work, Empson appeals to what
philosophers call the principle of charity – the assumption that a piece
of language, however tortuous or obscure, is trying to say something
which makes sense. ‘We could not use language as we do’, he writes,
‘and above all we could not learn it . . . unless we were always floating
in a general willingness to make sense of it; all the more, then, to try to
make a printed page mean something good is only fair’ (MG, p. 28).
In this sense, understanding is both a moral and a cognitive act, as
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
well as a fundamental disposition of our being. Before we come to

grasp anything in particular, we are always in a state of what one might
call pre-understanding. All good poetry, Empson considers, requires
an active effort of intellectual sympathy on the reader’s part, so that the
act of knowing is also an exercise of feeling. Pleasure and cognition go
together: ‘unless you are enjoying the poetry’, Empson insists, ‘you
cannot create it, as poetry, in your mind’ (STA, p. 248). Without some
affection for a work, you don’t really get to understand it. You must
also rely on it to show you the way it is trying to be good.
The critical act, then, must be both affective and analytical, so
that in this local sense at least, Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility is
overcome. In an excessively charitable gesture, Empson argues that
‘a student of literature ought to be trying all the time to empathise
with the author’ (UB, p. viii). The case is an ancient one: St
Augustine, for example, believed that understanding is a form of
love – of being emotionally engaged with what you are seeking to
grasp. If one’s empathy were to be complete, however, one would
lose one’s capacity to judge, which requires a certain reflective
distance. Besides, to empathise is not necessarily to sympathise, in
the sense of regarding an author’s feelings as valid. You can empa-
thise with a torturer. Even so, a poem, Empson considers, must be
thought worth the trouble of being carefully examined, and exam-
ining it carefully allows you to know more about what it is worth.
Fact and value conspire together, each enhancing the other.
Empson’s concern with sense and argument in poetry is at odds
with Richards’s view of it as a form of pseudo-statement – as emotive
rather than cognitive. For Empson, as we have just seen, thought
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and feeling work together in the process of criticism; indeed, the

semantic (what the text means) has primacy over its formal aspects,
since the latter have significance only in the context of what the
work is trying to say. We wouldn’t, for example, see disjointed
syntax as symptomatic of an unhinged mind unless we knew from
the poem’s content that this was what it was trying to convey. In any
case, emotions, far from being the opposite of rational propositions,
implicitly contain them: I am afraid of this animal because I know
that it is hungry, that it is notorious for eating humans, that it has a
particular hankering for the flesh of people like myself from the
north-west of England and so on. Much of what we call ‘feeling’ in
poetry is in Empson’s view an elaborate structure of interrelated
meanings; and with this idea he anticipates Raymond Williams’s
concept of a ‘structure of feeling’. A central aim of The Structure of
Complex Words, as the book’s title suggests, is to investigate what
one might call the inner logic of certain key words, the structural
relations between their various senses; and if it is this inner logic
which sometimes matters, then Empson is bound to reject Richards’s
view that all meaning is determined by its linguistic context.
Empson is a realist who believes in trying to understand the world
as it is, whereas Richards, as we have seen, is sceptical of such naive
objectivism, as he would no doubt regard it. When Empson writes in
Seven Types that ‘the object of life, after all, is not to understand things,
but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one
can’ (STA, p. 247), he is momentarily ventriloquising his master in a
way which seems untrue to his genuine beliefs. He is also out of step
with his mentor on the question of order and unity, of which, as we
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
have seen, Richards makes something of a fetish. The younger critic,

by contrast, reveals a certain indifference to order in the shapeless,
digressive nature of his prose style. (When asked how he came to write
so slackly, he blamed it on beer. One visitor to his rooms in Cambridge
found him patiently sucking beer stains from the carpet, no doubt at
a time of day when the pubs were closed.) He admired what he called
a certain ‘productive looseness’ in a work of art, which allows it to
gather into itself various disparate elements that have been contained
in tradition. He even uses the homely image of a stew, in which
various chunks of stuff are suffused in the same medium. You know
what words have gone into the making of a poem, but each of these
words floats in language as a whole, rather as the ingredients of a stew
are mixed with each other in a juice which envelops them; and just as
one does not know how these different bits of the stew are combined
or held in suspension, so it is hard to know how words take their
flavour from the nature of language as a whole. Language for Empson
is a kind of social unconscious, the deep resources which underlie a
specific word or lurk in the background of a phrase, but which are
hard to dredge to consciousness. He speaks cryptically but sugges-
tively in Seven Types of ‘the poet’s sense of the nature of a language’
(STA, p. 6), and of ‘meanings latent in the mode of action of the
language’ (STA, p. 7). Writers are those who need to have a language
in their bones if they are to use it effectively. They have somehow to
be attuned to its deep structures and typical modes of operation,
rather than simply be able to turn a fine phrase.
Empson’s casualness about unity is evident in Some Versions of
Pastoral, a work so broken-backed in structure, ranging from
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proletarian literature to Alice in Wonderland, that any coherent

conception of what it means by pastoral has to be assembled largely
by the reader. The book’s own form thus suggests a disunity which
pastoral itself is supposed to overcome, with its harmonising of the
social classes. It is a deliberately perverse text, a smack at academic
decorum which can be found almost everywhere in Empson’s work.
In fact, one critic regarded the book as a joke. In Seven Types of
Ambiguity, the seventh ambiguity to be examined is one reflecting a
fundamental rift or self-division in the poet’s mind; and though
Empson allows that this contradiction may be resolved in some
larger context, he also claims that the task of reconciliation falls
heavily on the reader. One such fissured mind, as we shall see, is
that of John Milton; but it is a self-division whose effects Empson
admires rather than laments, just as he finds Othello all the more
plausible because of his conflicting motives. The fact that Milton
seems to believe different things at the same time makes Paradise
Lost a lot more interesting than it might otherwise have been.
In explicating the various possible meanings of a text, Empson
does not seem to mind that they may be mutually incompatible, nor
does he try to synthesise them into a whole. Indeed, he expressly
denies that this is the poet’s task, and neither need it be that of the
critic. Great poetry, he believes, is usually written against a back-
ground of discord. ‘Human life’, he remarks, ‘is so much a matter of
juggling with contradictory impulses . . . that one is accustomed to
thinking people are sensible if they follow first one, then the other, of
two such courses’ (STA, p. 197). In a note to one of his poems, he
claims that life consists of maintaining oneself among contradictions
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
that can’t be resolved by analysis. In the words of his biographer, he

is a ‘connoisseur of conflict’,6 who declares himself enthralled by the
way in which, at the end of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff,
Harry Percy and Prince Henry ‘in a series of lightning changes, force
upon the audience in succession their mutually incompatible views
of the world’ (STA, p. 116). Discussing the tension in Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s poem ‘The Windhover’ between joy in physical beauty
and the urge to spiritual renunciation, he sees it as a case of ambi-
guity in which ‘two things thought of as incompatible, but desired
intensely by different systems of judgements, are spoken of simulta-
neously by words applying to both; both desires are thus given a
transient and exhausting satisfaction, and the two systems of judge-
ment are forced into open conflict before the reader’ (STA, p. 226).
Unity can be the enemy of diversity: Empson believes that ‘the way
in which opposites can be stated so as to satisfy a wide variety of
people, for a great number of degrees of interpretation, is the most
important thing about the communication of the arts’ (STA, p. 221).
Elizabethan drama has to gratify both courtiers and groundlings, and
so must accommodate alternative viewpoints and levels of interpre-
tation. The device of a double plot, to which a chapter of Some
Versions of Pastoral is devoted, is one way of doing so.
What Empson finds most impressive about the literature of the
Elizabethan period is that the conflicting nature of human sympa-
thies was somehow obvious to it, which he thinks is less true of the
post-Restoration era. As with Eliot and Leavis, though in less doctri-
naire a manner, there is a wistful sense of history having lapsed from
a more sound condition in the past. In the so-called Age of Reason
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of eighteenth-century England, unruly emotions which could

previously be incorporated into literary works are increasingly split
off from them, until by the time of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books
virtue, intelligence and natural feeling, personified by Alice herself,
are isolated from the chaotic forces she observes around her. Only
the child – a semi-outsider – can now be the bearer of ‘normal’
values in an anarchic society.
The mind, Empson remarks in Some Versions of Pastoral, is
complex and ill-connected like a theatre audience, so that it is as
surprising in the one case as the other that some kind of unity can
be produced by a play. Good literature has to work successfully for
readers who don’t share its viewpoint, and two individuals may have
very different experiences of the same work of art without either of
them being unequivocally wrong. We have seen that Richards is also
an advocate of diversity, but for him it must be compatible with
order. Politically speaking, it is a standard liberal case. His tidy mind
is uneasy with the unfinished and unresolved, as Empson’s disor-
derly imagination is not. In fact, the latter’s discussion of various
kinds of ambiguity in Seven Types traces what he calls ‘stages of
advancing logical disorder’ (STA, p. 48). It is not that he objects to
a reconciliatory art – pastoral, he thinks, is a prime example of it –
but that he is less insistent on it than most of the critics around him.
The point of a work of art is not so much to resolve antagonisms as
to perform the process of working them through, as well as to allow
the reader to participate in this activity. At one point he speaks of a
poem as the expression of an unresolved conflict. Where Empson
does find common ground with Richards is on the question of the
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
value of literature, the study of which he thinks is frivolous unless it

helps us to decide which attitudes and world views are preferable to
others. In practice, however, he is not much concerned with ranking
literary works on a scale of excellence. This is partly because his
impulse is to be inclusive and generous-minded, without being in
the least scatterbrained or sentimental.
While Cambridge philosophers like Bertrand Russell and the
early Wittgenstein were in search of a purely logical form of language
purged of equivocation, it is for his work on ambiguity that Empson
is probably best known; and an ambiguity is by definition irresolv-
able, at least if one lifts it out of context. He defines it as ‘any verbal
nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions
to the same piece of language’ (STA, p. 1), which suggests that the
issue is in the hands of the reader rather than the writer. A writer
may not regard what he or she has written as ambiguous, but in the
end it is for the readers to decide, just as some of them may detect
an irony while others do not. Like Richards, Empson sees the reader
as playing a key role in the constitution of the poem. Readers will
think up a range of reasons why (for example) apparently uncon-
nected items in the work should go together, even if this process is
largely unconscious. Empson’s sixth type of ambiguity occurs when
a statement really says nothing, being a tautology or contradiction,
and readers are forced to come up with statements of their own
which are liable to be at odds with each other.
Yet Empson’s definition of ambiguity may need some modi-
fying. One can contrast ambiguity with ambivalence, which also
gives room for alternative reactions, yet which usually consists of
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two opposed but determinate meanings. One can feel ambivalent

about the automobile, for example, which has proved wonderfully
convenient but has also brought countless human lives to an abrupt
halt. (When the first fatal car accident occurred in Britain in 1896,
a shocked Lord Mayor of London remarked that he hoped such a
thing would never happen again.) In Dombey and Son, by contrast,
Dickens is not sure whether the recently established railways are a
‘black monster’ or a triumph of modernity. It is when alternative
meanings or attitudes merge to the point where we no longer know
what to think, or what is intended, that ambivalence slides into
ambiguity in the richest sense of the term; and this in Empson’s
view lies at the root of poetry. What catches his eye is what one
commentator calls poetry’s ‘weft and warp of mixed meanings’.7
Even when a poem focuses on something definite, it implicitly
appeals to a broader, vaguer backdrop of human experience which
is all the more intrusive because it cannot be named. Any language
gives us a rich, obscure practical knowledge which can be felt
hovering in the background of whatever is actually articulated.
Poets do not need to be in full control of their experience to write
effectively: Empson’s fifth ambiguity is a matter of ‘fortunate confu-
sion’ or ‘fruitful disorder’, when authors are in the process of discov-
ering their meaning in the act of writing, or not holding all of it in
their mind at once, or are in transition from one idea to another.
Truth is dishevelled, and so is inimical to rigid conventions or
images of an ideal order. Artists, Empson believes, generally live in
a muddle (he certainly did himself, as we shall see below), whereas
Richards’s goal is a life of equipoise.
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
Empson shares Richards’s view that metaphor is the normal

condition of language, and agrees that words resonate with past
contexts and usages. Yet whereas Richards’s interest in language is
primarily philosophical, Empson’s aim is to put social history back
into speech, as he does most memorably in The Structure of Complex
Words. He also endorses his teacher’s Benthamite ethics. He, too,
holds that the greatest variety of satisfactions is central to the good
life. Given its pursuit of self-gratification, Benthamite morality has
sometimes been accused of egoism; but Empson, commended by
his friends and colleagues as a man remarkably free of ego, seeks to
turn this apparent defect to advantage. He believes that others are
satisfied when one satisfies oneself, not least because the latter
involves acting out a number of generous impulses, with which he
considers human beings to be plentifully equipped. You fulfil more
impulses of your own, he claims, if you have a tendency to fulfil
those of others. The great adversary of the Benthamite view, he
argues, is Buddhism – not because it lacks a belief in value, but
because it lacks a belief in the individual. Since he was deeply
attracted to Buddhism, this may be an example of holding two
contradictory views in creative tension.
Artists, Empson holds, must state unashamedly what they like
and want, and only by virtue of this selfishness can they be of use to
their fellows. It is a way of combining two strands of Empson’s
temperament: his liberal individualism, amounting at times to a
kind of devil-may-care anarchism, and the social conscience which
led him to call himself a socialist. In part, perhaps, that conscience is
a matter of noblesse oblige, the belief that social rank brings with it
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responsibilities. Combining self-fulfilment with a concern for others

is also a way of avoiding what he sees as the morbid cult of self-
sacrifice of Christianity, while at the same time not lapsing into
mere disregard for other people.
Empson has sometimes been accused of overlooking questions of
literary form in his pursuit of ever finer nuances of meaning. But this
is at best a half-truth. It is true that he has little to say about the
overall structure of a literary work, partly because he rejects the
modernist conviction that such structures can be present to the mind
as a whole. Dismissing this ‘spatial’ view of a poem or novel, he views
the work instead as a process in time, but generally doesn’t have room
in his writing to track this sequence step by step. His blow-by-blow
account of King Lear in Complex Words, and of Paradise Lost in
Milton’s God, are notable exceptions. It is also true that he is mostly
silent about tone, except to remark that striking the right one is more
important to writing criticism than one might suppose. The mood,
texture and atmosphere of a piece are similarly underplayed. He
does, however, make some brilliantly perceptive comments on
sound, grammar, syntax, rhythm, rhyme, pace and the like. He
speaks of ‘ambiguities of grammar’ and ‘subtleties of punctuation’
(STA, p. 51), and in discussing Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘On a Drop
of Dew’ writes of ‘the delicious weakness and prolonged hesitation of
[the poem’s] syntax’ (STA, p. 80). As for rhythm, it ‘allows one, by
playing off the possible prose rhythms against the super-imposed
verse rhythms, to combine a variety of statements in one order’ (STA,
p. 30). The effect of reading a particular sonnet is ‘a general sense of
compacted intellectual wealth, of an elaborate balance of variously
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
associated feeling’ (STA, p. 57). He speaks of a Shakespeare sonnet as

‘glowing and dancing with [the author’s] certitude’ (STA, p. 138). A
passage in Paradise Lost ‘has the squalid gelatinous effect of ecto-
plasm in a flashlight photograph’ (SVP, p. 127). None of this is the
language of a critic who is intent simply on extracting the sense of a
piece of writing. What he has to say in Seven Types of the stanzaic
structure of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is a masterpiece of
formal analysis.
Unlike Richards, Empson was a superbly accomplished poet. Robert

Lowell considered that almost no praise was too high for his verse.
This current of imaginative creativity also runs beneath his critical
language and occasionally erupts into it. So it is that he can describe
George Herbert’s poem ‘The Sacrifice’ as displaying a ‘monotonous
and rather naive pathos, of fixity of doctrine, of heartrending and
straightforward grandeur’ (STA, p. 231), where the various adjectives
seem in tension with each other, so that the curious phrase ‘straight-
forward grandeur’ is almost an oxymoron or contradiction in terms.
He also writes in similar style of an anonymous verse that ‘the whole
charm of the poem is its extravagant, its unreasonable simplicity’
(STA, p. 49). Discussing Macbeth’s words ‘If th’assassination / Could
trammel up the consequence, and catch /With his surcease, success’,
he speaks not only of those sinisterly hissing s sounds but also, in an
extraordinary moment, of ‘catch, the single little flat word among
these monsters . . . it is a mark of human inadequacy to deal with
these matters of statecraft, a child snatching at the moon as she rides
thunder-clouds’ (STA, p. 50). He means that Macbeth’s bungled
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attempt to assume regal power is as futile as a child (but why a girl?)

reaching for the moon, and that both figures are at the mercy of
forces (‘thunder-clouds’) which they are helpless to control.
Where this outlandish image drifts up from is a mystery. Nobody,
including Empson himself, could imagine that Shakespeare himself
had such an uncanny idea in mind. It is rather that the critical
commentary enlarges and enriches the poetry, borrowing some of
its creative energies and thus establishing a kind of solidarity with it.
Asked whether his breathtakingly ingenious readings of literary
works involved too much ‘reading in’, Empson retorted that unless
a critic ‘reads in’ he or she would have nothing to say. He meant,
presumably, that unless you draw out what strikes you as the impli-
cations of a work, which are not actually articulated, all you can do
is repeat the work itself. The line between reading in and spelling
out is not always exact. We generally argue not over the meaning of
the actual words of a literary text but over their interpretation, and
such argument has no obvious bounds.
Richards and Empson are both enthusiasts of science; indeed,
Empson regards it as the finest imaginative achievement of the
modern age. Criticism, however, should be a social rather than a
scientific affair. In this sense, his old teacher is too much of a ration-
alist for him; yet in so far as Richards proposes an emotive theory
of poetry, he is not rationalist enough. Both men are secular
humanists, though Empson was a militant atheist whereas Richards
was not. The Christian God, Empson observes with grim relish,
is ‘the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man’ (MG,
p. 251). In fact, he spent much of the last 30 years of his life
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
propagating a lurid caricature of this deity, one which no moder-

ately intelligent theologian would have trouble in dismantling. If
he was remarkably large-minded, he could also ride hobbyhorses.
Both men also regard any absolute truth about a literary work as
unattainable. Final judgement, Empson remarks, is something that
must be indefinitely postponed.
More generally, they agree on the need for cultivating fictions to
sustain human existence. We have seen this already in the case of
Richards, while Empson considers that the real difficulty of the
modern age is that ‘true beliefs may make it impossible to act rightly;
that we cannot think without verbal fictions; that they must not be
taken for true beliefs, and yet must be taken seriously’ (A, p. 198). A
prosperous human life thrives among other things on a carefully
cultivated pretence: ‘The feeling that life is essentially inadequate to
the human spirit’, he comments, ‘and yet a good life must avoid
saying so, is naturally at home with most versions of pastoral’ (SVP,
p. 95). This vein of pathos or wry disenchantment runs throughout
his work. ‘It is only in degree’, he writes, ‘that any improvement of
society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a
fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but
be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy’ (SVP, p. 12). It is
an unusually despondent remark from a man in his early twenties.
Richards and Empson differ sharply on the relevance of authors’
biographies and intentions to the interpretation of their work.
Empson grew increasingly interested in writers’ lives as his career
progressed, and published a late work entitled Using Biography. As we
have seen already, Richards was wary of such recourse to an author’s
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life experiences, not least because it can be bound up with psycho-

analytic criticism, which he deplored. Empson’s work, as we shall see,
is more hospitable to psychoanalysis (there is a scintillating Freudian
analysis of Alice in Wonderland in Some Versions of Pastoral ), though as
a rationalist he, too, is rattled by some of its darker findings. One
might claim that Richards is concerned with academic psychology,
whereas Empson, with his extraordinary astuteness about human
motives and self-deceptions, is an inspired amateur at the game.
As for the question of how far the author’s intentions matter in
determining the meaning of a literary work, Empson takes a briskly
commonsensical view. He accepts that writers may have uncon-
scious intentions, that they can mean more than they know, and
that readers can legitimately find in their work meanings which
they did not have in mind; but he also insists that there are times
when we need to respect what an author is intending to say, even
though establishing what this is may involve a degree of guesswork
on our part. Yet it is not just a shot in the dark either. History, for
example, places limits on interpretation. When W.B. Yeats writes in
his poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’ that those who rebuild ruined civilisations
are gay, he cannot have meant that they are homosexual. The imme-
diate context may be important, too: when W.H. Auden in his elegy
for Yeats asks Time to ‘pardon him for writing well’, we assume that
he means pardon him because he was a great writer, not pardon him
for being a great writer. As Empson points out in Argufying, we
assess other people’s intentions all the time without engaging in
some complex reflection on the fact, rather as playing catch doesn’t
require a theory of dynamics.
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Perhaps the most obvious contrast between the two critics is that
Richards is a full-blown theorist whereas Empson is not. The latter
takes a breezily pragmatic attitude to theory, believing that one
should accept any theoretical approach which happens to prove
productive, however mutually conflictive such methods might be.
For the most part, however, critics should just follow their nose.
Theories tend to restrict one’s potential range of insights. When T.S.
Eliot remarks that the only critical method is to be very intelligent,
he could have found no finer illustration of this than his drinking
mate Bill Empson. At the same time, what we might call everyday
sensibility is in Empson’s view a tissue of what was once conscious
theory, now become unconscious and habitual. What began as a
concept ends up as a custom. So theory has at least that much
importance. One should also point out that The Structure of Complex
Words is a major work of linguistic theory. Empson’s prejudice
against theoretical speculation also springs from the bluff, no-damn-
nonsense country squire aspect of his personality. He scornfully
writes off the work of a modern French philosopher known to him
as ‘Nerrida’, a slip which might have interested Freud. Even so, there
is a quality of wisdom about him lacking in many literary theorists,
one which is by no means so evident in his mentor.
We have seen that Richards was a left-leaning liberal, whereas
Empson was firmly ensconced on the left. He was a lifelong socialist,
and remarked in the 1930s that he would have liked to be able to
write poetry like the then-Marxist Auden and his Communist Party
colleagues. At the same time, he dismissed the charge that poetry
that was not politically engaged was necessarily escapist. He thought
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that the Auden group were right to demand socialism and a welfare
state, and was to this extent a communist fellow traveller. He also
took the side of the workers in the General Strike of 1926, at a time
when a number of Oxbridge students acted as strike-breakers, and
was later to proclaim his solidarity with the Chinese Revolution. He
was always at odds with orthodoxies, and admired those who were
regarded as traitors by their colleagues. In fact, he was just the kind
of eccentric upper-class renegade whom one could imagine secretly
working for the Soviets, if he had not been such an unswerving
critic of Stalinism.
The finest literature, he maintains, tends to display a dissident
streak. Its grandest theme, he writes in his Essays on Renaissance
Literature, is the way in which individuals can become morally
independent of the society which formed them. Works of art can
afford the public some nourishment because they do not conform
to conventional moral codes, and so, in pressing men and women
beyond their usual boundaries, allow them a more critical view of
these beliefs. It is hard to see that this is true of Pope or Goethe. The
main purpose of art, Empson declares, is to allow us to encounter
codes and customs different from our own. It is a worthy sentiment,
but also a standard piece of liberal wisdom. Is this really the main
purpose of Austen’s Emma or Beckett’s Endgame? One wonders why
it is art, and not, say, anthropology or travel writing which is allotted
this task. One also trusts that Empson, in a moment of what might
now be seen as post-colonial sentimentalism, does not regard the
customs of other cultures as invariably valuable, any more than our
own are.
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Empson sees Milton’s Satan as a kind of patrician rebel, rather

like himself. It is also likely that he detected a fascist or Stalinist
leader in Milton’s God, as did F.R. Leavis. When it comes to oppres-
sive political regimes, he supported the communist takeover of
China but harboured no illusions about the brutal reign of Mao
Zedong. In this sense he was more hard-headed than the dewy-eyed
Richards. Later in life he supported the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament and opposed the United States’ war in Vietnam. Yet
he was also curiously tolerant of the right-wing views of a number
of modernist writers, and seems at times to support an idealised
version of the English class system, as well as to display a muted
strain of nationalism. He writes of pastoral literature as assuming a
proper and beautiful relationship between rich and poor, and
observes that every nation with a strong class system needs an art
form that makes the classes feel part of a larger unity or simply at
home with each other. It is, however, a unity one has to work for,
since pastoral displays a clash between different modes of feeling, as
well as a contrast between its simple themes and complex styles. In
Some Versions of Pastoral, published in 1935 in the throes of political
and economic crisis, he appears to distance himself from what he
calls ‘the communists’, and was never a card-carrying one himself.
As we have seen already, he also remarks that there is only a limited
extent to which any improvement in society can prevent tragedy, so
that even the most radical politics can never be enough to repair
suffering or evil altogether. Reviewing Raymond Williams’s
Keywords in the 1970s, he refers to the book’s socialist arguments as
‘propaganda’. Yet he did not regard propaganda as inherently
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objectionable, so he may not be using the term pejoratively. Nor

does his sense of the limits of political change dim his enthusiasm
for social progress.
If Empson considered himself on the far left in his later years,
however, it is unlikely that he would have accepted a knighthood or
written a masque for the Queen, as he did when she visited Sheffield.
All the same, he is more ‘modern’ than Richards, and certainly more
so than Eliot, in his cheerful acceptance of the style of such popular
newspaper headlines as ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT
DISASTER, which not only provide rich meat for his appetite for
ambiguity but which strike him as an effective mode of writing.
Unlike Leavis, he believes it might be to the benefit of civilisation,
rather than its ruin, if such uses of language caught on more gener-
ally. As far as being up to date goes, he was also a fan of the Beatles,
though he mixed this appetite for the new with the more traditional
pastime of playing shove ha’penny in pubs.
However stubborn a nonconformist he was, Empson never ceased
to be a member of the English gentry, precisely because such noncon-
formism ran deep in its veins. Patricians behave as though they are a
law unto themselves, which makes them hard at times to distinguish
from anarchists. Empson is reported to have acted like this in everyday
life. A certain errant individualism may be expected of those who do
not have to conform to the conventions because they set them them-
selves. Empson invested a great deal of value in independence of
mind, which set him at odds with the ruling social orthodoxies at the
same time as it made him suspicious of ‘tribal’ loyalties such as
communism. In the familiar tradition of the English upper classes, he
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
was quirky, unruly, forthright and sometimes curmudgeonly; but he

also displayed a certain aristocratic spirit of geniality and affability, the
irony and good humour of those who enjoy an easy authority.
This is one reason why he was wary of tragedy, despite the fact
that several commentators have detected an undertow of fear, gloom
and anxiety in his writing. The gentleman associates seriousness
with the earnest, self-important language of the puritanical middle
classes, and is out to deflate it whenever he can seize the chance. He
also has an affection for the rogue or underdog, being something of
an outsider himself, and this, as we shall see, is one of the themes of
Some Versions of Pastoral. The landlord has a sneaking regard for the
poacher, as opposed to the respectable gamekeeper. Empson particu-
larly admired the eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding, who
was in some ways his alter ego: upper-class, genial, ironic and
generous-spirited, yet a shrewd judge of men and women with no
illusions about human nature. Using Biography contains a fine essay
on Fielding’s Tom Jones.
Much of Empson’s patrician background is captured in his prose
style, which is jaunty, idiomatic and occasionally flippant. It is the
facetious, mildly knockabout style of the wayward aristocrat who
disdains the high-mindedness of the bourgeoisie. There is also a
strain of Yorkshire bluntness about it, an impatience with fuss and
nonsense. The gentleman can dispense with decorative language
because he knows nobody is going to mistake him for a plumber. He
remarks in Argufying that the seventeenth-century poet John Wilmot,
Earl of Rochester, could talk in a plain-man way because he was a
great lord and a favourite of the king. Yet his own laid-back, eminently
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readable prose is packed with subtleties of insight which place a

heavy demand on the reader. As Michael Wood puts it, ‘the double
effect of high-powered thought and offhand statement is spectac-
ular’.8 Or, one might say, the combination of common sense and
sheer idiosyncrasy. It is hard to see how any form of writing can be at
once so lucid and so intricate. Like Empson’s own definition of
pastoral, it puts the complex into the simple.
He can also be funny in a way unlike the other critics discussed in
this book. He writes with Freudian scepticism of the first line of
Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ – ‘No, no; go not to Lethe; neither twist
. . .’ – that ‘somebody, or some force in the poet’s mind, must have
wanted to go to Lethe very much, if it took four negatives in the first
line to stop them’ (STA, p. 205). (Empson no doubt has in mind here
Freud’s concept of denegation, meaning that an overemphatic denial
implies an unconscious affirmation.) In Milton’s God, he imagines a
sadist who might live in fear of hell being welcomed instead into
heaven, since the saved, according to one Christian tradition, reaps
malicious pleasure from the torments of the damned. ‘Settling down
to hold kind God’s hand for all eternity’, he watches ‘old mother
being ripped to pieces so much more satisfyingly than he could ever
have imagined’ (MG, p. 250). Empson, John Haffenden remarks, is
‘a great entertainer’.9
The best way to convey something of the flavour of Empson’s criti-

cism is simply to quote him. We can begin with this celebrated
passage from Seven Types, in which he examines the first four lines
of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
The bare boughs are like ruined choirs, Empson claims,
. . . because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing,

because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of
wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to
be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the
likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting
like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all
but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the
cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well
with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for
various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant
destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism) which it would
be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and
many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must
all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of
ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly
in mind. (STA, pp. 2–3)
Nobody had ever read poetry as closely as this before, and certainly
nobody from the landed gentry. Empson himself claimed that he
had inherited the technique from the poet Robert Graves; but one
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of the works by Graves which influenced him in this respect was

co-authored with Graves’s partner Laura Riding; so that one of the
originators of close reading, a method which has sometimes been
seen as ‘masculine’ on account of its clinical, toughly analytical
approach, was actually a woman.
There is something of the precocious undergraduate show-off in
the passage just quoted, as there is in the book in general. Empson
takes a sly pleasure in discomforting the reader, as when in a later
work, Argufying, he interprets the last line of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the
West Wind’ – ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ – as
meaning ‘Though the Bourbons have got back their thrones, which
is bad, the resulting exasperation will bring world revolution all the
sooner, which is good’ (A, p. 323). He had later to cut out of Seven
Types what he felt were a number of tedious witticisms, and there is a
sense in which the nonchalant brilliance of his virtuoso reading of the
Shakespeare sonnet is itself a joke at the reader’s expense, relentlessly
piling one meaning on another (some of them brazenly fanciful) and
gleefully anticipating the reader’s incredulous response (‘surely
Shakespeare can’t have intended all that!’). The book’s title is also a
kind of joke: since seven is traditionally a magic number, from seven
dwarfs to seven sacraments, it seems to have some portentous signifi-
cance, but Empson’s division of types of ambiguity into seven catego-
ries is in fact fairly arbitrary.
The casual slinging together of one clause after another in the
Shakespeare commentary is not only a classic example of Empsonian
bravura, but – since it forms a single sentence – suggests that the
author, enraptured by his own imaginative fertility but trying not to
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
betray the fact, could go on forever. There is something implacable

about the way the passage refuses to take a breath. There is also a comic
or ironic disproportion between this single line of poetry and the
surplus of critical insight it evokes. The critic is in danger of ‘drowning
in his own incontinence’, as John Haffenden puts it (A, p. 4). It is as
though the commentary, instead of subjecting itself to the work it
examines, is trying to outdo it with its own imaginative acrobatics at
the very moment it seems to stay tenaciously true to the words on the
page. If it pays homage to the work, it also risks putting it in the shade.
Yet the more meanings the commentary plucks from the line, like a
magician conjuring doves from thin air, the more it suggests how
miraculously condensed it must be, and so the more compliments it
implicitly pays it. By the time we arrive at the end of the passage, we
are meant to understand that this pyrotechnic display is not simply a
matter of the critic revelling in his own exuberance but an attempt to
understand why the image is so hauntingly beautiful. In the end, the
intellect is in the service of the emotions; but at the same time beauty
is treated as something that can be analysed and argued over, rather
than as a mystery which slips through the net of language.
Seven Types also contains an analysis of some lines from T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, beginning ‘The Chair she sat in, like a
burnished throne . . .’. Part of Empson’s commentary on the passage
runs as follows:
What is poured may be cases, jewels, glitter, or light, and profu-

sion, enriching its modern meaning with its derivation, is
shared, with a dazzled luxury, between them; so that while some
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of the jewels are pouring out light from their cases, others are
poured about, as are their cases, on the dressing-table. If referring
to glitter, poured may, in any case, be a main verb as well as a
participle. There is a more trivial point of the same kind in the
next line, where glass may stand alone for a glass bottle or may
be paired with ivory (‘vials of glass’); and unstoppered may refer
only to glass, or to vials and glass, or to vials of glass and of ivory;
till lurked, which is for a moment taken as the same grammat-
ical form, attracts it towards perfumes. It is because of this blur-
ring of the grammar into luxury that the scientific word synthetic
is able to stand out so sharply as a dramatic and lyrical high
light. (STA, pp. 77–8)
He continues along these lines for quite a while. It is a masterly

demonstration of how you can derive a rich cluster of ambiguities
from grammar and syntax alone. Yet it is typical of Empson’s approach
that he says almost nothing about the atmosphere of the piece – the
sense of a cloying exoticism, one also to be found in the sumptuous
language of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. (The Eliot passage is
a pastiche of some lines in the play.) The language achieves its effect
partly by playing off a sense of splendour against a disquieting whiff
of decadence. If it manages to create an effect of genuine beauty, it
also intimates that there is something unnatural and claustrophobic
about it. Like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, this
woman seems not to have put her head out of doors for several
decades, and (so one feels) might disintegrate if she did, though it is
true that a breeze is blowing through her window. One might also
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
have expected a comment on the fact that the lines constitute a single
sentence, with its various clauses linked by commas, semi-colons and
a dash, and that this creates a feeling of sensory overload, as one
opulent effect is heaped lavishly on another without giving us time to
pause and digest them. The word ‘synthetic’ hints at a negative judge-
ment on all this extravagant artifice, and perhaps on the pampered
woman at the centre of it. The passage occurs in a section of The
Waste Land which denigrates women in general, so that there is an
ironic quality to its apparent relish of the richness it portrays.
Empson does indeed comment from time to time on mood and
emotional texture, but much of the time these matters are edged
aside by his focus on meaning. Another example of his eye for
different shades of sense are his observations on John Donne’s enig-
matic phrase ‘Weep me not dead’ in his poem ‘A Valediction, of
weeping’, which Empson thinks may mean
do not make me cry myself to death; do not kill me with the

sight of your tears; do not cry for me as for a man already dead,
when, in fact, I am in your arms; and, with a different sort of
feeling, do not exert your power over the sea as to make it drown
me by sympathetic magic . . . (STA, p. 144)
Turning to George Herbert’s poem ‘The Sacrifice’, he quotes the

following verse, in which the speaker is Christ:
Oh all ye who pass by, behold and see;

Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree,
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The tree of life, to all but only me.

Was ever grief like mine?
Empson’s extraordinary reading of this stanza runs as follows:
[Christ] climbs the tree to repay what was stolen, as if he was

putting the apple back; but the phrase in itself implies rather
that he is doing the stealing, that so far from sinless he is
Prometheus and the criminal. Either he stole on behalf of man
(it is he who appeared to be sinful, and was caught up the tree)
or he is climbing upwards, like Jack on the Beanstalk, and
taking his people with him back to Heaven. The phrase has an
odd humility which makes us see him as the son of the house;
possibly Herbert is drawing on the medieval tradition that the
Cross was made of the wood of the forbidden trees. Jesus seems
a child in this metaphor, because he is the Son of God, because
he can take apples without actually stealing (though there is
some doubt about this), because of the practical and domestic
associations of such a necessity, and because he is evidently
smaller than Man, or at any rate than Eve, who could pluck the
fruit without climbing . . . on the other hand, the son stealing
from his father’s orchard is a symbol of incest; in the person of
the Christ the supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme
act of virtue. (STA, p. 232)
‘I must climb the tree’ means ‘I must ascend the Cross’; but the Cross
is traditionally associated with the tree in the Garden of Eden from
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
which Eve plucks the fateful apple, so that the Redemption happens
on the same spot as the Fall. In an imaginative tour de force, Empson
sees Christ’s ascending the Cross as being at the same time his
climbing the tree of Eden in order to replace the apple which doomed
the human race, thus undoing the Fall; and this goes hand in hand
with his redemptive act on Calvary. Yet he also seems to be imitating
Eve’s action through his close association with lethal apples and
cursed trees, and is thus a thief or outlaw himself. This is appropriate,
since the crucified Christ is indeed a kind of criminal – both because
he was found guilty of a crime by the authorities (though of what
crime we can’t be sure), but also because according to St Paul he was
‘made sin’ on the Cross in order to become representative of human
sinfulness, and thus to redeem it by his Resurrection. So Christ is
redeemer and reprobate together, rather like the Prometheus who
stole fire for the sake of humanity, and incestuous to boot. He is a
child because he is innocent, but also because he is a mischievous
little scamp who knocks off other people’s property.
Empson completes his remarks with a flurry of paradoxes: ‘[Christ]
is scapegoat and tragic hero; loved because hated; hated because
godlike; freeing from torture because tortured; torturing his torturers
because all-merciful; source of all strength to men because by accepting
he exaggerates their weakness; and, because outcast, creating the
possibility of society’ (STA, p. 233).
This, which is far more theologically perceptive stuff than the
image of God as Stalin, neatly encapsulates the essence of Empson’s
next book, Some Versions of Pastoral, which for all its differences
from Seven Types has a latent continuity with it. The quotation also
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suggests how Christian in spirit the pastoral book is, disgusted

though its author would have been to hear it.
Some Versions begins with another of Empson’s legendary bouts of

brilliance, this time inspired by a verse from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard’:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Gray has in mind talented men and women who, because of their
humble social circumstances, will never have the chance to excel in
the world’s eyes. What this means, Empson remarks,
. . . is that eighteenth-century England had no scholarship

system or carriere ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic,
but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to
alter it. . . . By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he
makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity
which was undeserved. Furthermore, a gem does not mind
being in a cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that
the man is like the flower, as short-lived, natural, and valuable,
and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without oppor-
tunities. The sexual suggestion of blush brings in the Christian
idea that virginity is good in itself, and so that any renunciation
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
is good; this may trick us into feeling it is lucky for the poor
man that society keeps him unspotted from the World. The
tone of melancholy claims that the poet understands the consid-
erations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them;
the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality
and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by compar-
ison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the
inevitability of death. (SVP, pp. 11–12)
There are one or two doubtful moves here: the idea that Christianity
regards virginity as a value in itself is debatable, and if a gem does
not mind being in a cave because it is not aware of the fact, it is hard
to see why an equally insensate flower should object to being
plucked. Even so, Empson superbly demonstrates how the tone and
feeling of the verse are subtly undercut by its imagery – how a lament
over the condition of the poor is qualified by the implication that
nothing can be done about it. It is as though the poet identifies with
the plight of the lowly, yet at the same time uses tropes which imply
that it is inevitable in the very act of seeking to dignify it.
Some such ambiguous relationship lies for Empson at the heart of
pastoral literature, in his own idiosyncratic use of the term. Pastoral
presents us with both aristocrats and peasants, courtiers and rustics;
and the aristocrats must acknowledge their difference from ordinary
people while being mindful of the humanity they share in common.
It is sometimes a good thing, Empson argues, to stand apart from
your society so far as you can. This is his nonconformist persona
speaking, disdainful of conventions and herd-like consensus. Like
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the face of the Buddha, the ideal is to be both blind and all-seeing –
blind to tribal prejudices, but therefore able to expand and enrich the
self in an openness to the reality of others. ‘Some people are more
delicate and complex than others’, he writes, and ‘if such people can
keep this distinction from doing harm it is a good thing, though a
small thing by comparison with our common humanity’ (SVP, p. 23).
The last phrase evokes the more sociable, socialistic Empson; so that
it is a question of affirming individual difference and independence
while continuing to prize what we share in common. Pastoral is
among other things about this equipoise, which we shall find in a
different form in the work of F.R. Leavis. The nobleman not only
finds himself reflected in the rustic, but can also learn from him in a
spirit of humility. Empson imagines him thinking:
I now abandon my specialised feelings because I am trying to

find better ones, so I must balance myself for the moment by
imagining the feelings of the simple person. He may be in a
better state than I am by luck, freshness, or divine grace . . . I
must imagine his way of feeling because the refined thing must
be judged by the fundamental thing, because strength must be
learnt in weakness and sociability in isolation, because the best
manners are learnt in the simple life. (SVP, pp. 22–3)
Empson learned from Buddhism the value of an organic relationship

to Nature, an affinity with the world which prefigures today’s ecolog-
ical thought; and this he considered the only tolerable philosophy,
one sharply at odds with what he regarded as the vile Christian cult
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
of sacrificing Nature, or various parts of it, to a vindictive God. In

the latter case, the One (Christ) is sacrificed to the Many, destroyed
for its sake, while in pastoral the One contains the Many, rather as
the all-seeing artist does. The scapegoat, who is sacrificed on behalf
of the people as a whole, thereby unites the One and the Many, and
like Christ is both high and low, unique and representative, victim
and redeemer, hero and swain. Empson also learnt from Buddhism a
way of balancing the claims of individual freedom with social respon-
sibility. The Buddha is sufficient to himself yet full of universal
charity. Individual distinction and common humanity, which in the
process of living are a matter of constant trade-offs, compromises
and contradictions, are reconciled in this utopian vision.
Pastoral is among other things Empson’s warning to himself of the
dangers of being too clever. The canny common sense of the peasant
must keep the speculative intellectual in check. The class system is
thus both challenged and upheld: patricians see the peasants as their
equals or even as their betters, yet they cannot pretend that they
themselves are simple rustics, which would be like the bad faith of
middle-class authors who write about the proletariat while imagining
that they are part of them. There were plenty of such types around at
the time the book appeared. Effective proletarian literature, Empson
considers in an enigmatic chapter on the subject, is a version of
pastoral, airily passing over the fact that such writing is usually dedi-
cated to dismantling the very class system on which pastoral depends.
Pastoral, then, is a matter of irony: the rich are richer than the poor,
but they are poorer as well. The two social groups clash, but an equiv-
alence is established between them all the same, rather as an ambiguity
179
involves a convergence of conflicting meanings. It is hard not to see all

this as an allegory of the relationship between the artistic (or critic) and
the general public, rather as Stefan Collini sees the key terms examined
in Empson’s next study, The Structure of Complex Words, as all relating
in some undeclared way to his own critical process.10 The artist,
Empson maintains, is never at one with any public – a reckless gener-
alisation, to be sure, one truer of modern Europe than of some
pre-modern cultures. The same goes for critics, whose specialised
intelligence (not least if it is as adroit as Empson’s) estranges them from
the mass of people. Yet the paradox of literary art is that it deals in
complex, sometimes highly technical ways with feelings and situations
which are shared for the most part by humanity as a whole. It is, so to
speak, both amateur and professional, complex and simple, elevated
and mundane. The American critic R.P. Blackmur describes it as ‘the
formal discourse of the amateur’.11 Empson himself was an academic
and professional literary critic, yet he does not have a special field in
the usual manner of scholars, roaming in the style of an erudite
amateur over the whole of English literature. Unlike brain surgery,
literary criticism is something that anyone can have a stab at. Anyone
can say whether they enjoyed a book or not, or pass a few mildly intel-
ligent remarks about its plot, characters and so on. Empson, of course,
is a lot cleverer than this, but it is the kind of cleverness to which we
feel we ourselves might aspire, the shrewdness of someone better
versed in our common wisdom than we are ourselves. He has a kind of
flat common sense pushed to the point of genius.
The writer or critic, then, is aristocrat and peasant in one body
– both complex and simple, isolated yet in solidarity with others.
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
We need subtle and delicate instruments to investigate works which

concern our common condition, but the problem is that these very
instruments risk alienating us from that condition. This is one sense
in which pastoral is an ironic mode. In the political climate of the
1930s, the fraught relations between the intelligentsia and the
masses was a contentious issue on the left; and although Empson
does not appeal explicitly to that context, it can be felt hovering
somewhere in the background. For the upper classes to go to school
with the lower orders is part of what he means by pastoral ‘putting
the complex into the simple’ (SVP, p. 25). There is a coexistence
in the form of the elevated and the mundane, rather as there is
in the Incarnation, where God becomes a homeless Jew in an
obscure corner of the Roman Empire. Putting the complex into the
simple also means that in this vein of literary art, so-called rustics
are made to speak the formal, elaborate language of the court, which
teeters on the brink of being funny. This has the effect of bringing
the two ranks together, thus buttressing the class system, at the same
time as the homely wisdom of the lower orders can act as a critique
of the sophisticated learning of the higher ones. One might say that
the two classes converge in verbal form but conflict in moral
content.
Yet if this ideal of harmony might be unsurprising in a man who
was reared on a large country estate, and who was himself artist,
critic and gentleman rolled into one, there is another, more subver-
sive side to pastoral, as there is to Empson himself. For one thing, if
the rustics are equal to their rulers in the ornateness of their speech,
the class system is levelled as well as reinforced. If the complex can
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be put into the simple, then the simple cannot be as simple as all
that. At the same time, the lower classes are superior to the upper
classes because they retain an honesty, dignity and simplicity which
can show up their rulers as artificial and insincere. Empson himself,
it may be worth noting, was brought up to respect manual labour in
the countryside. The pastoral assumption, he writes, is that you can
say everything about complex people by a complete consideration
of simple people. To this extent, it is an egalitarian form as well as a
hierarchical one.
The artist, critic, child, aristocrat and intellectual are all in their
different ways outsiders. The aristocrat may stand at the apex of
society, but this can be a lonely place to be. The fool, clown, rogue
and scapegoat are also outsiders, and they, too, at least in Empson’s
sense of the term, are pastoral figures. In this sense, the low reflects
the high, and the high finds a parody of itself in the low. The same
happens in the double plots of some Elizabethan plays, to which
Empson devotes a chapter of his book. The clown, he remarks, ‘has
the wit of the Unconscious; he can speak the truth because he has
nothing to lose’ (SVP, p. 18). His own work was described as
‘clownish’ by some disapproving colleagues. The Fool, who sees all
because he lurks on the margins of society as a satirical spectator,
has more sense than his social betters and a firmer grasp of funda-
mental truths. The fact that he knows he is a Fool, in contrast with
apparently sensible folk who are unaware of their own folly, lends
him a kind of wisdom. In a similar way, the rogue has a fuller under-
standing of law and authority than those who formally dispense
justice.
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
Children have yet to be fully inducted into the conventions of

society, and are thus less ready to take them for granted. On the
contrary, they may well find them pointless and farcical, as Alice does
in Wonderland, and may therefore act as critics of social orthodoxy.
Alice, Empson remarks in his chapter on her in this work, is ‘the free
and independent mind’ (SVP, p. 210), a no-nonsense rationalist like
Empson himself, and thus something like the ideal literary critic. Yet
the irony is that free-wheeling individuals are fundamentally reliant
on the social system to which they stand askew, and may feel this to
be a form of bad faith. If everything is fundamentally one, then their
autonomy is an illusion; yet standing alone can still yield them some
insight into the essential arbitrariness of social conventions, as it does
in the end with Alice. So there is something to be said for contrar-
ians, however morally compromised they may be. In any case, the
very idea of an individual is a case of ambiguity, since you become
one only through dependence on a form of social existence. The
word originally meant ‘inseparable’.
Part of what the free mind discerns is the fallibility of the human
condition, and this, too, is a ‘pastoral’ feeling. By grounding himself in
common humanity, the nobleman can engage with an earthy wisdom
which is tolerant of human weakness and all-encompassing in its
sympathies. It is a capacious, good-humoured way of seeing which
knows when not to ask too much of others. We must admire the high
heroic values of truth, goodness and honour, but we should not use
these ideals to terrorise others in a way which makes them painfully
conscious of their own frailty. Empson’s own relaxed, companionable
prose style is a version of pastoral in just this sense. It is the style of a
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humanist – but in an ironic rather than triumphalist sense of the term,

which is to say one who embraces humanity in a wry awareness of its
deficiencies. There is a ‘flatness’ about pastoral, in the sense of a scepti-
cism of high-pitched pretensions. Empson finds this quality in the
eighteenth-century scholar Richard Bentley’s plain-minded commen-
tary on Paradise Lost; in Alice’s brisk, very English common sense in
her dealings with the freakish denizens of Wonderland; and in the
clear-eyed, disenchanted view of polite society of the underworld of
The Beggar’s Opera. The higher you aspire, the further you have to fall:
this is part of the warning of the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 to
the young courtier he is addressing. Those who, like the young man,
are most detached from everyday sensual appetite are most likely to
come a cropper when confronted with it, which is why lilies that fester
smell far worse than weeds. The same could be said of Angelo in
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
There is an arithmetical subtext to the work of this former math-
ematician. We have seen already that the notion of pastoral is bound
up in Empson’s thought with the idea of the One and the Many,
which he derives for the most part from Eastern thought. Ambiguity
can roll a multiplicity of meanings into a single term, and the same is
true, as we shall see later, of what Empson calls ‘complex words’.
Pastoral stages discordant voices and contending modes of feeling,
but it does so within an all-inclusive vision. The Milton of Milton’s
God is a single author split in two by his conflicting religious and
humanist sympathies. The Buddha is one, but in what Empson sees
as his ‘ironic magnanimity’ he presents to the world a multiplicity of
faces. Both the king and the Fool are individuals, but they are also
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
representative of more than themselves – the king, hero or nobleman

because he incarnates in his person a whole social order, the Fool
because he typifies our shared infirmities. Both contain multitudes,
and there is a secret handy-dandy complicity between them. So is
there in the fact that anyone who wants to be a king must be out of
his mind, as Shakespeare’s history plays might testify. There is also a
link between these figures and the artist, critic or political rebel, who
is similarly an outsider, but who just on this account can see further
than many an insider. Thus the Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost are
pastoral types in their harmonious relation with Nature, but Satan, as
a critic of Creation, is a pastoral figure in a different sense.
Another such character is the scapegoat, who like Christ is an
individual, but who bears on his innocent shoulders the sins of the
whole of humanity. He is thereby allied with the villain or criminal,
another outsider who can see through the elaborate pretences of
social existence. Christ the One descends to share the destiny of the
Many, which is an instance of the complex thing, spiritually
speaking, setting up home with the simple. He is the single swain
tending his multiple flock, but he is also portrayed as a lamb himself.
The high must stoop to the low not only to redeem it, but to
become part of it and learn enduringly from it. Despite Empson’s
near-pathological abhorrence of the Judaeo-Christian God, whom
he compares in Milton’s God to a Belsen commandant, the pastoral
vision is at its most Christian in its faith that strength is rooted in
weakness, and that the sublime thing (salvation) must be judged by
the mundane thing (giving someone a cup of water). It is on such
bathos that the Christian Gospel turns.
185
The most refined desires, Empson comments in both Freudian

and pastoral vein, are inherent in the plainest, and would be false if
they weren’t. As F.R. Leavis puts it in his own distinctive idiom,
‘humane culture, even in its most refined forms, [must] be kept
appropriately aware of its derivation from and dependence on the
culture of the soil’.12 If you press this case too far, however, you end
up with a vulgar Freudian reduction of all values to base instinct, a
case of which the rationalist Empson is deeply wary. It accounts for
why he finds Jonathan Swift ‘blasphemous’, with his brutal hacking
down of the spiritual to the physical. To see the noblest desires as
inherent in the plainest is not to rewrite every generous motivation as
crass appetite. Despite these reservations, perhaps the most funda-
mental aspect of literary art in Empson’s eyes is its awareness of the
limits of the human situation – of loss, waste, fragility and failure. In
this way, his humanism has a tragic inflection.
What Empson detests most about Christianity is the idea of
sacrifice. God, he holds in a remarkably crude piece of theology,
slaughters his own Son while reaping some grisly satisfaction from
the fact.13 Such barbarism must be distinguished from the non-
sacrificial solidarity with others which pastoral involves. Selflessness
is to be commended, but self-sacrifice is not. What this overlooks is
that those who devote themselves selflessly to the cause of the
‘swains’ – the obscure and inconspicuous of this world – are quite
likely to end up as sacrificial victims of the political state. Indeed,
this is part of the central message of the Christian faith. Empson
himself prefers those tragic heroes who give their lives for others to
those (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus) whose heroic stature
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
isolates them from humanity at large. It is good to stand a little

aside – how else can one be a critic? – but not to the point at which
one becomes sterilely self-enclosed.
Some Versions has a discussion of Shakespeare’s much debated
Sonnet 94, in which the speaker urges a narcissistic friend to persevere
in his distasteful state of self-absorption, if only because there is no
other way in which he might avoid succumbing to some ruinous temp-
tation. Ironically, the speaker tries to make his plea more persuasive by
comparing his friend’s ‘unnatural’ estrangement from Nature to the
innocence of a flower, which similarly lives only for itself. Humanity’s
separation from Nature is itself made to seem natural, rather as it is in
Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, to which Empson devotes a
magnificent chapter. There is an ironic relationship between conscious-
ness and the world, since the mind both is and is not part of its material
surroundings; but this tension can itself be accommodated within the
bountiful spirit of pastoral. It is a poetic mode which knows a moment
of potentially tragic separation between mind and world, the cultivated
and the simple, self-reflection and spontaneity; but it includes this
insight within a richer, more complex vision which recognises that the
intellectual must go to school with the masses, that there can be no fine
things without humble things, and that the mind is an outcrop of
Nature, not simply distinct from it.
Some critics read Some Versions as recording the decline of the
pastoral form, claiming that this makes some sense of its odd assort-
ment of topics.14 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with
their rock-solid class systems, pastoral could draw assuredly on a
fixed gulf between peasants and aristocrats. In post-Restoration
187
England, however, the artifice of the form, in which rustics speak

like noblemen, becomes more obvious, not least to a Puritan sensi-
bility that finds it pretentious, so that pastoral begins to veer into
mock-pastoral. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera is Empson’s prime
example of this shift, as the criminal orders continue to hold a
mirror up to the morally disreputable aristocracy, but in a knowing,
self-conscious way. Pastoral has lost its innocence, and with Alice in
Wonderland can recover that naturalness only in the world of the
child. In this sense, the story of pastoral is bound up with the evolu-
tion of English class society.
Empson was stung by the accusation that his approach to poetry

in Seven Types was unhistorical; and though Some Versions is not
much of a historical inquiry either, it is certainly more social
and political than the former work. In general, Empson moves
throughout his career from close poetic analysis to a more histori-
cally sensitive, socially responsive approach. Ambiguities which in
Seven Types were mostly verbal become in the later book the claim
(for example) that the poor are both richer and poorer than the rich.
It is in The Structure of Complex Words, however, a work he himself
justly describes as ‘wonderful’ and ‘magnificent’, that the linguistic
and historical finally converge, to the point where Empson can be
classified not only as a literary critic but as a historical linguist. In
the case of ambiguity, different meanings clash to the point of inde-
terminacy; what concerns Empson here, however, is the interaction
between different but determinate meanings within a single word.
This means seeing certain key words as nodes or clusters of sense,
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
or, if one prefers, as miniature texts. And since these terms change
over time, capturing shifts in social and moral attitudes, we can
speak of this form of inquiry as historical. Words, in C.S. Lewis’s
term, have ‘biographies’. Stefan Collini points out that whereas an
ambiguity for Empson is a device contrived by an individual writer,
the structure of a complex word is a fact of the language, part of the
established verbal currency.15
Empson describes these words as ‘compacted doctrines’, given that
they can be unpacked into a number of claims or propositions, not all
of them mutually compatible. Thus Macheath the highwayman in The
Beggar’s Opera uses the word ‘honest’ in a hearty, raffish style, which
implies a certain cavalier contempt for social convention, while for the
tradesman Peachum in the same play the term has a more respectable
resonance. It is as though the sign becomes a site of social conflict.
Words of this kind are mini-systems containing what Empson calls
‘equations’ between their various senses. There can be an equation
between two meanings of the same term; an equation between a word
and one of its implications; an equation between the sense of a word
and the feeling it evokes; or an equation between a so-called head
meaning (i.e. the primary sense of a term) and a chief meaning, which
is to say one demanded by a specific context. You can also bring two
terms together under the heading of a third, so that, for example, ‘sense’
in Wordsworth can mean both sensation and imagination. This
suggests a certain relation between the two in reality, and hence consti-
tutes a proposition or ‘doctrine’. Finally, there are identities such as
‘God is Love’, ‘Might is Right’ or ‘Time is Money’ which can be major
sources of delusion, and which sail close to what is commonly described
189
as ideology. Despite these speculations, much of the book consists of

literary criticism rather than linguistic theory, as Empson illustrates his
complex words in a set of coruscating chapters on ‘Fool in Lear’,
‘Timon’s Dog’, ‘Honesty in Othello’, ‘Sense in Measure for Measure’
and so on. They are among the most masterly pieces of literary analysis
he produced.
Since most of the key words Empson has in mind – arch, dog,
fool, rogue, wit, sense, honest – also have a bluff, no-nonsense, ‘earth-
touching’ air about them, this is yet another example of locating the
complex in the simple, and thus an extension of pastoral thought.
There is, Empson comments, ‘a sweetness or richness in the simple
thing’ (SCW, p. 170), a wealth of felt implication which can be spelt
out in a relatively systematic way. Hence the word ‘structure’: we are
speaking not just of a random scatter of associations but of the
evolving inner logic of certain terms, which is rooted in turn in the
logic of a specific form of social existence. They are ‘complex’ words
because they crystallise a collective social wisdom. It is worth noting
that Complex Words appeared only two years before Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations, which takes a broadly similar attitude to
language.
The simple and the complex are related in the sense that to call a
man a dog is to ascribe a fundamental sincerity to him which can then
become the material basis on which a more refined version of
humanity may be constructed. Indeed, only on such a modest foun-
dation can anything valuable be accomplished, which is another of
Empson’s unwitting acts of collusion with Christianity. Life itself is a
kind of double plot, since you can build yourself into a tolerable
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
human being only on the basis of being a mortal, vulnerable animal.

As Christopher Norris writes of Empson’s complex words, they have
‘a down-to-earth quality of healthy scepticism . . . which permits their
users to build up a trust in human nature on a shared knowledge of
its needs and attendant weaknesses’.16 It is a materialist form of
ethics, as opposed to the idealising view of humanity which can only
end in bitter disenchantment. It belongs with an ironic awareness of
one’s own limitations, as well as a mutual forbearance and tolerant
sense of human infirmity, all of which goes to constitute the pastoral
sensibility.
The opposite of this ironic vision (though the point remains
largely implicit in Empson’s work) is ideological absolutism, which
in the form of both fascism and Stalinism bulked large in the period
during which he produced his first two major works. When Complex
Words appeared in 1951, fascism had only recently been defeated,
and the world was becoming locked ever deeper into the Cold War.
In this sense, all of these studies have a political subtext. We have
seen already that the openness to different meanings typical of
ambiguity is at odds with the strict determinacy of sense to be found
in fascist regimes, with their rigid signifiers of Führer, State and
Fatherland and censorship of subversive speech. It also runs counter
to the prevailing philosophical fashion of the day, which from Frege
and Bertrand Russell to the early Wittgenstein and A.J. Ayer was in
search of a language which would be entirely rational and trans-
parent, purged of all fuzziness and imprecision. What countered
this fantasy was literary criticism, which turned from the pure ice of
linguistic philosophy to the rough ground of everyday life.
191
We have seen that pastoral can act as a form of social critique, as

the values of the patricians are tested against the wisdom of the peas-
ants. The politics of complex words are rather similar, since many of
these terms belong to a colloquial language at odds with official
morality. They represent the idiom of what one might call a counter-
public sphere, drawing upon a repository of largely unconscious
habits of mind which has its roots in what people actually think, feel
and do, rather than in what they are supposed to think, feel and do.
We are witness here to the birth of a secular, rationalist climate
increasingly at loggerheads with religious orthodoxy. In fact, in
Empson’s view, that orthodoxy is the paradigmatic case of ideology.
When he speaks in Milton’s God of ‘the lethal convictions which so
often capture our brains’ (MG, p. 169), it is this which he has in
mind. Yet Paradise Lost stages a struggle against ideology rather than
cravenly capitulating to it, which is part of what Empson finds so
magnificent about it. ‘The root of [Milton’s] power’, he writes, ‘is that
he could express and accept a downright horrible conception of God
and yet keep somehow alive, underneath it, all the breadth and gener-
osity, the welcome to every noble pleasure, which had been promi-
nent in European history just before his time’ (MG, pp. 276–7).
He finds the work both wonderful and atrocious, appealing because
of its moral incoherence rather than in spite of it. The text puts up
some vigorous resistance to its own official standpoint.
This is a strikingly original position to take up in the thick of the
Milton wars, which had been waged ever since Eliot turned down
his imperial thumb, and which we shall see re-emerge in the criti-
cism of F.R. Leavis. Empson deplores Milton’s formal beliefs but
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WI L L I AM EM PSON
finds his art full of poetic beauty. In a splendidly even-handed

sentence, he describes it as a ‘world of harsh and hypnotic, superb
and crotchety isolation’ (MG, p. 126). As a stalwart rationalist
himself, he also admires the vigorously argumentative way in which
the poet tries to make some tolerable sense of the indefensible.
Milton’s decent impulses (‘decent’ is a typical Empsonian term)
refuse to be entirely suppressed by his theological dogma.
Even so, the opposition between ideology and humanity in Paradise
Lost is surely too simplistic. The liberal is accustomed to viewing systems
of ideas as impediments to the free play of the mind, restraints on our
spontaneous humanity. Yet liberalism itself, as we encounter it in the
work of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, as well as in its more everyday
guises, is a system of sorts, privileging certain meanings and values over
others, excluding as illicit whole ranges of behaviour (slavery, socialism,
authoritarianism, censorship and so on) while acclaiming others. If liber-
alism is a reasonably coherent set of beliefs, yet also plays a vital role in
the fostering of human liberty, then system and freedom cannot be
everywhere in conflict. There are emancipatory theories such as femi-
nism, which engage in the systematic analysis of patriarchy in order to be
free of it. As a regicide and radical republican, John Milton placed some
of his theological doctrines at the service of a revolutionary politics.
Those who see other people’s views as ideological and their own as simply
human, pragmatic or commonsensical may be in the grip of an ideology
which has survived for so long that it has become well-nigh invisible.
And to become invisible is the aim of any ideology intent on enduring.
We have seen that Eliot was pained by the language of Paradise
Lost, and we shall see shortly that the same was true of F.R. Leavis. If
193
Empson had no such complaints, it is partly because both Eliot and

Leavis had a normative conception of the English language, whereas
Empson did not. He did not believe, as they did, that there is a
particular use of English which is somehow more native, authentic
and loyal to the spirit of the language than others. Nor was he much
taken by the idea of a literary tradition, a preoccupation which for
Eliot and Leavis was closely bound up with the normative stand-
point. Tradition for them consisted of those authors who use the
language ‘authentically’: Donne rather than Milton, Marvell rather
than Dryden, Keats rather than Shelley, Hopkins rather than
Tennyson. It is to Empson’s credit that he spurned this prejudice, as
did I.A. Richards – not only because of its inherent defects, which we
have glanced at already, but also because an extreme version of it was
to breed some sinister consequences in mid-twentieth-century
Europe. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the German language
was the true home of Being, the locus of the Spirit of the People.
There is, to be sure, a world of difference between this Nazi dogma
and Leavis’s preference for the kind of palpable, earth-bound poetry
which when read out loud sounds rather like chewing an apple. Both,
however, are types of spiritual chauvinism, even if Heidegger was
thinking of the Third Reich and Leavis of the England of Morris
dancing. Empson has been called the chief English literary critic of
the twentieth century.17 But he is also to be admired for his liberal
rationalist habit of deflating and demystifying portentous nonsense;
and in a dark political age in which exorbitant rhetoric could maim
and murder, this was a more urgent task than it usually is.
194
4
F.R. LEAVIS
William Empson detested F.R. Leavis, not an uncommon sentiment

in the literary world of the time. T.S. Eliot felt much the same. Leavis
nursed a similar antipathy to Empson. ‘If you want a character study
of Empson, go to Iago’, he is said to have remarked.1 In many
respects, Empson and Leavis were antitypes: whereas the former was
cosmopolitan, non-moralistic, upper-class, humorous, versatile in
his literary interests and bohemian in lifestyle, the latter was provin-
cial, austere, moralistic, largely humourless (at least in print),
intensely serious, lower-middle-class in origin, rigorously exclusive in
his literary sympathies and conventional in his way of life. It was a
classic case of the Cavalier versus the Roundhead. There were deeper
differences too. If Empson was a rationalist, Leavis was attuned to a
depth in humanity which he called religious, though he was by no
means an orthodox believer.
We have seen that Empson was an inveterate nonconformist,
and the same can be said of Leavis. In fact, he was easily the most
195
controversial English critic of the twentieth century, revered by a

faithful band of followers and reviled by a good many of his academic
colleagues. For all his maverick ways, however, Empson slotted easily
into the metropolitan literary establishment, while Leavis doggedly
refused to do so. Empson was more eccentric than subversive, and
did not attack the literary canon or the social and cultural establish-
ment in the manner of Leavis. Partly by choice, and partly because
of the rancour he provoked, Leavis was an outsider in a way that
Empson was not. He was the victim of prejudice and discrimina-
tion, as well as an object of odium and derision, in a way which was
by no means so true of his fellow critic. Both men occupied marginal
positions within academia for some years: Empson, as we have seen,
taught in East Asia, remote from the charmed circle of Oxford,
Cambridge and London, while Leavis spent much of his early career
as a part-time, freelance teacher in Cambridge with no official status.
He gained a full university appointment only at the age of 50, was
belatedly elected to a fellowship of a college, and was appointed to a
readership in the English Faculty only three years before his retire-
ment. He then became a visiting professor at the University of York;
but it was Cambridge whose recognition he sought, at the same time
as he never ceased to decry much that it stood for.
Though he maintained that all serious intellectual work took
place on the margins of academia, Leavis was by no means entirely
gratified to be consigned to that borderland himself. His partner and
closest collaborator, Queenie Dorothy Leavis, was never granted any
official academic status: she was turned down for a college fellowship,
and was later refused a university lectureship. Neither of the Leavises,
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F.R . L EAVI S
however, did themselves much good by their habit of denouncing

imaginary conspiracies against them (there were some real ones, too),
or by their vituperative onslaughts on their colleagues. It was a classic
case of what one might call the Rousseau complex: the paranoiac who
happens to be genuinely persecuted. (Rousseau compounded his
problems by being a hypochondriac who was always ill.) Empson, by
contrast to Leavis, spent his later years occupying a professorial Chair
and was esteemed throughout the literary world, whereas Leavis
continued to be both execrated and admired. As far as formal public
recognition goes, it would be hard to imagine Sir Frank Raymond
Leavis, though he did, rather surprisingly, accept the award of
Companion of Honour, the highest of British civil honours, not long
before his death.
Leavis was born in Cambridge in 1895, the son of a dealer in
musical instruments whose ancestors were rural craftsmen. Apart
from a spell as a medical orderly with a Quaker ambulance unit
during the First World War, he lived in Cambridge all his life, first
as a pupil at a grammar school, then as a student of History and
English at the university and finally as a teacher of English in the
same institution. He spoke throughout his life with a Cambridge
accent, but one typical of the town rather than the university. In
contrast to the footloose, adventurous Richards and Empson, very
little happened to him. He was neither attacked by Chinese bandits
nor erotically attracted to Japanese taxi drivers. He did, however,
turn Cambridge into the hub of a campaign whose influence was to
spread throughout the world, and which transformed the nature of
English studies.
197
If T.S. Eliot had already redrawn the literary map, Leavis pressed
this project further. He was continually charting, connecting,
comparing, contrasting, tracing lines of continuity, inquiring where
this comes in relation to that – an activity which he termed ‘placing’.
In fact, he pushed Eliot’s project to the point where not many vener-
able reputations are left standing. The only truly great English novel-
ists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and
D.H. Lawrence, two of whom were not English at all. Dickens is first
spurned and later exalted. The medieval period is almost wholly
ignored, though Leavis recorded his preference for Chaucer rather
than Dante, partly perhaps as a put-down of Eliot and partly as a
patriotic smack at Continental Europe. Edmund Spenser is decisively
dethroned. English literature, then, effectively begins with
Shakespeare. Leavis shared Eliot’s high estimation of the Metaphysical
poets and Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists; he also launched an
assault on Milton a good deal more bare-knuckled than that of his
more kid-gloved colleague. (There is, incidentally, an irony in this
onslaught, given that Milton and Leavis were both militant, patriotic,
Puritan-minded, dissident public intellectuals.)
Dryden and the Restoration yield little of value, though John
Bunyan is an author to be admired. Whereas Eliot was for the most
part lukewarm about the eighteenth century, Leavis praised Pope
and (more equivocally) Swift, as well as Samuel Johnson and a range
of more minor writers of the time. As we shall see later, he had
reason to admire the so-called Augustan age, while Eliot did not.
Like the latter, he charted what is for the most part a deteriorating
history of sensibility from the seventeenth century to the present;
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F.R . L EAVI S
but it is a less drastic decline than Eliot’s, since the latter largely
disregarded the Romantics, who were uncongenial to his classical
temperament and offered few resources for his own poetic practice.
He also seemed uninspired by the nineteenth-century novel. Leavis,
by contrast, found a good deal of merit in both. As poetry lapses
into languor and sentimentalism in the nineteenth century, one of
the finest of all European literary creations, the realist novel, moves
to the fore. It is Eliot’s apparent indifference to this genre which
deepens his literary pessimism. In fact, though it is Leavis who is
usually accused of being excessively narrow in his tastes, there is a
sense in which Eliot was even more exclusive, at least when it comes
to the literature of his adopted country.
If Eliot paid little heed to the Romantics, Leavis discriminated
scrupulously among them. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats are
mostly in, while Byron and Shelley are unquestionably out. From
then on, there is really no truly outstanding poet to be found in the
barren wastes of Victorian verse until we arrive at Gerard Manley
Hopkins, who was scarcely a name to conjure with in the literary
climate of the time. Nor, indeed, was that of T.S. Eliot, of whose early
poetry Leavis was one of the first champions. He was also an early
advocate of W.B. Yeats. Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, then a
little-known work, is acclaimed, but his Cantos are savaged. James
Joyce’s Ulysses also comes in for some rough treatment. Virginia Woolf
and her Bloomsbury colleagues are spurned as a tribe of precious
aesthetes and social parasites, while W.H. Auden and his associates
are arraigned for their modish Leftism. The finest novelist and literary
critic of the modern age is without question D.H. Lawrence. There is
199
a robust poetic tradition running from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, the

Metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists to Pope, Wordsworth,
Keats, Hopkins and Eliot, as well as a largely sterile legacy which
passes from Spenser and Milton to Shelley, Tennyson and Swinburne.
The parallels and differences between Leavis and Eliot are inter-
esting to note. Leavis borrows from Eliot the doctrines of imperson-
ality and the dissociation of sensibility, as well as the idea of tradition
– though his tradition is less of a quasi-mystical entity than Eliot’s,
and greater weight is assigned to the individual author. Both men
saw tradition as value-laden, a selection of ancestors shaped by the
needs and proclivities of the present, rather than as a neutral chron-
icle of past authors. Both critics saw the whole of English literature
as forming an organic unity, and were sensitively attuned to its
social and historical context. They shared a belief that writers must
be fully alive to their own time, inventing techniques which are
adequate to contemporary habits of feeling and forms of experi-
ence. It is this that Leavis believes Eliot to have accomplished in his
early poetry.
Eliot was not an academic, and Leavis, though a member of the
tribe himself, viewed the literary scholar as the enemy of the literary
critic. In his view, the intellectual habits bred by scholarly research
are incompatible with the imaginative, subtly perceptive mind.
Both thinkers were cultural pessimists, bearing witness to a Fall
from a social order they admired into a corrupt modern age, though
they located their ideal civilisations in different centuries. Both men
were concerned with language and sensibility, though Leavis placed
more weight than Eliot on the role of moral values in literary art. If
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F.R . L EAVI S
he derived many of his critical ideas from the latter, much of his
moral vision was shaped by D.H. Lawrence. As we have seen, he
was more open than Eliot to Romanticism and the realist novel,
while Eliot was more receptive than Leavis to the medieval period,
modernist experiment and the literature of Continental Europe.
Both critics saw the language of poetry as a sensory, almost physio-
logical affair which resists rationalist abstraction. Neither was enam-
oured of general theories. Leavis, however, was a liberal humanist,
whereas Eliot was neither liberal nor humanist. If the conservative
Eliot was preoccupied with social order, the passion of the liberal
Leavis was for personal fulfilment. Eliot believed in God, whereas
Leavis placed his faith in a secularised version of the Deity known
as Life.
By what criteria does Leavis make his remarkably assured judge-
ments? The answer lies partly in his distinctive view of the English
language. It is, he believed, a linguistic form to which the concrete,
palpable and sensuously particularised are somehow natural, and
which is averse to the abstract, general or theoretical. At its finest,
which is to say at its most poetic, English does not simply indicate
things but embodies or ‘enacts’ them. It performs what it speaks of,
creates what it communicates, so that you cannot slide a cigarette
paper between the words and the experience they record. As Leavis
observes of some lines by John Donne, they seem to do what they
say. It is what Leavis calls a ‘creative-exploratory’ form of writing,
as opposed to one which seems merely to reflect whatever it is
about. Change the words and you change the meaning or experi-
ence, which is not the case with ‘Please Use The Rear Exits’. You
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could rewrite this as ‘Kindly Make Use Of The Back Exits’ with no
loss of sense. Poetry is what can’t be paraphrased. Leavis is thus at
odds with Empson, who sees nothing indecorous about spelling out
the meaning of a poem. He is also guilty of what Ogden and
Richards call ‘word magic’, meaning a belief in the fusion of word
and thing.
A persuasive example of this crops up in Leavis’s analysis of
Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ode, in which the poet writes of the allegorical
figure of Autumn:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook
In stepping over from one line to the other, Leavis argues, we are
made to enact the balancing movement of the gleaner herself. A
rather less persuasive example from the same passage is his comment
on the phrase ‘moss’d cottage trees’:
the action of the packed consonants in ‘moss’d cottage trees’ is

plain enough: there stand the trees, gnarled and sturdy in trunk
and bough, their leafy entanglements thickly loaded. It is not
fanciful, I think, to find that (the sense being what it is) the
pronouncing of ‘cottage trees’ suggests, too, the crisp bite and
the flow of juice as the teeth close in the ripe apple. (CP, p. 16)2
One feels like responding that if this isn’t fanciful, then neither are
alien abductions. Rather more suggestive is his insight into a line
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F.R . L EAVI S
from Samuel Johnson’s poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ – ‘For

such the steady Romans shook the world’ – of which he remarks:
‘That “steady” turns the vague cliché, “shook the world”, into the
felt percussion of tramping legions’ (R, p. 118).
What Leavis does is to select a particular kind of English – racy,
sinewy, earthy, muscular, idiomatic – and find in it the very essence
of the language, so that those who write in this vein are commended
and many of those who do not are cast into the outer darkness. For
him, poetry is what St John calls in a more lofty context ‘the Word
made flesh’. His conception of the language, in other words, is
normative rather than simply descriptive. There are a whole set of
value judgements built into it from the outset. What one might call
sensuous specificity has indeed come to be prized in poetry; but as
we have seen in the case of Eliot, this is truer of the Romantic and
post-Romantic period than it is of the age of Gray’s ‘Elegy’, and to
require it of poetry or language as a whole is surely unreasonable.
Samuel Johnson thought that the particular was relatively insignifi-
cant and the general of supreme interest.
The work of Thomas Wyatt, John Clare, Arthur Hugh Clough
or Christina Rossetti is not especially racy or sinewy, but neither is
it intended to be. Whereas Keats uses elaborate adjectives like ‘cool-
rooted’, John Clare would probably just write ‘red’. Hopkins lets his
verbal lushness run riot, while Yeats is spare, with a limited vocabu-
lary consisting largely of non-sensuous words like ‘bread’, ‘fool’,
‘stone’, ‘bird’, ‘cold’ and so on. He is no lesser a poet for that. A
good deal of English culture has indeed been averse to the abstract
and theoretical, as its tradition of empiricist philosophy would
203
suggest, but this is by no means always a virtue. For the nineteenth-

century critic William Hazlitt, it means wallowing pig-like in the
trough of one’s senses, unable to rise to the dignity of an idea. Even
so, there is indeed a vital heritage of vividly sensuous poetry in
English, of which Leavis is a superb analyst.
There are, so he implies, other languages which simply indicate
objects and experiences rather than ‘enacting’ them. One suspects
that it is French that he has mostly in his sights, an ill-starred language
which is unable to perform what it proposes. The French novel from
Balzac to Proust is effectively written off. There is, in other words, a
certain linguistic chauvinism at work here, which is one of several
ways in which Leavis is a self-avowed Little Englander. The fact is
that what he calls the ‘creative-exploratory’ use of language is true to
some extent of language in general, if by this one means that words
play a crucial part in constituting an experience or state of mind
rather than merely reproducing it. It is as true of ‘To be or not to be,
that is the question’, where the language is tactfully unobtrusive, as it
is of ‘Nay, but to stew in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, where
the stabbing monosyllables and hissing s sounds convey a sense of
anger and disgust, and the whole effect is heightened by the closely
packed, densely textured vowels. It is true that this kind of language
seems to make us feel what it conveys, as ‘When shall we three meet
again?’ or ‘Try and get some sleep’ do not. Yet to describe this effect
in mimetic terms, as the words somehow ‘embodying’ or ‘enacting’ a
situation, is misleading. What is actually happening is that the mate-
riality of the language itself – the effort needed to pronounce so
crammed and jagged a line, the labour of lips, tongue and voice
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F.R . L EAVI S
organ it requires – puts us in mind of the materiality it describes. It

is a question of analogy, not enactment.
Poetic language, then, must not be simply indicative, like a set of
instructions for repairing a washing machine. (It is, however, a sign
of Leavis’s flexibility of mind that he regarded Samuel Johnson’s
poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ as a great work, even though
Johnson has in his view no sense of the creative-exploratory use of
words, and the style of the piece is accordingly one of statement,
reflection and exposition.) The most effective literary art must be
actual rather than nebulous, richly realised rather than vaguely
suggestive, poetic rather than poetical. Language as gesture and
performance is what wins this critic’s approval. He speaks of the
‘body and action’ of words, remarking of Gerard Manley Hopkins
that ‘his words and phrases are actions as well as sounds, ideas and
images, and must . . . be read with the body as well as with the eye’
(NB, p. 172). A similar exploitation of the ‘whole body’ of language
can be found in T.S. Eliot. In fact, this view of poetry is deeply
influenced by Eliot’s own criticism. It is a lack of body or ‘cerebral
muscle’ which accounts for the supposed spiritual and intellectual
anaemia of so much Victorian poetry. Yet to press this case too far is
to risk selling the pass to the aesthetes, formalists and Symbolists,
focusing on the words themselves rather than on what they seek to
record. It is this which Leavis finds so deplorable in Milton, whose
language, by drawing such ostentatious attention to itself, inter-
venes between the reader and the meaning or experience. Tennyson
and Swinburne are also rapped over the knuckles for revelling in the
musicality of words for its own sake, which the puritanical streak in
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Leavis (one of which he was moderately proud) finds distastefully

self-indulgent.
So the word cannot be transparent – a mere vehicle or medium of
the meaning – but neither can it be autonomous and self-involved,
cut off from real-life experience. There are times when Leavis prefers
the former to the latter, as when he writes of the kind of poetry
which has such life and body ‘that we hardly seem to be reading
arrangements of words’ (LP, p. 108). Language, like a well-trained
courtier, would seem to be at its best when it effaces itself. In similar
vein, he remarks of a passage in Milton’s Comus that the words seem
to withdraw themselves from our attention and we are ‘directly aware
of a tissue of feelings and perceptions’ (R, p. 49). Most of the time,
however, Milton has a feeling for words rather than feeling through
them, as in the supposedly laboured, pedantic diction of Paradise
Lost. What is amiss with the poem is the fact that what Leavis sugges-
tively calls the ‘steep cadences’ and ‘slopes and curves’ of its language
cease to be expressive of the experience, and function instead by rote,
as though they were on automatic. It is as if the words moved at one
level and the meaning at another. Language has been cut off from its
living source in the speaking voice. Though one sees what this means,
it seems odd to upbraid a poet for having a feeling for language.
This is not the case with Alexander Pope, above whose every line
‘we can imagine a tensely flexible and complex curve, representing
the modulation, emphasis and changing tone and tempo of the
voice in reading; the curve varying from line to line and the lines
playing subtly against one another’ (R, p. 31). It is a superlative
piece of analysis. Milton, by contrast, has renounced the English
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language – which is to say, Leavis’s own partisan version of it. With

the stilted gestures, predictable thuds and monotonous ritual of his
verse, he demonstrates an insensitivity to the ‘intrinsic nature’ of the
English tongue, handling it from the outside rather than grasping it
as expressive of lived experience. Leavis even compares its suppos-
edly mechanical way with words to bricklaying.
How then to avoid a language which merely indicates or refers
to the world, while steering clear of one which has cut adrift from
it? The answer lies in the type of poetry in which the full body of the
language expresses the full body of the experience. It is this which
Leavis means when he speaks of a poem or novel as fully realised.
Words must be subtle, sensuous, sinewy and densely textured – but
these qualities derive from the experience or situation to which they
give voice, not simply from their own substance. There seem to be
two views of poetic language here, which are not easy to reconcile
with each other. On the one hand, such language is essentially
expressive, which implies that it must cling close to the experience
and act as its faithful medium; on the other hand, poetic language
is creative-exploratory, which means that the words actually consti-
tute the experience. ‘A man’s most vivid emotional and sensuous
experience’, Leavis writes, ‘is inevitably bound up with the language
that he actually speaks’ (NB, p. 82). It is not as though Shakespeare,
in writing King Lear, had a thought that can be described as ‘How
shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and
windowed raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these?’,
which he then proceeded to put into words. It is rather that the
thought forms in the process of articulating it. The evocative use of
207
words, Leavis writes, allows poets to become more aware of their

own feelings, so that language has an active relation to what they
mean and feel rather than acting as a passive medium of it.
Poetry, Leavis argues, is at its finest when it is rooted in actual expe-
rience; but how literally this is to be taken is not always clear. As far as
we know, Shakespeare never ran his sword through a tedious pedant
lurking behind a curtain, but Polonius’s death in Hamlet comes over
authentically enough. Leavis, however, would seem to argue for a more
intimate relation between the author and the work, a biographical
emphasis rejected out of hand by Richards and dismissed for the most
part by Eliot. He sees Swift’s supposed hostility to humanity as the
result of the ‘channels of life’ having become ‘blocked and perverted’ in
him (CP, p. 86), and traces a similar disgust with life in Eliot’s Four
Quartets to some disordered inner state of the author. He also speaks of
writers like Bunyan, Johnson and Lawrence as men whom one would
be eager to meet. But this suggests too simplistic a link between life and
art. For one thing, it is not at all certain that one would have enjoyed
meeting the moody, humourless, hypercritical Lawrence, even if one
regarded him as the greatest writer since Virgil. (Leavis rebukes a
number of his fellow critics for overlooking Lawrence’s wit and humour,
but this is because one would need a particularly powerful microscope
to see them.) When it comes to the relation between art and life, we
would not necessarily be baffled to discover that Dante was a serial
killer, or that Wordsworth had never clapped eyes on a mountain, and
it might make no difference at all to our reading of their work.
Like Eliot, Leavis assigns a high value to the idea of imperson-
ality. In fact, he considers that The Waste Land reveals too little of it
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– that ‘the symbolic Waste Land makes itself felt too much as
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s’ (LA, p. 41). The writer’s personal experi-
ence must be sculpted into a work which is more than just a piece
of self-expression. The work of art is a social fact, not a scrap of
autobiography. Yet Leavis also argues that Eliot’s theory of imper-
sonality involves too great a gulf between the work and its creator,
leaving little space for the individual artist. Lawrence, whom he
considered a finer literary critic even than Eliot, saw no such hiatus
between the individual who experiences and the author who creates.
The conservative Eliot largely disregarded the man or woman who
produces the text, while Leavis, who had a liberal’s regard for the
individual, was uneasy with this indifference. (He actually voted
Liberal, as well as supporting the party in other ways.) Eliot and
Richards are both in flight from a nineteenth century which made
too much of poetry as subjective self-expression. But whereas
Richards sought to diminish the role of the individual author by
turning to scientific materialism, Eliot moved in the opposite
direction – to the Idealism of F.H. Bradley, for whom the self is a
kind of fiction. Eliot’s concept of tradition is another move against
subjectivism, as individual authors are reduced to little more than
the relay of a heritage far more precious than themselves. In the end,
Leavis resolves the problem of how to preserve impersonality while
still valuing subjectivity by drawing on the work of D.H. Lawrence,
for whom the uniquely individual self has its roots in a depth which
is as impersonal as the cosmos itself.3 We utter what is not ourselves.
At the core of the self lies that which is inconceivably other to it.
What is closest to us is also what is most strange.
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Leavis’s ideal version of English is supremely exemplified by

Shakespeare, whose creative-exploratory use of language is unparal-
leled. It can also be found in the ‘rooted and racy Englishness’ and
native robustness of Ben Jonson (R, p. 17), as well as in the ‘sinew
and living nerve’ of the poetry of John Donne (R, p. 12). It is with
Donne, Leavis claims, that Shakespeare’s language first enters non-
dramatic poetry in England. Once the so-called dissociation of
sensibility has set in, however, his critical judgements grow some-
what bleaker. Wordsworth is admired for his impersonality, as well
as for the sanity, naturalness and ‘normality’ of his sensibility; but
most of his sonnets are dismissed as lamentable claptrap, while the
‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode is accused of displaying an empty
grandeur. It is hard to demur from either reproof. The very essence
of Byron’s manner ‘is a contemptuous defiance of decorum and
propriety’ (R, p. 149), a phrase in which one can hear the voice of
the son of the respectable shop-keeping classes. The highly esteemed
Shelley betrays a weak grasp of the actual, a lack of critical intelli-
gence and a failure to see things in their own right. Full of poetical
vapidity and sentimental banalities, his verse is denounced in an
astonishingly iconoclastic gesture as ‘repetitive, vaporous, monoto-
nously self-regarding and often emotionally cheap, and so, in no
very long run, boring’ (CP, p. 221). Rather than inhering in concrete
situations, the emotion is pumped in from the outside. The stuff
might seem intoxicating to a 15-year-old, Leavis remarks, but to
more mature minds it is unreadable.
Tennyson ‘doesn’t offer, characteristically, any very interesting
local life for inspection’ (R, p. 5), though Christina Rossetti has ‘her
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own thin and limited but very notable distinction’ (R, p. 6), and
Emily Brontë is highly praised. The same cannot be said for Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, with his ‘shamelessly cheap evocation of a romantic
and bogus Platonism’ (CP, p. 47). The impersonality of Walter
Savage Landor’s work ‘is that of the stiff suit of style that stands up
empty – impersonal because there’s nothing inside’ (CP, p. 285).
George Meredith’s poem Modern Love, considered by many critics
at the time as a distinguished piece of Victorian verse, is ‘the flashy
product of unusual but vulgar cleverness working upon cheap
emotion’ (NB, p. 21). The finest Victorian poet is Gerard Manley
Hopkins, whose performative language, sensuous precision, muscu-
larity and living speech rhythms restore to the language something
of the substance of which it has been stripped. His work demon-
strates a unity of form and content (another idea Leavis inherits
from Eliot), so that ‘the technical triumph is a triumph of spirit’
(NB, p. 182). Only a handful of Thomas Hardy’s poems, by
contrast, can be said to achieve true greatness, given the fact that
their author writes ‘with a gaucherie compounded of the literary,
the colloquial, the baldly prosaic, the conventionally poetical, the
pedantic and the rustic’ (NB, p. 59). It is a familiar form of patronage
of the man Henry James patted verbally on the head as ‘the good
little Thomas Hardy’, and one with which we shall see Raymond
Williams take issue.
As for the Georgian movement, it ‘may fairly be considered as a
“movement”, since it can be considered as little else’ (NB, p. 62).
Rupert Brooke was afflicted by a prolonged bout of adolescence,
though with his characteristic eye for quality Leavis singles out the
211
then little-known Edward Thomas, whose originality, subtlety of

technique and distinctively modern sensibility he holds in high
regard. He also compliments the equally obscure war poet Isaac
Rosenberg, whose technical dexterity he rates even more highly
than Thomas’s, and whom he deems superior to Wilfred Owen.
Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ represents a definitive
break with nineteenth-century aestheticism and sentimentalism,
inaugurating a thoroughly modern form of consciousness. It repre-
sents a seismic shift or momentous turning-point in the history of
sensibility. The poem articulates the modes of feeling of one fully
alive to his age, which in Leavis’s view is always an index of value,
and its technique and experience are impossible to dissociate.
Pound’s Cantos, by contrast, are both vacuous and bullying – a
bullying which consorts naturally with the author’s fascism and
anti-Semitism. The gradually maturing Yeats reveals an attractively
‘spare, hard and sinewy and in tone sardonic’ way of writing (NB,
p. 42), but W.H. Auden is marked down for being cerebral, imma-
ture and overbred. He also became an American citizen, despite
being ‘English upper class, Public School and Oxford’ (AK, p. 151),
thereby rolling four mortal sins into one. The fact that he had been
a Marxist in his youth does him no favours either.
The typical form of a critical judgement, Leavis claims, is ‘This is so,

isn’t it?’, which in a court of law would count as a leading question.
It is neither the blank agnosticism of ‘Is this so?’ nor the dogmatism
of ‘This is so’. It solicits the assent, dissent or qualification of others,
in what Leavis sees as the inherently collaborative process of critical
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approach. A literary judgement is one’s own or it is nothing; yet it is

never simply one’s own, any more than a language is one’s private
property. Language is rather ‘the upshot or precipitate of immemo-
rial human living’ (LP, p. 44), as it is for the Eliot by whom Leavis is
so deeply influenced. ‘A language is a life’ (AK, p. 183), he insists.
Like language, a literary work is the creation of a cooperative process
rather than simply the product of an individual. It exists only in the
convergence of minds on a printed page. You cannot point to a
poem; rather, it exists in some virtual or intersubjective space, as the
black marks on the page are recreated by a community of readers.
Literature for Leavis is cognitive, which we have seen is not the
case for Richards and only equivocally so for Eliot. Literary works
yield us social and personal knowledge, rather than simply impacting
upon our visceral regions or redressing the balance of our impulses.
In fact, in comparison with the social history provided by major
novelists, the work of the professional historian strikes Leavis as
empty and unilluminating. We are speaking, however, of a unique
form of social knowledge, one which has no truck with statistics or
measurable trends. Instead, the literary work inhabits what Leavis
calls the ‘third realm’, situated somewhere between the brutely objec-
tive and the whimsically subjective. It is where all the most signifi-
cant human activity takes place, and an alternative term for it would
be ‘culture’, in the broad sense of the word. A literary work of art isn’t
an objective phenomenon like a pickled egg or a mobile phone, but
neither is it purely subjective. It cannot be taken into the laboratory
and dissected, but neither does it live simply in the mind of an indi-
vidual reader. A critical judgement can be as mistaken as a
213
miscalculation in arithmetic, but it is not mistaken in the same way.

To describe the tone of a poem as sombre is more than a matter of
subjective feeling; indeed, we pick up the concept of sombreness
only by sharing in a language and form of life. Even so, the judge-
ment cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Others, for example,
may disagree, as there is no disagreement over the chemical composi-
tion of water. The locus of truth and meaning when it comes to
literature is the endless conversation known as criticism. A meaning,
Leavis observes, is where minds can meet – though he might have
added that it is also where they can collide.
‘The critic’s aim’, Leavis argues, ‘is, first, to realise as sensitively
and completely as possible this or that which claims his attention;
and a certain valuing is implicit in the realising’ (CP, p. 213). The
critic must enter into possession of the work in its concrete fullness,
‘feeling into it’ rather than dealing in flat-footed generalities.
Criticism must thus be distinguished from theory and philosophy:
‘there may be an important function for an intelligence that, in its
sensitive concern for the concrete, its perception of complexities,
and its delicate responsiveness to actualities, is indifferent to theo-
retic rigour or completeness and does not mind incurring the charge
of incapacity for strict thinking’ (EU, p. 143). The criticism of
Matthew Arnold, for example, a figure whom Leavis grossly over-
rates, reveals ‘the flexibility, the sensitiveness, the constant delicacy
of touch, the intelligence that is inseparably at one with an alert and
fine sense of value . . .’ (MBC, p. 38). There have been quite a few
literary types who reveal ‘an incapacity for strict thinking’, though
not many of them rationalise the defect by making it part of their
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F.R . L EAVI S
critical approach. If philosophy is a matter of precise thinking, crit-

icism is a question of precise feeling, but feeling informed by a
special, highly disciplined kind of intelligence. George Eliot, in a
fine phrase, ‘warms analysis into creation’ (GT, p. 61). Leavis’s wari-
ness of theory, one might note, is also to some extent a nervousness
of ideas. He has very little to say, for example, about the intellectual
content of George Eliot’s fiction or Joseph Conrad’s vision of the
world. His readings cling too tightly to the page for that.
By now, the reader should have gathered at least two things.
First, that Leavis was a ferociously polemical critic. He once criti-
cised a portrait of himself for looking too benign. It is a mode which
does not endear him to those civilised souls for whom all polemic is
ill-mannered. Secondly, it should be clear that he spoke a distinctive
critical language, one largely of his own invention. A list of his
favoured terms would include such words as mature, creative,
concrete, vital, fine, serious, intelligent, right, subtle, delicate,
complex, robust, intense, sensitive, realised, poised, refined, civi-
lised, controlled, organised, organic, whole, precise, responsible and
disciplined. In fact, his sentences sometimes seem to consist of a
ritual reshuffling of these key words, as, for example, when he writes
of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ that ‘the rich local concreteness is
the local manifestation of an inclusive sureness of grasp of the
whole. What the detail exhibits is not merely an extraordinary
intensity of realisation, but also an extraordinary rightness and deli-
cacy of touch; a sureness of touch that is the working of a fine
organisation’ (R, p. 245). The language could only be Leavis’s, or
that of an exceptionally fine parodist.
215
This list of terms, however, omits what is perhaps the most

central of all Leavisite notions: ‘Life’. Great literature, Leavis
believed, allows us to feel more intensely alive, more supremely
fulfilled in our creative capacities, than anything else. One might
retort that if we feel at our most alive only when reading Middlemarch
or The Rainbow, we must be in pretty poor shape. Literature is
important, to be sure, but not that important. Much of the time,
however, Leavis would endorse this judgement: great literary works
are not only examples of fine living but manifest what is most life-
enhancing in everyday existence, and how we might achieve it. It is
in this sense that they are ‘moral’.
Yet how are we to establish what ‘makes for life’ and what doesn’t?
Like the word ‘human’, ‘life’ hovers between a descriptive and a
normative sense. It can mean how we actually live, or how we ought
to. In its purely descriptive sense the term includes violence, greed,
theft, torture and the like, which one assumes Leavis is not particu-
larly keen to see literary works promoting. He is using the word in
a normative sense, to mean those expressions of life we should
esteem; but he gives us no way of discriminating between these and,
say, genocide. Perhaps it is creative life which makes the difference,
but genocide is creative in its own ghastly way. It involves being
imaginative and resourceful, as well as bringing about a condition
which did not exist before. The word ‘imaginative’ is by no means
always affirmative, whatever the great majority of literary types
seem to think. The same is true of the concept of empathy. Sadists
need to be well supplied with it.
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When invited to spell out what he means by life in more concep-

tual terms, Leavis declines to do so. This is because to define life
would be to kill it dead, and would thus prove self-defeating. For
Leavis as for Nietzsche, life is the enemy of definition. So it would
seem that we are thrown back on intuition. Perhaps we simply feel
in our bones what makes for life and what doesn’t. But intuitionism
is a form of dogmatism. There is no arguing over it. Either you feel
it or you don’t. Somebody might happen to feel that all Armenians
are born with an innate desire to sponge off the state, and there’s an
end of it. Besides, such intuitionism really only works within a
coterie of like-minded individuals, of the kind which (as we shall
see later) Leavis gathered around himself. We don’t need to argue
over what counts as living well (the traditional moral question) if we
share much the same situation, and are thus predisposed to agree in
the first place. It is true that intuition plays a part in abstract
thought, as when philosophers regard a proposition as counter-
intuitive. It is just that one would be rash to rely on it alone. At the
same time, one might argue that though Leavis does not state what
he means by life, he shows us, and that this demonstration is the
whole point of his criticism. Many of his accounts of literary texts
are marvellously adept at drawing our attention to felicitous details,
passionate intensities, enlivening ironies, vivid portrayals and so on.
His principles are crystallised in his practice.
Does this mean, however, that all authentic literature must be
life-affirming? Can everything worth reading from Beowulf to Saul
Bellow be conscripted into a campaign for spiritual health? There
217
are times when Leavis would appear to believe so. It is certainly a

case advanced by his most venerated author, D.H. Lawrence, for
whom life will inevitably triumph. If one individual proves inca-
pable of being a transmitter of it, it will simply cast that person
aside and find its embodiment elsewhere – in a snake or crocodile,
for example, which in Lawrence’s eyes can be quite as precious as a
human being. The human for him has no inherent priority over
other forms of animal life. Besides, Lawrence’s insistence that the
unfathomable forces of life will always prevail is not only a form of
spiritual determinism but can smack of a crass triumphalism. Men
and women in his eyes are essentially instruments of life, with little
agency of their own. Spontaneity really means passivity. There is no
genuine tragedy in his fiction, since to acknowledge human break-
down and defeat would be, in his own phrase, to ‘do dirt on life’.
For his part, Leavis acknowledges the reality of tragedy, and by
no means all the literary works he prizes, which include Little Dorrit,
Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Waste Land, could be said to
be in any very obvious sense life-enhancing. It is in their sensitive
feel for the dire conditions they portray, their imaginative reach
and verbal integrity, that they might be said to make for life. ‘Life’
here is more a question of treatment than content. Even so, one
imagines that Leavis would be reluctant to concede that there can
be a truly major literary artist (Samuel Beckett springs to mind)
whose vision of humanity is implacably negative. It is true that he
rated Beckett’s compatriot Jonathan Swift as a great writer, despite
his supposed disgust for humanity; but it is hard to see why, given
that he also found him savage, insanely egoistic and by no means as
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intelligent as William Blake. The high value he places on Eliot’s

Four Quartets is severely qualified by what he rightly saw as its
distaste for everyday life.
Leavis is sometimes described as a moralist, in a fruitful tradition
of English moral thought from John Bunyan to George Orwell; but
what this means needs to be specified. It does not mean that litera-
ture should teach us certain moral values; it means rather that liter-
ature is a form of morality, indeed the most resourceful form of it
there is. In the course of the nineteenth century, there is a gradual
shift away from a Kantian idea of morality as duty and obligation to
a more generous, capacious sense of the term. By the time we arrive
at Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and Henry James, the ‘moral’
refers to the qualities and values manifest in human behaviour. Its
concern is with the closely woven texture of human lives; and since
this is also the business of literature, and perhaps of the realist novel
in particular, the literary and the moral become more or less synon-
ymous. The term ‘moral’ began to shed its didactic sense, along
with its suggestion of rules, codes and prohibitions, and became
instead a question of how one evaluates lived experience. In an age
when traditional moral orthodoxies were loosening their grip over
men and women, the novel became the secular version of Scripture.
Literary criticism was lent a new lease of life by the Death of God.
The novel teaches us how to live, not by providing us with a list of
regulations but by dramatising human situations. In granting us
access to the interior lives of individuals, it allows us at the same
time to see them in their social context, situate them in a specific
history and pass judgements on their behaviour which take these
219
conditions into account. Given the complexity of these factors, as

well as its habit of imaginative sympathy, the realist novel tends to
be alert to the difficulties of moral judgement, and the consequent
need for balance, nuance and a sense of tolerance. It is, in other
words, a liberal form, even if this is by no means true of all of its
practitioners.
Leavis’s study of the English novel, The Great Tradition, regards
its subject as one of the most creative moral forces in English civili-
sation. His selection of a mere five novelists as indisputably great
has provoked a good deal of ridicule and indignation; but he doesn’t
say that these are the only authors worth reading, and he praises a
number of other writers en passant. Even so, the narrowness and
excessive rigour of which he is so often accused is plainly a feature
of the work. Walter Scott is demoted to a disparaging footnote,
Dickens is dismissed as a mere entertainer, the gauche Thomas
Hardy fails to make the grade, James Joyce lacks any genuine feel for
life and there is no truly outstanding English fiction before Jane
Austen. An exception is John Bunyan, who ‘counts immeasurably
in the English-speaking conscience’ (GT, p. 11), but he, too, is rele-
gated to a footnote. The Brontës are dealt with in a note appended
to the main text. Trollope, Gaskell, Thackeray, Meredith and
Virginia Woolf are all briskly shown the door. Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa is ‘really impressive’, but as the longest piece of fiction in
English it takes a prohibitive amount of time to read. Besides, ‘the
more [Richardson] tries to deal with ladies and gentlemen, the more
immitigably vulgar he is’ (GT, p. 13). One of the finest anti-novels
of the literature, the eighteenth-century author Laurence Sterne’s
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F.R . L EAVI S
hilarious, proto-modernist Tristram Shandy, is not only irrespon-

sible in its ‘trifling’ but positively nasty.
On the other hand, Leavis is surely right that Austen, Eliot,
James and Lawrence stand head and shoulders above the Trollopes,
Gaskells and Thackerays, though he overrates Conrad and has the
usual inflated view of the second-rate novella Heart of Darkness.
Generally speaking, he has a fine nose for quality, despite the fact
that in New Bearings in English Poetry he lavishes praise on an
obscure poet and former pupil of his called Ronald Bottrall, whom
few people at the time had heard of and nobody has heard of since.
Rigorous discrimination of this kind is not much in vogue in post-
modern culture, which has little affection for ‘hierarchies’. The
truth, surely, is that though you can make a fetish of rankings and
pecking orders, the act of discrimination is a regular feature of
everyday social life, and it is hard to see why literature should be
quarantined from it. It is those intellectuals who disown it in a surge
of populist sentiment who are truly out of line with common prac-
tice. Why should we pass judgements on rock bands and football
teams but not on poetry or chamber music?
Leavis certainly makes too much of league-tabling; but his drive
to evaluate must be judged in the context of the literary milieu he
berates, which at times seemed to feel that making value judge-
ments was both presumptuous and discourteous. In an epigraph to
The Common Pursuit, Leavis quotes a passage from Robert Graves’s
Goodbye to All That in which the author, while an English student
at Oxford, is rebuked by a board of academics for having the
audacity to prefer some authors to others. A gentleman would not
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tolerate inferior stuff in the literary canon any more than he would
in his wine cellar. In a curious historical irony, this old-style hostility
to sharp distinctions has been revived by postmodernism, which has
been known to denounce preferring one thing to another as ‘elitist’.
But it is not elitist to rank Quentin Tarantino’s work over Mary
Poppins. Is it also unacceptable to value anti-racism more than
racism, or to feed the hungry rather than letting them starve? And
does not holding the view that value judgements are elitist unjustly
exclude those who believe the opposite? Perhaps the shrewdest
comment about literary evaluation was made by the Cambridge
critic Graham Hough, who was taken captive by the Japanese
during the Second World War, and who later remarked that when
you find yourself in a prisoner of war camp with dysentery and a
collection of Yeats’s poetry, you find out which the great poems are.
We shall see later that Leavis’s concern for quality was related to
the vital social function he ascribed to the study of English. In the
meanwhile, we should note what it is he found most worthwhile
about the fiction he discusses. All five of his chosen novelists are
supposedly ‘distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind
of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (GT,
p. 17). Whether this is true of Conrad, who has a near-nihilistic
streak inherited from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or whether
these Lawrentian terms are really appropriate to Jane Austen, is
surely a question worth raising, rather as ‘reverent openness’ would
seem more typical of George Eliot than Jane Austen. Eliot, Leavis
argues, brought to the novel from her Evangelical background a
radically respectful attitude to life. Her moral standards are Puritan,
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and like those of Leavis himself spring from a respectable petty-

bourgeois upbringing. He fails to mention that this emancipated
intellectual lived in a non-marital partnership with her lover. It may
also be something of a strain to reconcile these puritanical values
with a reverent openness to life, however that elusive notion is to be
defined.
There is a clear class animus at work here. When Leavis speaks
of George Eliot as ‘admir[ing] truthfulness and chastity and industry
and self-restraint’, as well as ‘disapproving of loose living and reck-
lessness and deceit and self-indulgence’ (GT, p. 23n), he is quoting
the words of Lord David Cecil, aristocrat and Oxford literary
academic, who was very much a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead.
(Cecil, incidentally, seems not to recognise that the world is scarcely
bursting at the seams with people who detest truthfulness and sing
the praises of deceit, so that the force of his point is somewhat
blunted.) In rightly taking Cecil’s words as the condescension of the
patrician to the petty bourgeois, Leavis insists that these values are
among those he himself holds dear, and that ‘the enlightenment or
aestheticism or sophistication that feels an amused superiority to
them leads, in my view, to triviality and boredom, and that out of
triviality comes evil’ (GT, p. 23n). In its moral depth and serious-
ness, the great English novel is among other things a critique of
upper-class frivolity, the aesthetes of Bloomsbury, social parasites,
amateur-genteel critics and Oxford academicism. Jane Austen
would no doubt have been surprised to hear it. Yet Austen herself is
a satirist of the gentry, and Leavis’s class instincts in this instance are
surely sound.
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Like Richards before him and Raymond Williams afterwards,

Leavis is suspicious of the term ‘aesthetic’, which he takes to mean
an attention to artistic form at the expense of moral content. This is
to equate aesthetics with formalism or aestheticism, rather as some
critics mistakenly see nothing in the subject but questions of beauty,
value and the unique experience which art is supposed to afford. No
such distinction between form and content, Leavis claims, can be
made in the case of major English fiction. Jane Austen’s interest in
‘composition’, the principles by which she organised her material, is
inseparable from her moral values. ‘Is there any great novelist’, Leavis
asks, ‘whose preoccupation with “form” is not a matter of his respon-
sibility towards a rich human interest, or complexity of interests,
profoundly realised?’ (GT, p. 40). The formal perfection of a work
like Emma must be seen in terms of Austen’s moral concerns and her
engagement with ‘life’. The later work of Henry James, by contrast,
with its cobwebby style, excessive obliquity and fastidious discrimi-
nations, is not sufficiently informed by a feeling for moral value.
As another critic put it, James chewed more than he could bite
off. He was an author, Leavis declares, who ‘did not live enough’
(GT, p. 181), though one might add that he produced some magnif-
icent literary art out of this very incapacity. The Ambassadors is
dismissed as a piece of feeble word-spinning, while The Wings of the
Dove is fussily vague and intolerably sentimental. In both cases,
form overshadows content.
There is, Leavis declares, no such thing as ‘literary values’. The
merit of a literary work depends on its responsiveness to the values
implicit in everyday living, and the depth and intricacy with which
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it explores them. Yet he also required that literary works should be

fully ‘organised’, which sounds like a literary value of a kind.
Conrad’s Nostromo ‘forms a rich and subtle but highly organised
pattern’ (GT, p. 211), though Leavis is sharp enough to perceive
that there is something hollow at its heart. James’s finest novels
‘have the abundant, full-blooded life of well-nourished organisms’
(GT, p. 179), which makes them sound more like farm animals
than works of fiction. Every aspect of a work must contribute to the
significance of the whole; there is no room for slack or redundancy.
Joyce’s Ulysses is reproved for its inorganic nature, its lack of any
central organising principle. (In fact, its very title announces one.)
The demand that works of art must be tightly unified is at least
as old as Aristotle; but it was being challenged in Leavis’s own day by
modernism, which saw no reason why a work should not be frag-
mented, dissonant or internally conflictive. Leavis, though he rarely
uses the word ‘modernism’, is not entirely unsympathetic to such
projects: hence his admiration for The Waste Land and a number of
other experimental texts. Some of Lawrence’s novels, not least The
Rainbow and Women in Love, are in his view more boldly innovative
in form than any other writing of the time. Even so, he remains for
the most part firmly wedded to a realist poetics. Actual life and felt
experience are the taproot of major fiction, and too much formal
experiment risks losing touch with that foundation. The danger is
exemplified above all by Gustave Flaubert, in whose work we find a
sterile preoccupation with technique linked to a loathing of life.
James Joyce is heading straight down the same cul-de-sac. Formalism
is a particular pitfall for foreigners.
225
Leavis occasionally describes the novel as a ‘dramatic poem’,

which is to say anything but a novel. He means by this that we must
break with the old-fashioned analysis of character and storyline in
order to appreciate the work as an organised pattern of themes and
imagery. The novel is primarily a work of language rather than of
character, psychology and situation. (William Empson, inciden-
tally, was not of this view, maintaining that a discussion of char-
acter, however out of vogue at the time, was as relevant as ever.) Yet
in discussing works of fiction Leavis often falls back on traditional
talk of character, event, plot and narrative, overlooking the artistry
of a text and treating it instead like a slice of real life. It is also true
that that though he is as committed to so-called close reading as
Richards and Empson, he frequently quotes large, sometimes page-
long chunks of literary works without submitting them to a fine-
grained verbal examination.
The novel, then, is the great Book of Life. In The Great Tradition,
only one of Charles Dickens’s works answers to this criterion: the
schematic, grotesquely caricaturing Hard Times. This is partly because
it is short enough to constitute an organic unity, unlike the ‘loose
inclusiveness’ of the author’s other works, and partly because it is the
one novel by Dickens which is explicitly about ‘life’, in the sense of
contrasting the mechanistic creed of Utilitarianism with the sponta-
neous vitality of a circus. Leavis speaks of ‘the astonishing and irresist-
ible richness of life that characterises the book everywhere’ (GT,
p. 257), and finds in one of the circus performers, Sissy Jupe, the
prototype of a Lawrentian heroine, typifying ‘the life that is lived
freely and richly from the deep instinctive and emotional springs’
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F.R . L EAVI S
(GT, p. 254). It is not clear how clowns and trapeze artists are going
to transform a heartless industrial capitalism, which provides the
book’s social context. They may offer an anarchic alternative to it, but
that is another matter. In the figure of Gradgrind, Utilitarianism is
reduced to a cold-hearted number-crunching, overlooking the fact
that it was responsible for a number of enlightened reforms in
Victorian society. Leavis is alert to some of the novel’s flaws – its savage
travesty of the trade union movement, for example, which was rather
more of a positive social force in Victorian Britain than lion tamers.
He also notes the mawkishness with which it treats its befuddled,
Uncle Tom-like working-class hero, Stephen Blackpool. Yet these
flaws are finally brushed aside. We are informed that ‘in [Dickens’s]
ease and range there is surely no greater master of English except
Shakespeare’ (GT, p. 272), in which case it is odd that only one of his
novels can be rescued from the junk heap of literary history.
That particular embarrassment, however, was later to be reme-
died. Patronised in The Great Tradition as no more than a great
entertainer, Dickens was later to be rehabilitated in a full-length
study co-authored with Queenie Leavis, Dickens the Novelist. We
now learn that he ‘was one of the greatest of creative writers’ (DN,
p. ix), and that to dismiss him as an entertainer would be utterly
wrong-headed. Extraordinarily, however, there is no acknowledge-
ment that this is exactly what Leavis himself had done 20 years
earlier. The party line has changed, but if an air of infallible authority
is to be maintained, the volte face must be quietly suppressed. As the
Vatican official remarked of a possible reversal of the Catholic
Church’s ban on contraception, all it would mean is that the Church
227
would have moved from one state of certainty to another state of

certainty.
If Leavis was converted to a love of Dickens, no such road-to-
Damascus epiphany was needed in the case of Lawrence. It is true
that an early pamphlet of his on the writer has its reservations: it
finds The Rainbow monotonous, and considers Eliot’s charge that
its author was spiritually sick to be not wholly without foundation.
Leavis also lavishes praise on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel which
(though he defended its publication in court) he came rightly to see
as second-rate. By the time of D.H. Lawrence: Novelist 25 years
later, however, scarcely a breath of criticism of ‘our last great writer’
(DHL, p. 9) is to be detected (‘last’ meaning not only ‘latest’, but
that – modern civilisation being as bankrupt as it is – we are unlikely
to see another of his stature). Adjectives like ‘greatness’, ‘genius’ and
‘transcendence’ tumble on each other’s heels. It is curious to read
this laudatory prose today, given that history has since rendered
Lawrence almost unreadable for a good many students. All some of
them know about him, apart perhaps from rumours of the Lady
Chatterley trial, is that he was a racist, sexist, elitist, misogynistic,
homophobic, anti-Semitic believer in ‘blood hierarchies’, which is
not the strongest of incentives these days to take him from the
library shelf. Hardly anything of these ugly opinions can be gleaned
from Leavis’s thoroughly sanitised account – not so much because
he suppresses them as because he seems hardly aware of them. It is
a drastically one-sided view of its subject.
Yet so is the prejudice that Lawrence is nothing but a case of
monstrous political incorrectness. That he held a number of
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F.R . L EAVI S
offensive views is beyond doubt; but he was also, however unevenly

and sporadically, an outstandingly gifted artist, who produced some
of the masterpieces of modern English fiction. It would be conven-
ient if politically abhorrent art were always artistically shoddy stuff,
but things are not quite so straightforward. Besides, even in political
terms, Lawrence has much of value to offer. He may have been sexist
and homophobic, but as the son of a miner he was also a ferocious
critic of industrial capitalism. It is a system which involves what he
called ‘the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of
mere acquisition’.4 Possession, he comments, is an illness of the spirit.
We do not even have possession over ourselves. As Lawrence observes
of Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, ‘he knew that he did not belong
to himself ’. We are stewards of our selves rather than proprietors of
them. We also confront each other as irreducibly ‘other’, and to seek
to determine the being of another is a cardinal crime.
In Lawrence’s eyes, humanity’s dominion over Nature is a calam-
itous consequence of modern humanism. An overbearing will has
cut the human species loose from its sensuous involvement with the
creaturely world. Lawrence’s aim was also to restore the flow and
recoil of spontaneous-creative life between men and women, a flow
deadened and disrupted by a puritanical morality and a mechanistic
society; and the novel is his chief means of doing so. If Lady
Chatterley’s Lover is an audacious performance, it is not because of its
talk of penises and vaginas. It is courageous because despite every-
thing – exile, fury, isolation, near-despair – Lawrence refuses in the
end to deny what he sees as the inexhaustible creativity of the human
spirit. There is more to him than misogyny and anti-Semitism, as we
229
shall see when we come to consider Raymond Williams’s commen-

tary on his work.
Leavis sometimes speaks of Lawrence’s work as ‘religious’, meaning

not that he is an orthodox believer but that the sense of belonging to
a creative depth beyond oneself is typical of religious experience.
Lawrence does not give this unsearchable abyss the name of God, but
what he calls spontaneous-creative life is certainly a version of the
Christian idea of grace. He is, in other words, a full-bloodedly meta-
physical writer, as in his radically different way is Joseph Conrad; and
this points to a rather curious aspect of the so-called great tradition of
the English novel. The authors it includes may consort well together
in terms of literary quality (though even that is arguable), but there is
something incongruous about placing Conrad and Lawrence along-
side Jane Austen and Henry James. The former two address the most
fundamental of questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos.
They exemplify the kind of inquiry which Leavis formulates several
times in his work as the question ‘What for? What ultimately do we
live by?’. Austen, Eliot and James, by contrast, are preoccupied less
with the cosmos than with civilisation. They are maestros of manners
and morals, not of Otherness and transcendence.
This contrast corresponds to two opposing aspects of Leavis
himself. On the one hand, he is a champion of sociability, ‘fine
living’, civilised intercourse and moral refinement. Henry James
‘creates an ideal civilised sensibility; a humanity capable of communi-
cating by the finest shades of inflexion and implication; a nuance may
engage a whole complex moral economy’ (GT, p. 26). Writing of
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F.R . L EAVI S
James’s novella Madame de Mauves, Leavis saw the author as looking

to a civilisation ‘in which the manners belonging to a ripe art of social
intercourse shall be the index of a moral refinement of the best
American kind and a seriousness that shall entail a maturity of humane
culture’ (GT, p. 160). By contrast, one of James’s compatriots, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, lacks a ‘sense of even the elementary decencies that one
had thought of as making civilised intercourse possible’.5 That
Fitzgerald was an alcoholic is perhaps not irrelevant to this dyspeptic
judgement. Manners and social intercourse are clearly no superficial
affairs; rather, they reach down to the deepest sources of culture and
morality. Ben Jonson, for example, combines his rooted and racy
Englishness with a civilised refinement. If the seventeenth-century
poet Andrew Marvell represents for Leavis the acme of English civili-
sation, it is because he is at once urbane and deep-thinking.
In the early eighteenth century, so-called Good Form was still
morally significant. It belonged to a public sphere of common sense,
sound judgement and polite, unspecialised discourse. The ‘Augustan’
virtues, Leavis writes in a finely perceptive sentence, include ‘an easy
sureness of diction and tone, a neat precision and poise of movement
and gesture, an elegant constancy of point and an even decorum’ (R,
p. 148). The seventeenth-century poet Thomas Carew reveals a
‘sophisticated gallantry’ about which there is nothing ‘rakish or raffish
– nothing of the Wild Gallant; its urbane assurance has in it nothing
of the Restoration insolence’ (R, p. 16). In Leavis’s view, there was a
shift of sensibility from the dissolute climate of the late seventeenth-
century Restoration to the mannered moral seriousness of the age of
Addison and Pope. The word ‘order’ for Pope is no idle term but ‘a
231
rich concept imaginatively realised’ (R, p. 92). Pope’s verse is ‘at once
polite and profound’ (R, p. 71), combining social grace with spiritual
depth. Politeness, far from being superficial drawing-room stuff, is in
the service of culture and civilisation. One might add that whatever
his positive appraisal of civility, Leavis’s own prose style is scarcely a
model of it. One critic detects a certain strain of Puritan integrity, an
aversion to show and suavity, in the way he writes.6 He sacrifices good
form and geniality to the unvarnished truth.
When Leavis is in civic mood, he is keen to reject any fundamental
distinction between the individual and society – an opposition he
regards rather dubiously as a specifically Romantic illusion. He even
goes so far as to maintain that serious literature tends inevitably
towards the sociological, even if it provides us with a type of social
knowledge that nothing else can. The essential truth of the novel, he
claims, is the social nature of the individual. It is a mildly surprising
viewpoint for a liberal. Yet it is a social emphasis evident throughout
Leavis’s work. You cannot have a thriving drama, he insists, without a
public theatre, and that in turn is impossible without a genuine
community. Shakespeare’s achievement would be inexplicable apart
from the social context which shaped his means of expression, while
the work of John Bunyan is the fruit of that collaborative achievement
known as the English language. At the same time, Leavis is conscious
of the danger of socialising both art and the individual out of exist-
ence, insisting instead that society exists only in the substance of indi-
vidual lives. ‘Without the distinguished individual’, he warns, ‘. . .
there is no art that matters’ (AK, p. 179). It is as if the liberal in him
is at war with the communitarian. Yet the two viewpoints can be
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reconciled: Samuel Johnson is a ‘genius of robust and racy individu-

ality’ (CP, p. 104), yet he also values civility, sociability and social
convention. He has a sense of society as a going concern in a way
which means that he doesn’t need to be conscious of it.
Leavis’s interest in the early eighteenth century, then, sprang
partly from his conviction that a flourishing literature requires a lively
public sphere. It is this domain of informed judgement and civilised
debate, animated by a spirit of free, disinterested intelligence, that he
hoped to reconstruct for his own time. If Eliot was much less capti-
vated by this historical period, it was largely because he was in search
of a past which could be fruitful for his own literary art, which is to
say an era of conflict and fragmentation, not of elegance and consoli-
dation. Yet there is a thin line between a serious respect for social
convention and a shallow one. ‘The positive, concentrated, and
confident civilisation we see registered in The Tatler and The Spectator
is impressive’, Leavis writes, ‘but no profound analysis is necessary to
elicit from those bland pages the weaknesses of a culture that makes
the Gentleman qua Gentleman its criterion’ (CP, pp. 103–4). You
need to defend civility against the barbarians and Romantic individu-
alists, but how do you do so without selling the pass to what Leavis
scathingly calls the ‘cocktail culture’ of Bloomsbury? It is a milieu
with which even Eliot, to Leavis’s disgust, had thrown in his hand,
exchanging avant-garde experiment for sophisticated chit-chat. He
even grouses that the Bloomsbury set call Eliot Tom (everyone called
him Tom), whereas it is hard to imagine Virginia Woolf calling Leavis
‘Frank’, or perhaps even allowing him across her threshold. The later
Eliot, whose dislike of Lawrence Leavis finds offensive, has sold out
233
to a coterie, which in Leavis’s eyes is the opposite of an elite. An elite

represents the most sensitive, pioneering conscience of an age, culti-
vating values without which civilisation will perish and safeguarding
them from the philistine bankers and politicians; a coterie is a closed,
self-admiring bunch of social layabouts whose primary function is to
savour their own superiority.
There are other problems with the idea of civility. Leavis was a
heretic who preferred for the most part to stand out against society, at
least in its current shape, rather than conform to it. If he managed to
sustain a social ideal, it is in the teeth of the social order to which he
belonged. The word he uses of himself and his followers is ‘outlaws’.
Pope’s ‘adroit combination of animus and urbanity’ (R, p. 93),
another deft critical insight, suggests how you can be dissident and
refined at once, but Leavis himself tips the balance rather too sharply
towards the former. It was said of him as a person that he was the soul
of courtesy, but also that he fostered a type of bohemianism. E.M.
Forster, like Leavis a liberal devoted to the free play of critical intelli-
gence, is a novelist of civilised personal relationships who nonetheless
felt a radical dissatisfaction with civilisation; but Leavis, having sung
Forster’s praises in an early study, later turned vehemently against
him, as he did with so many authors and colleagues. (This included
the meek-mannered Richards, who on leaving a note for Leavis
congratulating him on becoming a Companion of Honour received
back a one-sentence reply which read ‘We repudiate with contempt
any approach from you’.) In the end, Forster’s civility is not enough,
though the note to Richards suggests that Leavis could have profited
from it rather more than he did.
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Henry James, an author who was more or less a permanent house

guest of the English upper classes, may have been the epitome of social
grace, indeed he appears at times almost absurdly overbred; but he also
confessed in a private letter that ‘I believe only in absolutely inde-
pendent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable
(or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same’. Leavis
borrows this sentence for one of the epigraphs of The Common Pursuit,
along with a comment about the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun:
‘The Norwegian Society of Authors gave him a loving cup, but he
asked them to scratch off the inscription and give it to somebody else’.
This – Companionship of Honour apart – has the authentic
Leavisite ring. No public intellectual could have been less suscep-
tible to the blandishments of the cultural establishment. The other
problem with civility is that it doesn’t cut deep enough. James may
be in the first rank of writers, but he lacks the spiritual depth one
finds in Lawrence. Leavis was a secularist who like many non-
believers still hankered for transcendence. Like Eliot, he rejected
Richards’s wistful faith that literature might take the place of reli-
gion; but Lawrence’s work, indeed, literature in general, served
precisely that function in his thought. It is a haven of ultimate value
in a godless world.
From 1932 to 1953, Leavis was editor-in-chief of Scrutiny, a critical

journal based at Cambridge which had a global impact and trans-
formed the face of literary studies. There has been no project in
Britain to compare to it in the modern age, either in English studies
or any other area of the humanities. Devoted as it was to rigorous
235
judgement, its very name is faintly intimidating. It derives from a

Latin term meaning to sort out rubbish, and sifting the literary gold
from the dross was exactly the task which Leavis and his colleagues
set out to accomplish. It was largely through Scrutiny that Leavis
became such a formidable influence throughout the world, and this
at a time when he was complaining that he had won little or no
public recognition. (He meant, with typical provincialism, that
Cambridge had not appointed him to a Chair.) What he did have,
unlike the other figures discussed so far in this book, was a school – a
sizeable band of international disciples whose role was to evangelise
their colleagues and students by spreading the Leavisite word.
Scrutiny, in short, was not simply a journal but a militant
campaign. It chalked up some notable achievements in the field of
secondary as well as tertiary education, and there were a good many
school students (myself included) who imbibed its values from an
undercover, fifth-columnist Leavisite English teacher without being
aware of the fact. By the late 1940s, there were Leavisites at every
level of the national educational system, from professorial Chairs to
secondary schools, adult education to teacher training colleges.
Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment was used in
adult education courses, and there was a Leavisite journal run by
schoolteachers of English. The heretical ideas of the 1930s were to
become the literary orthodoxy of the following decade. By the end
of the Second World War, Scrutiny’s ideas had become dominant in
the teaching of English literature.
Since the Scrutineers formed a community of sorts, and since
they also assumed an embattled stance towards modern civilisation
236
F.R . L EAVI S
at large, they could combine in their own persons the twin virtues
of civilised conversation and cultural rebellion. Part vanguard,
part elite, their aim was to create ‘an intelligent, educated, morally
responsible and politically enlightened public’.7 It was hardly a
modest proposal. After the 1944 Education Act, which admitted
pupils from less well-heeled backgrounds to higher education, a
new stratum of former working-class and lower-middle-class intel-
lectuals, many like Leavis himself with provincial roots, found
Scrutiny’s tough-minded rejection of Good Form, Good Taste and
Polite Letters intuitively appealing. It was clear to them how deeply
such values were interwoven with social privilege, so that, in a deci-
sive shift of sensibility, power was wrested from the aesthetes, dilet-
tantes and gentlemen scholars. In some conservative circles, Scrutiny
was denounced for its narrowness, sectarianism, priggishness and
quasi-religious zeal, as well as for its custom of verbally beating up
its opponents; but Leavis himself became one of the most talked-
about critics in the English-speaking world, and his gloomy diag-
nosis of contemporary culture was widely endorsed.
One of the most combative class warriors of the journal was
Queenie Leavis, of whom her husband once remarked that there
was enough energy in her to blow Europe to pieces. She was an
outsider in Cambridge in terms of gender, class and ethnicity – a
woman in a university where women were still thin on the ground,
whose father was a lower-middle-class North London draper and
who was brought up as an orthodox Jew. She was rejected by her
family for marrying a Gentile, thus suffering a further form of
exclusion. When Leavis found himself without any university
237
teaching, it was Queenie who became the breadwinner. From her

position on the periphery of academia, she could see more clearly
than most insiders how closely its literary standards were bound up
with its social assumptions. ‘A life devoted to the humanities’, she
writes, ‘means not following a vocation but taking up the genteelest
profit-making pursuit, one which confers a high caste on its
members; literary appreciation must obey the same laws as other
expressions of social superiority. The Discipline of Letters is seen to
be simply the rules of the academic English club’.8 In a bitter invec-
tive against Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas, it is less Woolf ’s radical
feminism which commands her attention than the fact that she
belongs to a propertied cultural elite. Some commentary on Woolf
today reveals the opposite blind spot. Q.D. Leavis was rather less
enamoured of Woolf than of her father, the Victorian writer Leslie
Stephen, whom she applauds for being a public intellectual rather
than an academic. She also points out that the resistance to the
early poetry of T.S. Eliot came from the same quarter as those
who opposed the General Strike of 1926. It is interesting to note,
incidentally, that she disliked Lawrence, which is rather like the
wife of an Archbishop of Canterbury declaring herself a militant
atheist.
What was Scrutiny’s diagnosis of modern civilisation? In a series of
works produced by Leavis from early in his career to his later years, a
consistent view of modern civilisation and its pre-history is proposed.9
In For Continuity, he laments that ‘the traditional ways of life have
been destroyed by the machine, more and more does human life
depart from the natural rhythms, the cultures have mingled, and the
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F.R . L EAVI S
forms have dissolved into chaos, so that everywhere the serious litera-
ture of the West betrays a sense of paralysing consciousness, of a lack
of direction, of momentum, of dynamic axioms’ (FC, p. 139). We
were not, in short, in the best of shapes. In Mass Civilisation and
Minority Culture, we are bizarrely informed that the motor car,
symbol of the second industrial revolution, has broken up the family
and disrupted social custom. Somewhat less strangely, we learn that
society has been taken over by mass production, mechanised labour,
the standardisation of individuals as well as commodities and a
general emotional impoverishment. The cinema poses a potent threat
to traditional working-class culture. Working-class men and women,
Leavis complains, now carry around transistor radios, and the air
reeks of the smell of their fish and chips. Standards have been
subverted, authority has evaporated, tradition lies in ruins, language
is in jeopardy from advertising and the popular press, and continuity
with the culture of the past has been disastrously breached. The
custodians of civilised values are now cut off from the powers that
rule the world – powers which no longer represent an intellectual
culture but which are wielded instead by a philistine middle class. As
with artistic modernism, Scrutiny is for the most part the response of
a disinherited sector of the intelligentsia to a mass society, one which
threatens to undermine their own authority.
Modern civilisation, then, is mechanised, atomised, rootless,
materialistic and utilitarian. Leavis will later capture the essence of
this calamitous condition in the compound adjective ‘technologico-
Benthamite’. Jeremy Bentham, founder of Utilitarianism and a
source of moral insight for both Richards and Empson, is now
239
arraigned as the villain. Leavis seems not to be aware that Bentham,

as we have seen already, was in many ways a progressive thinker:
writing in the late eighteenth century, he opposed the criminalising
of homosexuality, which is probably more than Leavis himself did.
The term ‘Benthamite’ here is simply shorthand for a civilisation
devoted to material means rather than spiritual ends. Even so,
Leavis is right to recognise that Benthamism ‘provided the sanction
for the complacent selfishness and comfortable obtuseness of the
prosperous classes in the great age of progress’ (MBC, p. 34). He
also notes its responsibility for the Victorian Poor Law.
In Leavis’s view, one of the leading contemporary exponents of
this creed was C.P. Snow, a vain, self-important Cambridge scientist
and novelist who fancied himself as something of a sage, and who
was the very epitome of an Establishment figure. Snow had deplored
in a public lecture what he saw as the disabling gap between literary
and scientific cultures, the unity between which was embodied in
no less a personage than himself; and Leavis delivered a riposte to
his argument in a now legendary public lecture entitled ‘Two
Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow’. It is an astonishing,
immensely enjoyable performance, in which Leavis’s scurrility is
pressed to the point of barefaced libel. A request by the publishers
of the piece to tone it down was adamantly refused.
Snow, Leavis remarks, adopts in his lecture ‘a tone of which one
can say that, while only genius could justify it, one cannot readily
think of genius adopting it’ (TC, p. 53). In fact, not only is Snow
not a genius, but ‘he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is
possible to be’ (TC, p. 54). He is, however, a portent, in that though
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F.R . L EAVI S
negligible himself he has become a sage and mastermind for a vast,

deluded public. His supposed insight into the modern age is char-
acterised by ‘blindness, unconsciousness and automatism. He
doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know that he doesn’t
know’ (TC, p. 55). To call his argument a process of thought is to
flatter it. His lecture ‘exhibits an utter lack of intellectual distinction
and an embarrassing vulgarity of style’ (TC, p. 56). As a novelist,
‘he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know
what a novel is . . . I am trying to remember where I heard (can I
have dreamed it?) that [his novels] are composed for him by an
electronic brain called Charlie, into which the instructions are fed
in the form of the chapter-headings’ (TC, p. 57). Snow is utterly
without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.
One of Leavis’s objections to Snow is that he labels anyone who
challenges talk of productivity, material standards and technological
progress as a Luddite, which is to say as one nostalgic for pre-indus-
trial society; and prominent among the Luddites in Snow’s judge-
ment are literary intellectuals like Leavis himself. One of Snow’s
colleagues, the historian J.H. Plumb, complained that an antipathy
to material progress ran through literary criticism like dry rot.
Leavis is at pains to point out that he himself harbours no such
prejudice, and has no hankering to return to the past – though he
hands his critics a whole crateful of ammunition by inquiring
rhetorically ‘whether the average member of a modern society is
more fully human, or more alive, than a Bushman, an Indian
peasant, or a member of one of those poignantly surviving primitive
peoples, with their marvellous arts and skills and vital intelligence?’
241
(TC, p. 72). It may be that some Indian peasants are less alive than
citizens of the West in the sense of not getting enough to eat, though
Leavis passes over the fact. In any case, almost every thinker who
appeals to an idealised past ritually adds that there can be no
returning to it.
Leavis’s point, however, is that the felicity which Snow envisages
‘cannot be regarded by a fully human mind as a matter for happy
contemplation’ (TC, p. 72). His adversary cannot see that along
with ‘the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the
high standard of living’ (TC, p. 72) of modern times goes a moral
vacancy and spiritual depletion. As a consequence of this carve-up
of a figure lionised in the London clubs, Leavis was vilified by the
Establishment, while Snow protested that the unwelcome publicity
had deprived him of a Nobel Prize. The idea that this dismally
undistinguished novelist would have ever been considered for a
Nobel Prize is beyond absurdity. Some of Snow’s supporters urged
him to sue, but he opted instead for an air of injured innocence,
while working hard behind the scenes to bring Leavis low.
Leavis was right to rebuke Snow for his crass faith in material
progress and casual way with spiritual values. He was surely
mistaken, however, to argue that science is simply a means to an
end. This may well be true of technology, but large sectors of science
are no more a means to an end than The Brothers Karamazov.
Investigating the material world can be a project carried out for its
own sake, and thus has more in common with the humanities than
Leavis cares to acknowledge. It is hard to see how studying molluscs
or black holes is going to benefit senior citizens. Besides, the
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F.R . L EAVI S
overwhelming beauty which astrophysicists discern in so many

features of the universe is an aesthetic matter closely linked to the
pursuit of truth, rather as for Leavis the formal symmetry of a Jane
Austen novel has an inner relation to its moral vision. Leavis tips his
hat to science and technology, but in typical humanistic style is
grudging and ill-informed about them both. He once scoffed that a
colleague on a respirator was being ‘kept alive by science’. With
Richards, science was part of the solution; now it has become part
of the problem. You can react to the frivolity of belles lettres either by
being scientifically hard-nosed like Richards, mixing sound sense
with analytic virtuosity like Empson or, like Leavis, by cutting
beneath both scientific objectivism and literary subjectivism to
certain abiding moral truths. As far as Leavis was concerned,
Richards had chosen the wrong side in the dispute between science
and the humanities, and his early friendship with him, as fellow
enfants terribles in the Cambridge English Faculty, came to an end.
In Scrutiny’s view, things were not always as dire as they were now.
In the early seventeenth century, so Leavis argues, there was a ‘lusty’,
largely rural culture in which the relation between humanity and its
environment seemed right and natural. There was no unbridgeable
gap between ‘high’ and popular culture. A poet like Robert Herrick
could be classical but at the same time in touch with the culture of
the people. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans had a unified culture
shared by all social classes, but by the late seventeenth century
this common way of life had become rigidly stratified. The rural
social order was further eroded by the growth of urbanism and
243
industrialism, in the passage from field to factory. The monotony of

industrial labour reduced culture to mere distraction or entertain-
ment. By the modern age, the rhythms of the soil had been replaced
by the inanities of jazz. The natural relations between humanity and
the world had been disrupted, probably irreparably so. By the mid-
nineteenth century, only a few vestiges of this age-old form of life
survived. The spirit of the English language was formed while
England was still mostly rural, characterised by a vital popular
speech. It is this sturdy, muscular language which passed as a
precious legacy to Shakespeare, Jonson and Bunyan, while the
healthy, homogeneous community which produced it gradually
withered away. The so-called organic society, then, migrated into
the English language itself, or at least into those ways of using it that
Leavis most admires.
By the early eighteenth century, with the growth of neo-classi-
cism and the polite world of clubs and coffee houses, high culture
was cut off from the culture of the people, which entered accord-
ingly into a long decline. A homogeneous reading public, however,
survived for some time. There was an educated minority audience
for literature, nurtured not least by the great London periodicals
from the eighteenth-century Tatler and Spectator to such Victorian
organs as the Westminster Review. Leavis, in other words, combines
his affection for the rural with a respect for the civilised. In the early
nineteenth century, however, popular fiction was increasingly
invaded by sentimentalism and sensationalism, while the end of the
century witnessed the emergence of mass publishing and mass jour-
nalism to debase standards even further. All this had to be resisted
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F.R . L EAVI S
by ‘an armed and conscious minority’, Queenie Leavis declared,10

though one takes it she didn’t have handing out machine guns
in mind.
Thomas Hardy was perhaps the last author who could combine
the serious and the popular. Before him, Charles Dickens had done
so with incomparable verve and flair. In fact, we are told that speech
at the time of Dickens was still a popular art rooted in a living
culture, in which case it is hard to see how the organic society could
have perished two centuries earlier. Leavis claims that polite culture
was cut off from the culture of the people in the late seventeenth
century, yet he was also particularly fond of a work by George Sturt,
The Wheelwright’s Shop, which appears to argue that at least some
aspects of the organic society were alive and well at the end of the
nineteenth century. For Richard Hoggart, author of the incompa-
rable The Uses of Literacy, that community would seem to have
survived in the form of working-class solidarity until the end of the
Second World War. There are, then, a number of contending views
on when the lapse from grace actually took place.
Even if an ideal rural order did pass away some time in the
seventeenth century, the artist or intellectual was not entirely
washed up by its demise. What took its place was a public sphere of
polite letters and civilised intercourse, all the way down to the mid-
nineteenth century. Literary types may have constituted a minority,
but they could still trade on the presence of a responsive reading
public. By the time of Scrutiny, however, even this was no longer the
case. The general public had been hijacked by the media and mass
publishing market, while the literary intelligentsia threw in their
245
hand for the most part with cultural institutions (the BBC, the
British Council, the so-called public schools, ‘quality’ newspapers
and periodicals, metropolitan literary salons, the Royal Society of
Literature, high-minded coteries such as Bloomsbury) for which
Scrutiny had nothing but contempt. At one point, Leavis also
throws in for good measure ‘the publicisers, public relations men,
heads of [Oxbridge] houses, academic ward-bosses, hobnobbers
with Cabinet ministers and educational reformers’ (LA, p. 25).
Stranded between the masses and the mandarins, the journal found
itself in the classic double-bind of the lower-middle class, disdainful
of the populace below yet scornful of the social elite above. The
Leavises disliked both the masses and the upper classes.
The organic society is of course a myth. ‘At every moment of its
history’, writes the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the Occident has
given itself over to nostalgia for a more archaic community that has
disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and
conviviality’.11 In the first century bce, Ovid was already lamenting
the passing of the Golden Age in his Metamorphoses, though as
usual with Ovid it is hard to know how serious he is intending to
be. One of the most popular locations for the lost paradise is the
medieval period, despite the fact that in the 1370s the poet William
Langland can be found recording widespread social unrest among
famished farm labourers. The Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney’s
pastoral romance Arcadia was written in a park which was created
by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. In the early
seventeenth century, the English countryside was rife with disease,
early death, appalling hardship and backbreaking labour. Land was
246
F.R . L EAVI S
for the most part exploited as capital, almost half the working popu-
lation were wage-earners rather than peasants, and unemployment
was high enough for public order to be recurrently endangered.
‘There is plenty of evidence’, writes C.B. Macpherson, ‘that England
approximated closely to a possessive market society in the seven-
teenth century’.12 It is this that Leavis describes as ‘the old fine order’
(R, p. 34).
So there was no Fall from the happy garden into industrialism.
It was not a question of one social order giving way to another, but
of industrial capitalism gradually overtaking the agrarian capitalism
with which it was interlocked. Capitalist social relations had colo-
nised rural England some centuries before the industrial revolution.
Besides, squalid and oppressive though the conditions of factory
workers were, it is arguable that in the long run their material condi-
tions improved in some respects in comparison with those of the
traditional rural labourer. In this sense, if in few others, there is
something to be said for Snow’s case.
Some Scrutiny contributors warned against romanticising the
wretchedly impoverished life of rural labourers. Queenie Leavis,
among others, was conscious of the dangers of idealising Merrie
England. As Robert J.C. Young remarks in a different context,
‘Those who do not have access to modernity generally want it when
they get the chance. Those who reject it on ideological grounds are
often those who already have it’.13 In any case, Leavis does not make
as much of the old organic England as some commentators have
suggested, and there is nothing necessarily amiss with nostalgia as
such. In certain respects, the past was indeed preferable to the
247
present, just as in other respects the present is an improvement on

the past. There were no nuclear missiles in medieval England, but
there was no anaesthesia either. The chimera of endless progress is
just as one-sided as Leavis’s view of history as decline. Karl Marx
believed that the modern age was one of exhilarating emancipation,
but saw it as one long nightmare as well. He also regarded these two
narratives as being closely interwoven.
For a group so keen on fine judgement, the Scrutineers’ view of
contemporary civilisation was alarmingly indiscriminate. As far as
popular culture went, Leavis would no doubt have seen no differ-
ence between John Wayne and John Coltrane, assuming that he was
aware of either of them. From this Olympian height, the popular
cultural landscape appeared uniformly barren. Modernity was
almost unreservedly deplored as a spiritual waste land. There was no
attempt to balance the pollution of rivers with advances in medicine
and sanitation, to weigh the influence of the tabloid press against
the growing power of women, or to offset the mass publication of
so-called pulp fiction with the spread of literacy, democracy and
civil rights. What was needed, given this soulless condition, was the
cultivation of a civilised, educated reading public, of the kind once
enjoyed by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals; and
Scrutiny would constitute the nucleus of this readership. Through a
programme of social and cultural reform, it would concern itself
not just with literature but with the destiny of modern civilisation
as a whole. It would constitute a self-conscious elite, though, unlike
Eliot’s mixture of the landed gentry and conservative intellectuals, a
thoroughly meritocratic one. Only in minorities, Leavis holds, is
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F.R . L EAVI S
there life and hope. Dissociated from all partisan interests, the
group would act as the custodian of creative values in a degenerate
era. As such, it would represent that rare English phenomenon, an
independent intelligentsia. Literary criticism was the best training
ground for the development of a free, unspecialised, disinterested
intelligence, which could be brought critically to bear on social
existence as a whole. Literature itself was the prime depository of
human values – indeed, of the inherited wisdom of the race. As one
Scrutineer observed, ‘English is not really a subject at all. It is a
condition of existence’.14 Scrutiny’s faith in the power of English
studies was inflated beyond all reasonable proportion, yet this was
partly because its dilettantish forebears had devalued the subject so
drastically. The journal was reacting against the Quiller-Couches of
this world by taking the discipline with intense, indeed excessive
seriousness.
Literary criticism was a training in both intelligence and sensi-
bility, and was naturally interdisciplinary. The ideal English school
would thus involve economic, political, social and religious thought.
We have seen already that Leavis himself had come over to English
from History, while Queenie Leavis regarded herself as a cultural
anthropologist. Nor would the school’s literary preoccupations be
confined to English writing. Leavis had a long-standing interest in
American literature, despite his loathing of what he saw as the
Americanisation (or ‘cretinisation’) of English society, and Scrutiny
published commentaries on French, German and Italian authors. A
transformed English school would act as a centre of humane value
and judicious judgement within a larger forum of critique, the
249
university itself. The university would become ‘a centre of human

consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgement and responsi-
bility’ (TC, p. 75). English schools would produce a stratum of
authors, editors, journalists and other intellectuals who would exert
a genuine influence on political power, while helping to generate
the highly literate reading public of which society stood in sore
need. An engagement in social and political affairs should be the
business of those trained in the disciplined sensitivity which literary
criticism could provide. English, in other words, would play the
kind of role in producing cultivated administrators and civil serv-
ants which Classics had traditionally performed. A public sphere of
a kind could be created from within the university – an irony, to be
sure, since universities had in some ways replaced the original
article. The worldly, debonair discourse of the eighteenth-century
coffee houses, which congratulated itself on not being fustily
academic, had finally retreated to the cloisters of Oxbridge.
The way to reform a degraded society, then, was through educa-
tion. The main engine of education was the university; at the core
of the universities lay the humanities; the queen of the humanities
was literature, and the royal road to literature was literary criticism.
If you believe in humanity, Leavis maintains, there is nothing more
important than to keep alive the idea of the university. It is, in fact,
hard to see how keeping the idea of the university alive is more
vital to the fate of the species than the drugs trade or the prevention
of sex trafficking. Besides, the universities in Britain were under-
going a drastic change for the worse in Leavis’s eyes at roughly the
time he was proposing them as an ideal. The expansion of higher
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F.R . L EAVI S
education in the 1960s was not a change he looked upon benignly.

He took an equally dim view of the wave of student militancy which
swept across the globe shortly afterwards. Education on what he
called an ‘industrial’ scale was the enemy of minority culture. Yet if
he was defiantly elitist about this development, he was also one of
the first public intellectuals to recognise that universities were
destined to become service stations for the economy, as they are for
the most part today; and it was in the teeth of this trend that he
stressed the importance of higher education as the home of a free
play of critical intelligence, one at odds with the priorities of indus-
trial capitalism.
In this sense, Scrutiny was in general on the political left. It is
likely that had he lived to see it, Leavis would have heartily approved
of the Green movement. In his early years, he even considered the
possibility of some form of economic communism, while rejecting
Marxism for what he saw as its denial of the autonomy of the human
spirit. In any case, Marxism was not radical enough: it was just
another version of the soulless industrial order which was corroding
the sources of creative life. It was, Leavis argued, ‘a characteristic
product of our “capitalist” civilisation’, placing the word ‘capitalism’
in scare quotes in order not to seem complicit with the very form of
critique he was dismissing.15 He also remarked that he detested
collectivist ideologies. Even so, he read Leon Trotsky’s Literature and
Revolution with interest, and offered to lend a hand when some
upper-class louts threatened to break up a protest against the West’s
invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956, remarking that he was good in a
rough-house. Whether or not this was true physically (he had been
251
gassed in the First World War and regarded himself as disabled), it

was certainly true metaphorically.16
Yet if Scrutiny had something of the left’s social conscience and
scorn for privilege, it could also reproduce a few of its less palatable
features. There were times when those who ran the journal behaved
like the most ferociously sectarian of Trotskyist groups, ostracising
those members who deviated from the party line, detecting malig-
nant enemies behind every mild demurral, and spending rather less
time mauling the opposition than scrapping with each other. These
conflicts owed a good deal to the embattled temperaments of the
Leavises, but they also reflected the strains and contradictions
inherent in the enterprise itself. English studies were at the heart of
that project, yet Scrutiny looked askance on much that was done in
their name. The home of English studies was the universities, yet the
universities were increasingly in thrall to a philistine rationality. The
humane values which English stood for formed the essence of civilisa-
tion, but actual civilisation was sterile and mechanistic. Only at
Cambridge, Leavis insists, could the idea of Scrutiny have taken
shape; yet the actual Cambridge had pushed him and his partner to
the margins and refused to award lectureships to some of their most
ardent acolytes. Hence Leavis’s celebrated declaration that ‘We were,
and knew we were, Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of
Cambridge’ (TC, p. 76). As with a set of Chinese boxes, the vital
centre of civilisation was the universities, the living heart of the
university was English studies, the exemplary university was
Cambridge and the essence of Cambridge was Scrutiny. Yet at every
stage, the ideal ran counter to the reality. It was under these pressures
252
F.R . L EAVI S
that the Leavisites could be venomous in the cause of creative life and
stridently partisan about the idea of impartiality.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Leavis’s final years were

dogged by a sour sense of defeat. He had closed down Scrutiny, he
remarked, because he had failed, but also because no intelligent
review could survive in the modern age. As far as failure went, he
was thinking of the fact that he had proved incapable of shaking up
Cambridge, which was not entirely true. There was a Leavisite pres-
ence in the Cambridge English Faculty for some years after the
journal folded, and a large number of students were influenced by
this trend, all the way down to imitating the Master’s distinctive
accent and gestures. His own published work was for the most part
more generously received than his grousing about reviewers would
suggest. And beyond Cambridge lay an international academic
community which had been indelibly stamped by his spirit.
All the same, his mood darkened in his final years. Nor Shall My
Sword fulminates against ‘our desperate sickness’ (NSS, p. 180),
which includes sexual permissiveness, student unrest, drugs and
absenteeism. If one has to state the alternative to all this, there is
little to be said beyond ‘creativity’. The book also decries workers
who demand higher wages, the destruction of the grammar schools
and those bleeding-heart liberals who wish to atone for the British
Empire. The British did an immense amount of creative work in
India, Leavis maintains, and he is proud to call himself a Little
Englander. The assumption that there can be democracy in India or
‘black Africa’ is ludicrous. His wrath is unleashed upon migrants,
253
student militancy, enlightened liberals who preach social compas-

sion, ‘multiracialism’, Jimi Hendrix and those who don’t see that
elites are a permanent fixture of existence. He had always been
suspicious of feminism, big-heartedly pointing out in The Great
Tradition that George Eliot had ‘an extremely vigorous and distin-
guished mind, and one in no respect disabled by being a woman’s’
(GT, p. 96n). Henry James’s young heroine Daisy Miller ‘is utterly
uneducated, and no intelligent man could stand her for long since
there could be no possible exchange of speech with her: she has
nothing to recommend her but looks, money, confidence, and
clothes’ (GT, p. 159). There is a reference to the ‘spinsterly limita-
tions’ of Jane Austen (R, p. 125). Leavis’s preference for sinewy,
muscular language itself betrays a masculinist bias. The radical who
declared that ‘the academic is the enemy’ (TC, pp. 75–6) had begun
to sound like a purple-faced colonel firing off letters from his club
to the Daily Telegraph.
By and large, this is how Leavis has been remembered, in so far as
he is remembered at all. It is the elitism, narrowness, sectarianism and
later illiberalism which have lingered in the cultural memory. What is
less often recalled is that in an age of genteel amateurs and aesthetic
poseurs, who regarded literary appreciation as a superior form of wine-
tasting, he played a pivotal role in establishing English as a serious
moral and intellectual discipline. Raymond Williams, a student in
Leavis’s Cambridge, writes that it was ‘the range of Leavis’s attacks on
academicism, on Bloomsbury, on metropolitan literary culture, on the
commercial press, on advertising, that first took me’.17 Leavis’s passion
for education, he adds, was an additional attraction. If he was
254
F.R . L EAVI S
disputatious, not to say downright abusive, it was partly because there

was so much at stake for him in transforming English studies, not least
issues which resonated far beyond the walls of academia. No doubt he
and his colleagues overrated the importance of the subject. When one
reacts, one generally overreacts. In the early 1960s, a fist fight broke
out between two of Leavis’s most ardent camp-followers, one of them
now an eminent novelist. The cause of the scuffle turned out to be a
disagreement over the supremacy of George Eliot.
In order to retrieve English from those who had trivialised it,
Leavis was prepared to take on the whole of the cultural and academic
Establishment. With impressive courage, he was never afraid to infu-
riate in the name of his principles those who might have helped him
off the bread line in his early years. He was a man of exceptional
integrity who stuck to his guns whatever the cost in personal advance-
ment. He warned prophetically of the dangers of universities falling
victim to a bone-headed utilitarianism which measured outcomes in
the manner of a biscuit factory. He was also a superb teacher, deeply
devoted to his students, whom he advised to cultivate intellectual
promiscuity rather than settle for tunnel vision. His conception of
literary studies was unusually generous for the time, shading into
history, religion, economics, sociology and anthropology. His powers
of discrimination may have failed when it came to popular culture,
but he was surely right to protest that ordinary men and women
deserved better than the kitsch with which they were being served up
by whole sectors of the popular press, popular fiction, advertising
and television. He had a keen sense of responsibility not just to
literary studies but to the quality of life of society as a whole. He was
255
also a critical pioneer, championing writers like Hopkins, Eliot,

Pound, Yeats, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and others before
their reputations were well established.
As a critic, Leavis could be excessively rigorous in his judgements,
but most of them turned out to be sound enough. He scandalised the
Shakespearian scholars by describing Othello’s nobility as ‘the disguise
of an obtuse and brutal egoism. Self-pity becomes stupidity, ferocious
stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion’ (CP, pp. 146–7). It is a
devastatingly accurate assessment, one which refuses to judge the
character by his own inflated self-image. The actor Laurence Olivier
put the interpretation to the test with excellent results in a stage
production of the play. Leavis could be a magnificent analyst of
literary works, and introduced a new language into literary studies.
He was capable of some strikingly apt formulations: Thackeray’s
‘clubman’s wisdom’, Matthew Arnold’s ‘thin, sweet, meditative melan-
choly’, the occasionally ‘unctuous cadences’ of Yeats’s early prose,
Pound’s ‘rhythmic suppleness’, the ‘rich disorganisation’ of The Waste
Land, the ‘hypnoidal vaguenesses’ of the Celtic Twilight. For all his
egregious faults, those who regard him simply as a crusty old elitist
whose favourite novelist was nothing but a misogynistic homophobe
would do well to think again.
256
5
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
‘Queenie did it all in the Thirties’ was F.R. Leavis’s comment on the
work of Raymond Williams.1 He presumably had in mind Q.D.
Leavis’s critique of popular culture in her Fiction and the Reading
Public; but though the book is indeed a pioneering study, it can
hardly be weighed in the scales against the work of the greatest
socialist thinker of post-war Britain. It is true, however, that among
its other achievements Scrutiny was a source of what would later
become known as cultural studies. If its treatment of popular culture
was emphatically negative, it also acknowledged its growing influ-
ence. Yet as Williams himself points out, there was a more impor-
tant factor at work here. The critical analysis of newspapers, cinema,
advertisements and the mass media first got under way in the adult
education movement in the 1950s, in the period when Williams
himself, along with the labour historian E.P. Thompson and the
literary and cultural critic Richard Hoggart, were working in this
field.2
257
Williams was born in 1921 in a small Welsh village not far from
the border with England, and metaphorically speaking he lived in
border country all his life. He was caught between England and
Wales, city and country, middle class and working class, intellectual
and popular culture, the experience of mobility and a love of the
place where he grew up. One might add to these polarities the divi-
sion between mental and manual labour: he did some hedging and
ditching in the countryside and had a remarkably quick feel for
material processes, along with a practical understanding of how
things worked untypical of an intellectual. His materialism, in a
word, was not just a cerebral affair.
The son of a railway signalman and the descendant of genera-
tions of farm labourers, Williams read English at Cambridge, but
had to break off his course of studies to fight in the Second World
War. As a lieutenant in an anti-tank regiment at the age of 22, he was
engaged in military action in Continental Europe, and regarded the
Allies’ campaign as a form of solidarity with the Red Army. Some
years later, he was deprived of his military commission for refusing to
fight in the Korean War, but managed to avoid imprisonment for
this offence. After returning to Cambridge to complete his degree, he
took a political decision to teach in the adult education movement
and the Workers’ Educational Association, a career which he later
described as a vocation rather than a profession. It was work of rare
value – though as Williams once wryly remarked to me, it could
sometimes be a matter of teaching doctors’ daughters rather than (as
at the male-dominated universities of the day) doctors’ sons. In the
late 1950s he was involved with the early New Left and the Campaign
258
R AYM OND WI L L I AM S
for Nuclear Disarmament, and on the strength of his path-breaking

study Culture and Society 1780–1950 was appointed to a lectureship
at Cambridge and later to a Chair. He died in 1988.3
Williams’s Chair was in drama, a subject which concerned him
practically as well as theoretically. He wrote two plays for television,
along with some theatre scripts. There is a mutedly theatrical,
powerfully emotive strain in much of his non-fictional work,
suggestive of an artist writing as a critic. There are also snatches of
rather portentous rhetoric. In his mature work, drama is exemplary
of what he calls cultural materialism, meaning the study of culture
as a set of material practices; but his early writing on the subject is
very far from such an approach. Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952)
and Drama in Performance (1954), published at a time when
Williams was still much under the influence of Leavis, are pieces of
conventional literary criticism which have almost nothing to say
about the social conditions of production of the drama with which
they deal. Instead, the plays are treated simply as a set of texts to be
examined, a method that the later Williams would decisively reject.
Even so, to apply the close reading of the Cambridge school to
drama was a relatively original move. Williams’s experiment, as he
calls it, is to apply the techniques of literary criticism to the stage,
whereas the later Williams will turn his back on criticism altogether,
in a culture which he came to see as ‘rotten with [it]’ (PL, p. 240).4
At this early point, he had not yet found his distinctive voice, or
discovered a way of uniting his politics with his intellectual inter-
ests. In fact, in Reading and Criticism (1950), another Leavis-
influenced study, he manages to discuss Joseph Conrad’s novella
259
Heart of Darkness without mentioning imperialism. It is also

remarkable that in Drama from Ibsen to Eliot he should claim that
moral issues do not fall within the boundaries of literary criticism,
and that to question the values implicit in T.S. Eliot’s drama would
be to transgress the proper borders of the discipline. Readers at the
time would no doubt have been astonished to learn that the author
of these studies considered himself a communist. As Williams was
to remark later, he was a ‘relatively sound academic’ before he was
an actual member of academia, meaning while he was still working
in adult education, but became much less orthodox and acceptable
when he was a university teacher (PL, pp. 211–12).
All the same, these early offerings, along with Preface to Film (1954,
co-authored with Michael Orrom), have strengths which prefigure the
innovative, revolutionary Williams of the 1970s and 1980s. He was
already preoccupied by what one might call the politics of form – of
how a whole way of seeing or feeling, one with powerful political
implications, is inherent in the structures and conventions of a work
of art, not simply in its extractable content. Drama from Ibsen to Eliot
is a critique of one such form, dramatic naturalism, which aims for
verisimilitude – which is to say, creating the illusion of reality by repre-
senting a familiar world on stage. In his later work, Williams would
come to acknowledge the radical nature of naturalism in the late nine-
teenth century: its militantly secular rejection of the supernatural, its
attention to the poor and disregarded, its exposure of sordid realities
which polite society would prefer to suppress, its materialist vision of
humanity as the product of its environment, its close affinities with the
socialist movement and with the enlightened world view of science.
260
Naturalism as verisimilitude in art, however, is a different matter.

In Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, Williams is conscious of the limits of
naturalism, or indeed of any representational form of art. There are
deeper realities, as well as inner ones, which a portrayal of the everyday
world is unable to reveal. Putting a factory on stage, Bertolt Brecht
remarked, will tell you nothing about capitalism. So this theatrical
form has political effects. Naturalistic theatre is also marked in
Williams’s view by an impoverishment of language, which he relates
in Leavisite style to the tarnished, threadbare speech of modern
industrial society. The emotional paucity of George Bernard Shaw’s
dramatic prose is a case in point. The dramatic representation of
everyday speech, Williams claims, is less satisfying in modern condi-
tions than it was in Shakespeare’s day. An exception can be found in
the pre-industrial Ireland of J.M. Synge, an author once described as
the only man who could write in English and Irish simultaneously.
Serious drama, Williams maintains, requires a rich common
language; it also demands a community of sensibility between artist
and audience which cannot flourish in a ‘mechanised’ social order.
Synge, by contrast, discovered in the west of Ireland a community of
expression, which may be a more charitable way of saying that all his
characters sound much the same. It is true, Williams concedes, that
his extravagantly poetic dialogue, which at times can be no more than
a verbal ‘flavouring’, falls short of Shakespearian stature, and is pressed
to an extreme in his compatriot Sean O’Casey’s ‘adjectival drunken-
ness’ (DIE, p. 117). Even so, the burnished splendour of Synge’s
language is based in Williams’s view on an organic form of life,
whereas O’Casey’s dialogue, adjectival drunkenness apart, reflects the
261
drab, bleached speech of the city. (He fails to note that Dublin, the
city in question, also gave birth to one of the most verbally opulent of
all modern literary works, James Joyce’s Ulysses.)
Williams once remarked that the two deepest formative influ-
ences on him in Cambridge were Leavis and Marxism, and it would
seem that the former has the upper hand here. Yet his critique of
naturalism is itself an implicit form of politics. Naturalist authors
like Ibsen, Zola and Strindberg, Williams would argue later, belong
to a dissident fraction of the middle class, hostile to its values yet
unable to break decisively with its outlook. One might see in this an
allegory of Williams’s own situation in a politically becalmed post-
war Britain, as a socialist who felt the lack of any credible force for
social change. But there is another political implication as well.
Naturalism presents its audience with an instantly recognisable,
meticulously lifelike world, usually that of a living room; but this
very sturdiness may suggest that the form of life we are witnessing is
immune to change. The political message implicit in the play’s form
(‘this situation is here to stay’) may then be in conflict with its
content, which might clamour for social transformation.
The image of the naturalistic room crops up again and again in
Williams’s writing, as characters are trapped in an enclosed space in
which their destinies are being determined by external powers over
which they have little or no control. The work of Chekhov is a case
in point. A whole way of viewing humanity, with strong political
implications, is crystallised in a specific artistic form. Men and
women are no longer authors of their own history. They cannot
grasp the nature of the forces which fashion them. Because the
262
naturalist frame forbids bringing these forces directly on stage, we

can observe nothing but the characters’ passive reaction to them, as
one might ‘stare from a window at where one’s life is being decided’
(DIB, p. 335). What cannot be shown directly can only be alluded
to obliquely, mainly by the use of symbolism: the seagull, the cherry
orchard, the tower, the wild duck, the mountain peaks, the white
horses and so on.
Williams was finally to break out of his own isolated room, one in
which he wrote his celebrated Culture and Society 1780–1950, into
new forms of political activity. European drama had made the break
with the work of the later Ibsen, Strindberg and others, who eventu-
ally abandoned naturalism for Expressionism. If the theatre was to
reveal the anguished subjectivity of modern life, shaped as it is by the
pressures of the unconscious, it would need to ditch the sofa and
sideboard and draw instead on the resources of dream, fantasy and
unconscious desire. The result is a world in which characters split
and merge, the past blends with the present and there is no longer
any firm frontier between self and others, inner and outer, image and
reality, conscious and unconscious. Alternatively, you can fight your
way out of the private room into the public sphere of a Bertolt Brecht,
creating a form of theatre which can put social realities directly on
stage. There is no living room in Mother Courage and her Children.
These dramatic techniques found their equivalents in cinema and
later in television, so that there is a logical progression from Williams
the critic of drama to Williams the theorist of popular culture.
Generally speaking, Williams preferred modernist experiment in
drama and realism in the novel. In The Long Revolution, he calls for
263
a new realism, meaning ‘the kind of novel which creates and judges
the quality of a whole way of life in terms of the qualities of persons’
(LR, p. 278). The formula is derived from the work of the Hungarian
Marxist critic Georg Lukács. Genuine realism rejects the kind of
fiction which reduces the world to the consciousness of a solitary
individual, but also refuses to treat individuals as mere functions of
their environments. Instead, characters remain what Williams calls
absolute ends in themselves, while society, rather than behaving
simply as ‘background’, represents the living substance of their
actions and relationships. As he puts it in his study of the English
novel, ‘a unique life, in a place and a time, speaks from its own
uniqueness and yet speaks a common experience’ (EN, p. 192).
In this sense, realism is the form which corresponds most closely
to Williams’s socialist humanism. He opposed a society which severs
the links between individual lives, but also one which reduces men
and women to mere effects of the social totality. Realism, so to
speak, is an antidote to both capitalism and Stalinism. Where he
differs from Lukács is in the latter’s conviction that realism must
involve verisimilitude, presenting a familiar world in recognisable
ways. It is this which underlies the Hungarian critic’s stiff-necked
hostility to modernist experiment. Williams, by contrast, had lived
through a Cambridge in which Joyce, Eisenstein and Surrealism
were revered in student socialist circles, so that realism for him was
open to a variety of formal techniques. It is a way of seeing, not a
matter of trying to write like Stendhal or Tolstoy. All the same, his
commitment to realism in the novel is implicitly prescriptive: a
particular way of viewing the world, whatever literary form it
264
assumes, is privileged above all others. By and large, Williams

disliked an art which he saw as abstract, distancing, bloodless and
analytic, all of which can be taken as shorthand for modernism. If
he could admire literary works which hold the world at arm’s length
in their crystalline concern with purity of form and psychological
depth, it was against the grain of his deeper inclinations.
Over a decade after the appearance of Drama from Ibsen to Eliot,
Williams was to publish a far more embattled study of theatre,
Modern Tragedy (1966). Convinced that he had encountered various
forms of tragedy in his own life, he found himself being informed by
traditionally minded literary scholars that this could not possibly be
so. Tragedy concerned the death of princes and the downfall of the
mighty, not the misfortunes of ordinary men and women. It involved
a belief in gods, heroes, myth, fate, blood sacrifice, cosmic order, the
nobility of suffering and the exaltation of the human spirit. Since
none of this had survived in the prosaic world of modern democracy,
tragedy had perished along with it. In this sense, the very title of
Williams’s work is a gesture of defiance. Tragedy, it would appear, did
not die with Jean Racine, at least not for this thinker. The book thus
represents a courageous political intervention, defending tragedy in
the everyday sense of the term against the patrician disdain of the
academics. There is a cold, sardonic anger about the work which is
very far from Williams’s earlier writings. It is a tone which we shall
hear repeatedly in the studies that follow.
‘War, revolution, poverty, hunger; men reduced to objects and
killed from lists; persecution and torture; the many kinds of contem-
porary martyrdom; however close and insistent the facts, we are not
265
to be moved, in a context of tragedy. Tragedy, we know, is about

something else’ (MT, p. 62). For the conservative scholars whom
Williams has in his sights, Aeschylus is tragic but Auschwitz is not.
Some of these scholars point to the Nazi concentration camps as
testimony to the malevolence of human nature, evidence of an evil
at the heart of the human condition which no political change
could cure. For the humanistic Williams, however, this meant
falsely generalising a historically specific fact to a demeaning view of
humanity as a whole. He was one of the few writers to make the
point that ‘while men created the camps, other men died, at
conscious risk, to destroy them’ (MT, p. 59). Indeed, he himself had
risked death for the sake of others. Throughout his career, Williams
spoke up for hope while keenly aware of human cruelty and corrup-
tion. He was also conscious of how incorrigibly naive the virtue of
hope is bound to seem in a world characterised by what he calls ‘a
widespread loss of the future’ (PM, p. 96).
In fact, tragedy and hope are not in his view mutually exclusive.
Not all stage tragedies end in death and breakdown. On the contrary,
the emergence of new life, however frail and precarious, is an inte-
gral part of the classical tragic action. In an imaginative move,
Williams linked this fact to the nature of modern political revolu-
tion. Revolution, he believed, is needed in any society which cannot
incorporate all of its members in their full humanity. It is thus an
essential project ‘in all societies in which there are, for example,
subordinate racial groups, landless landworkers, hired hands, the
unemployed, and suppressed or discriminate [sic] minorities of any
kind’ (MT, p. 77). This is not how most academics were speaking in
266
the mid-1960s, though by the turbulent end of that decade a size-

able minority of them had come to adopt such views. Modern
Tragedy was written in a period of anti-colonial insurrections across
the globe, a series of events which taken as a whole represent the
most successful political revolution of the late-modern era. Williams
saw these scattered seizures of power as constituting a complete
action, one which he regarded as ‘the inevitable working through of
a deep and tragic disorder’ (MT, p. 75). The action is tragic not
because it ends in failure, but because of the fearfully steep price it
is forced to pay for justice and freedom. If life is to flourish, it must
pass through the possibility of death. The need for emancipation
cannot be denied, but neither can the affliction it brings in its wake.
The two are linked in a single tragic condition. Tragedy, then, did
not end with Euripides, Corneille or Ibsen. On the contrary, it is
the keynote of the world in which Williams is writing.
It was Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) which first brought

Williams widespread acclaim. As with many an influential work, its
impact was a matter of the spirit of the times as well as of its inherent
value. In a world of relative post-war affluence, dissident novelists,
playwrights and film-makers, the emergence of cultural studies, the
politics of the New Left and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
the Cold War, the imperialist debacle of Suez and the crisis of the
Communist parties with the Hungarian revolt of 1956, Williams’s
book spoke urgently to the condition of Britain in the late 1950s.
Faced with a Stalinised form of Marxism on the one hand and a
deeply compromised Labourism on the other, he had few political
267
resources to hand. Accordingly, he reached back into English social

thought in order to construct a radical tradition of his own. It is this
remarkable project that Culture and Society represents.
The heritage in question is a moral and cultural critique of
industrial capitalism. It is an attempt to base social thought on the
idea of a general humanity, rather than on the specialised language
of politics, sociology and economics. Because so many thinkers in
these fields had been co-opted by the conventional wisdom, it had
been left largely to artists, cultural thinkers and free-floating intel-
lectuals to challenge the social order, from William Blake and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge to George Orwell and F.R. Leavis. Edmund
Burke stands at the source of this current, with his insistence that
‘the state ought not to be considered nothing better than a partner-
ship agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco . . .
it [is] a partnership not only between those who are living, but
between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born’ (quoted in CS, pp. 21–2). In his assault on a crass
utilitarianism, Burke ‘prepared a position’, Williams comments,
‘from which the march of industrialism and liberalism was to be
continually attacked’ (CS, p. 23). A contemporary of his, William
Cobbett, may have idealised the Middle Ages but showed ‘an attach-
ment by instinct and experience to the labouring poor’ (CS, p. 32).
There is also the heritage of the radical Romantic artist, who
Wordsworth sees as ‘carrying everywhere with him relationship and
love’ (CS, p. 63). Such individuals find in art ‘certain human values,
capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an
industrial civilisation was felt to be threatening or even destroying’
268
(CS, p. 56). So the Romantic poet is less a lonely visionary than the
bearer of a common humanity, resisting a view of human beings as
mere extractors of profit or instruments of production. The creative
imagination is a political as well as poetic force, directed against
mechanical production, the cult of utility and a coercive politics.
‘The arts’, Williams writes, ‘defined a quality of living which it
was the whole purpose of political change to make possible’ (CS,
p. 211). From Schiller and Coleridge to Marx and Matthew Arnold,
culture in the sense of the harmonious development of human
faculties is pitted against the stunting of human potential by indus-
trialism. ‘Mechanism’, comments Thomas Carlyle, ‘has now struck
its roots down into man’s most intimate, primary sources of convic-
tion; and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity,
innumerable stems – fruit-bearing and poison-bearing’ (quoted in
CS, p. 104). At the same time, cash payment has become the sole
nexus between individuals.
For Victorian sages like John Ruskin, the art of a period is a
measure of the quality of life which produced it. ‘The art of any
country’, Ruskin writes, ‘is the exponent of its social and political
virtues’ (quoted in CS, p. 184). Two concepts of culture – as art and
as a whole way of life – are yoked fruitfully together. Culture
involves wholeness of being and creative self-realisation, both of
which are hard to come by among the cotton mills of Lancashire. As
Ruskin protests in Stones of Venice:
The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder
than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this – that
269
we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch

cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery;
but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine or to form a single
living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.
(quoted in CS, p. 190)
In the life and work of William Morris, Romantic artist and Marxist
activist, these values are harnessed for the first time to a specific
political force, the working-class movement. ‘It is the province of
art’, Morris observes, ‘to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable
life before [humanity]’ (quoted in CS, p. 202). It is not a question
of using art as an instrument for moral or political ends, but of
finding in it an image of self-fulfilment with political implications.
One of the most eminent twentieth-century inheritors of the
‘Culture and Society’ legacy is D.H. Lawrence, the child of a
working-class home close to the countryside, with whom Williams
strongly identifies. The communitarian impulse in himself,
Lawrence remarked, was stronger than the sexual one. True freedom
consists in belonging to a living homeland, not in straying and
breaking away. Democracy is a condition in which ‘each man shall
be spontaneously himself – each man himself, each woman herself,
without any question of equality or inequality entering in at all; and
that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or
any other woman’ (quoted in CS, p. 276). What Lawrence felt in
the presence of another human being was neither equality nor
inequality but (in his own term) Otherness, and few English writers
have conveyed so finely a sense of the ‘thisness’ or uniqueness of
270
persons, animals and objects. He has a remarkable sense of what the

philosopher Martin Heidegger calls Gelassenheit – the capacity to be
open and responsive to the pure givenness of another being, without
any attempt to bend them to one’s will. We cannot possess one
another, and only on this understanding can there be genuine inti-
macy between us.
A number of the figures whom Williams examines are nostalgic
for an organic society, one which flourished before the calamitous
Fall into possessive individualism, mechanistic habits of thought
and the replacement of ‘natural’ bonds between individuals with
commercial or contractual ones. Williams himself repudiates this
homesickness, sardonically remarking that the only sure thing about
the organic society is that it has always gone. It is a judgement
which represents a decisive break with Leavisism. The dream of
such an ideal order, he points out, can be found however far back
we look. There were thinkers in antiquity who mourned the decline
of parental authority and the neglect of the gods. Williams knows
enough of the history of the countryside to be aware of the igno-
rance, frustrated intelligence, deprivation, petty tyranny, disease,
mortality and backbreaking labour which have disfigured it. This is
one way in which one might describe him in his early years as a Left
Leavisite, sharing many of Leavis’s values yet opposed to his cultural
elitism, and determined to demolish the myth that the modern
industrial age represents a steep decline from the creative to the
cretinous. Instead, in a style reminiscent of Marx, he highlights the
benefits as well as the barbarisms which modern life has bestowed
on humanity. In this respect, he belongs to the camp of Richards
271
and Empson rather than that of Eliot and Leavis – though his belief
in the possibility of human advancement is rooted in his socialist
trust in human capabilities, not in some arid rationalism.
All the same, Culture and Society is rather too indulgent to the
reactionary viewpoint of most of the authors it considers. If it does
not overlook such beliefs, it certainly plays them down. In this
respect, the book delivers a thoroughly sanitised narrative. Edmund
Burke was an advocate of colonialism, an enemy of revolution and
a doughty defender of private property, while Coleridge ended up
as a High Anglican Tory hostile to popular democracy. Thomas
Carlyle was an unbridled racist and imperialist who venerated the
strong, recommended the planned emigration of ‘surplus’ workers,
revealed a savage contempt for the common people and supported
authoritarian rule. Matthew Arnold may have ranked among the
leading liberals of the Victorian era, but this did not prevent him
from calling for state violence to suppress working-class protest.
John Henry Newman advocated the harmonious development of
human faculties, but his was a mind aloof from the most pressing
social issues of his day, and usually on the wrong side of such ques-
tions when it deigned to consider them. John Ruskin was an old-
school Tory paternalist who placed his faith in a hierarchical social
order and hymned the virtues of order, obedience, authority and
subordination. We have already noted the unsavoury politics of
D.H. Lawrence. The same goes for T.S. Eliot, to whom Williams
devotes a chapter.
It is true that most of these writers were critical of laissez-faire,
liberal individualism, rampant commercialism, the dereliction of
272
duty by the ruling caste and the semi-destitute conditions of some

of those they governed. They spoke up instead for community, the
creative imagination, positive bonds between individuals, mutual
responsibility and spiritual self-fulfilment. Yet though most of them
were adversaries of industrialism, few of them were critics of indus-
trial capitalism. Only William Morris was a revolutionary socialist,
who recognised that it was this system, not simply industrialism,
which held the key to contemporary social ills. In this sense, most
of the figures the book admires supported a form of life at odds with
the values they wished to see flourish. T.S. Eliot, as Williams points
out, believed in a corporate social order rather than an individualist
one, but lent his support in practice to a capitalist set-up which
threatened to undermine his own ideal. What Williams traces, then,
in the absence of a widespread, deep-seated socialist tradition, is a
radicalism of the right. The anarchy of the free market is opposed
not by socialist democracy but by order, authority, hierarchy and
paternalism. It is a remarkably copious, fertile inheritance, one
which was to reach its peak in modernism; but for the book to make
light of some of its more discreditable features is a serious flaw, as
Williams himself came to acknowledge.
Culture and Society ends with a Conclusion remarkable for its
wisdom and authority. It is an outstanding document in a politically
barren era. Williams argues for what he calls a common culture, by
which he means not a uniform way of life, nor (as with Eliot) a single
culture shared at different levels, but a society in which the channels of
participation are open to everyone; which is thus commonly made as
well as commonly shared; and which would accordingly involve a
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good deal more diversity than we enjoy at present. We are speaking of

what Williams several times calls ‘an educated and participating
democracy’. Such a form of life could not be conscious of itself as a
whole (indeed, much of it would be profoundly unconscious), or be
available as a whole to its members. It would form a series of special-
ised, highly complex developments rather than some simple totality.
In any case, since it would be perpetually in the making, it could never
be fixed and bounded. Inequalities in skill and knowledge would
coexist with what Williams calls equality of being, in the mutual
respect of members of the culture for each other’s contributions.
We need to provide the means of life and the means of commu-
nity, by which one takes it Williams means socialist institutions; but
what will be lived by those means cannot be prescribed in advance.
We must thus remain open to every offered value and meaning,
since we can never predict which of them might prove fruitful. A
culture is essentially unplannable. The very word, transplanted like
Williams himself from the country to the city, means the active
tending of natural growth; and though the tending is conscious and
organised, the growth itself is spontaneous. There is a minority who
would impose their own selfish priorities on this common form of
life, and who must therefore be opposed. This is why the symbol of
the working-class movement must remain a clenched fist. Yet the
clenching, Williams insists, should never be such that the hand
cannot open and the fingers extend, to give shape to a new reality.
If a common culture is not to be some idle utopia, it is because
in Williams’s view the nucleus of such a future exists in the present.
It can be found in the values of the working-class movement, with
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its belief in solidarity rather than individualism, cooperation rather

than competition, mutual responsibility rather than individual self-
interest. For this political ethic, society is viewed ‘neither as neutral
nor as protective, but as the positive means for all kinds of develop-
ment, including individual development’ (CS, p. 427). Solidarity,
Williams concedes, can have negative, even noxious implications;
but there are constructive versions of it as well, as his own personal
experience would confirm. In an essay entitled ‘Culture is Ordinary’,
produced at the same time as Culture and Society, he claims that the
working-class way of life he once knew himself, ‘with its emphases
of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as
expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institu-
tions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society’ (RH,
p. 8). If Williams looked back to his childhood home, it was not in
Romantic nostalgia but to find a way forward.
Socialism, then, involves the extension of certain existing values
into society as a whole, though Williams is clear that no value is ever
disseminated on such a scale without being transformed in the
process. Working-class culture is not primarily a question of works
of art – in fact, most of what goes by the name of such culture is
produced for the people, not by them. It is rather a question of
institutions such as the trade unions, the cooperative movement,
socialist organisations and the like, all of which Williams rightly
regarded as remarkable cultural achievements in their own right. It
is this above all that the class from which Williams himself came has
bequeathed to civilisation, as vital in its own way as Romantic
poetry or the realist novel.
275
It was in the 1950s that the political left first identified the media
as a major problem. Culture and Society was published around the
time that the concept of mass communications began to emerge.
Williams rejects the term on two grounds. First, because to describe
others as a ‘mass’ is itself a symptom of alienation on the part of the
observer. There are, in fact, no masses, simply ways of seeing people
as masses. Masses are other people. We do not generally consider our
families or ourselves as part of the masses, so why should we not
extend this respect to others? Secondly, the notion of mass commu-
nication is hard to disentangle from the reality of manipulation. Any
genuine theory of communication, Williams insists, must be a theory
of community – of how we should speak to one another, of the
sharing of life and experience as an end in itself, whereas the whole
concept of mass communications depends on a minority exploiting
a majority. The so-called masses form a faceless public to be cajoled,
persuaded, diverted and instructed, and the chief motive behind this
process is the accumulation of profit. At the same time, the public is
fed with political views, if only by the silent exclusion of certain
convictions, which buttress the status quo, including the power and
financial resources of the press and media themselves. A small clutch
of billionaires are able to mould public opinion to promote their
own interests, and this in a supposed democracy. It is striking that for
all we learn of the state of popular culture from Richards and Leavis,
George Orwell and Richard Hoggart, it is not until the work of
Williams that this cheapening of everyday existence is set in the
context of a capitalism which preys on the ignorance or cultural inex-
perience of millions of men and women in order to reap a lucrative
276
gain from it. For Richards or the Leavises to have broached such
questions would have meant overstepping the limits of their liber-
alism. In their view, the solution to the problem lay in education,
which is more of a defensive strategy than a transformative one.
Williams is rather less long-term. When asked his opinion of
entrepreneurs like the media baron Rupert Murdoch in the set of
interviews entitled Politics and Letters, he replies with disarming
bluntness that such men must be driven out. He also produced a
brief but original study, Communications, which instead of simply
bewailing the flashiness of advertising or the sensationalism of the
tabloid press, advances concrete proposals for transforming the
ownership and management of the press and media, removing them
from the distortions of the marketplace without succumbing to the
dangers of state control. Even so, he rejects the pessimistic view of
Eliot and the Leavises that there has been a catastrophic decline in
cultural standards. Empson, as we have seen, took a similar view to
Williams, while Richards believed in cultural degeneration but also
in the possibility of renewal. Williams is similarly judicious: there is
indeed a good deal of shoddy art, journalism and entertainment
around, but there is also some superb popular culture, as well as a
notable increase in the audiences for ballet, opera, museums, art
exhibitions and classical music. ‘You can find kitsch in a national
theatre’, he remarks, ‘and an intensely original play in a [TV] police
series’ (RWCS, p. 163). He might also have pointed to film – a
cultural form which fascinated him as a student, which he was
among the first to teach at Cambridge, and which has produced one
masterpiece after another while remaining enormously popular.
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Williams does not idealise the working class, as some of his

fiction bears witness. His portrayal of working people in these
novels is for the most part clear-eyed and undeceived, and he has an
unerring ear for the speech of Welsh working-class men and women
in what was once his home. What he proposes as a source of value
is less working-class life in general than the ethic of cooperation and
common responsibility which informs its political institutions. He
would have encountered this ethic as a child in the activities of his
father, who took part in the General Strike of 1926 and was secre-
tary of his local Labour Party branch. Middle-class intellectuals who
romanticise working people do not generally picture them as
engaged in strikes, pickets, lock-outs and demonstrations, actions
which can pose a threat to their own interests.
Yet the fact that Williams’s father was a political activist also
makes him untypical of working people in general, as well as making
it easier for Williams to rebut the case that ordinary men and
women are materialistically minded, politically apathetic and more
enthused by Bingo than Bolshevism. Williams was fortunate enough
to experience the class into which he was born at its finest; and
though this lends his work much that is precious, it also breeds in
him a trust in the capacities of ordinary people, as well as of
humanity in general, which is occasionally too credulous. He is
reluctant to acknowledge just how monstrously human beings can
behave – partly because he believes that this would be to concede
too much to the conservative notion of an innately corrupt human
nature, and partly because it runs counter to his own formative
experience. There are times in his writing where he uses the word
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‘human’ as a positive term, as though torture and genocide were not

human as well. He writes, for example, of those ‘who answer death
and suffering with a human voice’ (MT, p. 204), but if Nelson
Mandela spoke with a human voice, so did Hermann Göering.
Part of what Williams learnt from the close-knit community in
which he grew up was the inseparability of the individual and society.
If he held to this as a social and literary doctrine, it was one based on
actual experience. Indeed, he points out in The Long Revolution that
the word ‘individual’ originally meant ‘indivisible’, or inseparable
from the whole. Unlike most critics, he was not bred to a culture of
liberal individualism, and thus could identify its limits more easily
than those who have gradually to learn them. In this sense, his social
background is not simply a biographical fact about him. It is the
reason why he approached social orthodoxy at an angle which makes
it seem more questionable than it is for others. Simply because he
was conscious of an alternative form of life, he was more likely to
sense the social bias or historical relativity of certain assumptions.
The same can be said of many post-colonial critics today.
He also brought from his background a trust in the creativity of
the common life which is untypical of modern criticism. For a good
deal of Formalism and modernism, everyday life is alienated and
inauthentic, and only by being fractured or estranged can it be made
to reveal some merit. The only worthwhile art is one which breaks
with common conventions in innovative, experimental style. Drawing
on his own more positive experience of the everyday, Williams ques-
tioned this aesthetic. The artist’s task is as much to affirm and consol-
idate common meanings as it is to disrupt them. This, too, is an
279
implicit rebuke of modernism. It also stands opposed to a postmod-

ernism for which value can be found only in what deviates from the
common life, transgressing its norms and flouting its conventions.
Looking back at Culture and Society from the standpoint of
Williams’s later work, one is struck by the emollience of its tone. If
it is one of the key documents of the modern political left, it is far
from an abrasive one. Its style is reasonable, circumspect and
respectful. This is surely one reason for its remarkable success, as
well as for the admiring reviews it received from members of the
academic Establishment. They were to be far less enthusiastic about
the study which followed it up, The Long Revolution. A good many
readers, not wholly without justification, took Culture and Society
to be the work of a liberal rather than a socialist, a misinterpretation
which ironically might be said to have launched Williams’s public
career. For it was largely on the basis of this study that he was offered
a Cambridge Fellowship, only for the academic world to discover
that they had invited a barbarian into their citadel. The later
Williams observed that he no longer knew the person who wrote his
‘breakthrough’ work, describing it dismissively as ‘first-stage radi-
calism’ (PL, p. 107). The authors discussed in it, he comments, put
the right questions but gave the wrong answers. It is hard to think
of a more succinct way of summarising the book. If he speaks
dismissively about the study, it is because it was taken to define who
and what he was at just the point when he was moving beyond it.
One of Williams’s abiding interests was the novel, a form of which he

himself was a practitioner; and his reflections on the subject are at
280
their most searching in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence

(1970). In the 1840s, when the English became the first predomi-
nantly urban people in history, the novel ‘brought in new feelings,
people, relationships; rhythms newly known, discovered, articulated;
defining the society, rather than merely reflecting it’ (EN, p. 11).
There were deep changes in ‘inward feelings, experiences, self-defini-
tions’ (EN, p. 12). The fiction of the Brontës, Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell and others does not simply portray a rapidly changing social
order; instead, it catches up and helps to define its rhythms and
habits of feeling, its modes of perception and forms of consciousness.
Far from being a mere reflection of history, it reveals aspects of it
which would not otherwise be knowable. It shows society not as a
static backdrop to its characters but ‘as a process that entered lives,
to shape or to deform’ (EN, p. 13). History, then, is present in the
very forms and styles of realism. As society is transformed, so is
human subjectivity; and the novel, while registering this crisis of
feeling and identity, also lends it some of the terms in which it can be
formulated.
An example of this can be found in Williams’s remarks about
Dickens. Dickens is the first great novelist of urban England, but
the city does not enter his writing simply as setting and social back-
ground. It is also to be felt in his way of delineating his characters,
who are presented often enough by way of some single fixed feature:
a trick of speech, an eccentric walk, a peculiar facial feature and so
on. This, Williams claims, is ‘a way of seeing men and woman that
belongs to the street’ (EN, p. 32). It is the kind of rapid, partial
perception we have of pedestrians we bump into at some busy
281
crossroads and never see again. Figures emerge for a moment from
the crowd and are instantly swallowed up by it. We do not view
them in the round, as we do with George Eliot’s rural figures, since
in the anonymous space of the city the lives of others are inacces-
sible. It is though they exist simply as vivid appearances, shorn of
any history or complex hinterland. Individuals in Dickens often
enough collide rather than relate, bounce off each other, speak past
or at each other rather than engage in meaningful dialogue. In this
great web of coincidences and random encounters, people live in
the interstices of each other’s lives. They are strangers to one another,
even if the plots of the novels sometimes bring to light concealed
relations between them. And all this, while a symptom of some
grievous alienation and disconnection, is also exhilarating in its
constant novelty and mutability, so that Dickens’s own style, rather
than being ‘the controlled language of analysis and comprehension’
(EN, p. 31) we associate with Jane Austen or George Eliot, is one of
rhetoric, display, theatricality, emotional empathy, public exhorta-
tion. It is in this way that history can be found secreted in the very
forms of his work, not simply in its portraits of workhouses and
debtors’ prisons.
To grasp this idea more completely, we need to understand
something of Williams’s key concept of a ‘structure of feeling’. The
phrase is almost an oxymoron, since ‘structure’ suggests something
fairly solid, while ‘feeling’ is more elusive and impalpable. As
Williams observes, ‘it is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests,
yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our
activity’ (LR, p. 48). It thus reflects something of the dual character
282
of literary criticism, which deals in feelings but in an analytical way.

Or one might regard it as a bridge between criticism and sociology,
since the latter deals largely with structures and the former takes
more account of lived experience. Williams works for the most
part at the point where the two converge. It is this stress on lived
experience – ‘this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place
and time’ (LR, p. 47) – that the arts can contribute to a more socio-
logical study of human cultures, without which it is bound to be
incomplete. The influence of Leavis lingers on in Williams’s descrip-
tion of the concept. ‘Structure of feeling’ also suggests that feelings
are shared and social rather than merely subjective. A structure of
feeling is a precise historical pattern of feeling which can be typical
of a whole age, but also of a group, an artistic current or an indi-
vidual work of art. In this sense, the concept can be used as a link
between a broad span of history and more specific phenomena.
There can also be conflicting structures of feeling within the same
artwork or social condition.
It is a novel concept for a Marxist to employ. As Michael
Moriarty points out, almost no other writer in the Marxist tradition
has seen the human response to history as mediated not essentially
through discourses or beliefs but through feelings.5 One advantage
of the concept is that it allows Williams to avoid the term ‘ideology’,
which he associates with clear-cut doctrines and abstract ideas.
(There are, in fact, less intellectualist versions of the notion.)
Ideology and structure of feeling are not synonymous; but the latter
is one of the ways in which a dominant power seeks to legitimate
itself, and ‘ideology’ is the traditional name given to this process at
283
the level of ideas. There are also, however, resistant or oppositional

structures of feeling, as well as artistic works or stretches of social
life where dominant and resistant lock horns. For Williams, then,
power is a question of affect and experience, not simply of creeds.
One of the disadvantages of the idea, however, is that it invests
rather too deeply in the notion of experience, a more slippery,
ambiguous phenomenon than Williams would seem to acknowl-
edge. Marx points out that the underlying mechanisms of capi-
talism do not show up in our regular experience, rather as for Freud
the unconscious can be glimpsed in it only indirectly. Besides, your
experience of a situation may be at odds with mine, and the same
experience may lead us to different conclusions. Williams’s political
views, as we have seen, arose partly from his upbringing, but you
could live through much the same childhood and adolescence and
arrive at a very different political stance. Plenty of people have.
Perhaps the traditional term for Williams’s coinage is ‘sensibility’,
which can also be used both of a specific work and of a whole period
or society. We can speak of the sensibility of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair,
but also of the sensibility of the late Victorian age. Williams might
have felt that ‘structure’ was a more precise, analytic concept than
the rather fuzzy idea of sensibility; but he did not carry through
such structural analysis in any extended form.
Williams sometimes saw a structure of feeling as an emotional
pattern which is still emergent, and has yet to crystallise into a defin-
itive shape. It is, so to speak, feeling still in solution or suspension. All
societies, he argues, are made up of a complex interaction between
values and meanings which are dominant, those which are inherited
284
from the past but remain active in the present (the residual), and
those which are gradually coming to birth (the emergent). There are
always feelings which can’t as yet be fully articulated – embryonic
‘elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective
elements of consciousness and relationship’ (ML, p. 132) – which
have yet to be formalised into an ideology or world view, and which
may be first detected by the sensitive antennae of art. Williams was
especially attracted to Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, which he
took to mean how the culture of a dominant class saturates the whole
process of social living – not just with ideas, but with certain forms of
lived experience.6 Hegemony is in Williams’s view a more vital
conception than either culture or ideology – partly because it raises
the question of power, which is not necessarily true of the notion of
culture, and partly because its roots sink deeper than ideas, which is
not always the case with the concept of ideology. If it is more politi-
cally pointed than culture, it is also more complex and inward than
ideology. Even so, he wants to insist against certain pessimistic brands
of Marxism that no ruling order can exhaust all human energy and
meaning, and that what one might call practical consciousness is
often in conflict with ‘official’ beliefs.7
In his study of the English novel, Williams writes of the world of
the Brontës as one of ‘desire and hunger, of rebellion and pallid
convention: the terms of desire and fulfilment and the terms of
oppression and deprivation profoundly connected in a single dimen-
sion of experience’ (EN, p. 60). One could take this as an account of
English society at the time, when the hunger could be quite literal
(the 1840s are sometimes known as the Hungry Forties), and when
285
the devastating impact of early industrial capitalism involved both

rebellion and deprivation. But it is also an account of the structure of
feeling of the Brontës’ fiction, in which the hunger in question is
metaphorical (though just as real), desire clashes with convention
and characters like Heathcliff and Jane Eyre stage a smouldering
revolt against authority. History invades the Brontës’ writing, but
obliquely, spontaneously, through certain recurrent patterns of
feeling. ‘When there is real dislocation’, Williams writes, ‘it does not
have to appear in a strike or in machine-breaking’ (EN, p. 65).
Another mediation between art and society is convention, which
in Williams’s view is at root a matter of social relationships. Consider,
for example, the convention of the omniscient narrator in the realist
novel, with its implications of authoritative judgement, a capacious
vision and the ability to steer a unified narrative through a prodigal
host of characters and conditions. It is not hard to relate the self-
assurance of this project to the historical heyday of the middle class,
which can rank the realist novel as among its most magnificent
cultural achievements. One might then contrast this with the shat-
tered world of so much modernist fiction, in which there may no
longer be any unquestionable truth, solid foundation or commanding
viewpoint, simply a set of clashing perspectives and unsettling ambi-
guities. A crisis of literary form springs from a deeper upheaval, as
middle-class society enters into the turbulent period around the First
World War. In Williams’s view, cultural forms and conventions have
a historical foundation.
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence challenges a good deal
of standard critical opinion. It is a critical commonplace that Jane
286
Austen ignores the momentous historical events of her time, such as

the Napoleonic wars; but Williams points out that few historical
realities were more significant at the time than the fortunes of the
landed families with which she deals. Austen sets her fiction not in
some timeless, tranquil countryside but in a world of complex interac-
tions between inheritance, landed property, fortunes reaped from
commerce and colonial exploitation, marriages into estates and a
number of other sources of wealth. For all its elegance and decorum,
this is an openly acquisitive society, as landed, trading and colonial
capital increasingly interlock. Despite the conflicts and instabilities
which all this generates, Austen manages in Williams’s view to achieve
a remarkable unity of tone – a moral poise and assured judgement
which reflect the confidence and maturity of her social class. She meas-
ures the traditional genteel order, as well as the social climbers trying
to scramble into it, by certain absolute standards of moral conduct,
and can pass some tart comments on how dismally so many of her
characters fall short of them. It is hard to imagine the liberal-minded
George Eliot or Henry James remarking of the death of one of their
characters, as Austen does, that it was a stroke of good fortune for his
parents. But she is also a thoroughly materialist author, with a quick
eye for the value of a country residence or the revenue yielded by a
piece of land. As Williams points out, it is these things she sees when
she looks at a field, not anyone actually working there. Farm labourers
are largely invisible. The countryside becomes real only in relation to
the houses of the gentry; otherwise it is mostly a place to walk in.
Williams’s personal familiarity with rural society also allows him
to demolish a number of myths about Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s
287
fiction does not deal with the peasantry, for the good reason that
they hardly existed in the England in which he wrote. The class had
been more or less driven from the land by the late eighteenth-century
enclosures. In its place we have a world of capitalist landowners,
tenant farmers, farm labourers, dealers and craftsmen. Grace
Melbury of The Woodlanders is no simple country lass but the
daughter of a successful timber merchant. Tess Durbeyfield speaks
the West Country dialect at home but Standard English when she is
away from it. She is seduced not by a wicked aristocrat but by the
son of a retired manufacturer. She, too, is no benighted rustic, but as
the daughter of a life-holder and small dealer has been reasonably
well educated at a national school. Williams points out that Hardy
himself, like George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, has been patronis-
ingly described as an ‘autodidact’ or self-taught individual, even
though all three of these authors received a better education than the
great majority of their fellow citizens. ‘Autodidact’ in this context
can be translated as ‘didn’t go to public school or Oxbridge’.
Tragedy in Hardy springs from circumstance, not fate. Nor,
Williams insists, is it the result of a timeless rural way of life being
invaded and undermined by urban influences. There is no major
clash between the rural and the urban, not least because in English
society the capitalist relations typical of the city first took hold in the
countryside. If Hardy’s Wessex is a precarious place in which to live,
it is largely because of disruptive forces which are internal to it:
poverty, the hazards of tenancy and small-capital farming, the leasing
and renting of land, the gradual dwindling of the class of craftsmen,
dealers, small tradesmen, cottagers and the like. What is also unstable
288
in the novels is Hardy’s own relation to this social landscape, as the

son of a small-time rural builder who knows it from the inside, yet
who is also an educated observer, with one eye on the place itself and
the other on the metropolitan readership for whom he is writing.
This ambiguity, Williams argues, is built into Hardy’s use of
language. If Tess alternates between the Wessex dialect and a more
‘correct’ form of speech, Hardy himself is caught between a direct
form of description of rural society in the easy idiom of the insider,
and a more elaborate, self-conscious, ‘literary’ style of writing, one
which aims to be acceptable to a middle-class metropolitan audi-
ence, for many of whom the countryside is a realm of rural idiocy.
He calls these two modes of speech ‘customary’ and ‘educated’, and
argues that neither will finally serve Hardy’s purpose: as Williams
puts it, ‘the educated dumb in intensity and limited in humanity,
the customary thwarted by ignorance and complacent in habit’
(EN, p. 107). Form, once again, is social and historical: a stylistic
disturbance is symptomatic of a deeper social crisis. A similar
tension between the articulate and inarticulate, belonging and not
belonging, the need for rootedness and freedom of spirit, is traced
by Williams in the work of D.H. Lawrence, in his view the most
gifted English novelist of his time.
If Williams is illuminating on Austen, the Brontës, Dickens,
George Eliot and Hardy, he is distinctly less impressive on Joseph
Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. One cannot
really discuss Conrad without some reference to his metaphysical or
philosophical vision, but Williams, like Leavis, is weak on philosophy
and puts this aspect of his work aside. The same is true of his
289
treatment of D.H. Lawrence, whose metaphysical notions are vital to

an understanding of his fiction. As for Henry James, one of the finest
of all English-language novelists, Williams appears strangely uneasy
about him. As with Austen, he stresses how thoroughly materialist
James is beneath the mannered surface. His fiction is all about wealth,
possession and exploitation, yet Williams inexplicably regards him as
excluding history from his art. He also sees him as a modernist rather
than a major realist, one for whom the novel becomes its own subject
matter. ‘Consciousness in James’, he writes, ‘. . . is the almost exclu-
sive object and subject of consciousness’ (EN, p. 135). This may be
true of the late James, though even that is arguable, but it is a travesty
of his work as a whole. So is the suggestion that Joyce’s Dublin in
Ulysses is less a real city or ‘knowable community’ than a symbolic
abstraction. A knowable community is exactly what Ulysses depicts;
indeed, it is true to some extent of this small post-colonial capital
today, where everyone seems to have been at school or college with
everyone else. The city is said to have wonderful acoustics. Joyce’s
novel is still acclaimed as a great work of art, but the most astonish-
ingly avant-garde literary work in English, the same author’s Finnegans
Wake, is dismissed in a couple of sentences. D.H. Lawrence’s Women
in Love, one of its author’s most adventurous imaginative experi-
ments, is paid due (if rather perfunctory) homage; but in the end
Williams opts for the more realist Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with its feel
for the common life, over the ‘abstract symbolic language’ of the
former work. It is a spectacularly wrong-headed judgement.
Williams’s view of these modern writers is skewed by his hostility
to modernism, and nowhere more obviously so than in his aversion
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to Virginia Woolf. He sees her fiction as a world in which the

common reality he values has been stripped away, leaving only an
isolated, disembodied consciousness. In The Waves, ‘all the furni-
ture, even the physical bodies, have gone out of the window, and we
are left with feelings and voices, voices in the air’ (LR, p. 279). But
why should one expect Woolf to write like Balzac or Turgenev?
Williams delivered this judgement before Woolf became a feminist
icon, and there is no distaste for feminism implicit in his critique of
her art. In fact, the work in which he writes these words, The Long
Revolution, lists what he calls ‘the complex of relationships based on
the generation and nurture of life’ (LR, p. 114) alongside politics,
economics and culture as the main sectors of any society. A social
order which regards the birth and care of human beings not as a
primary concern but as a way of being supplied with potential
workers is to be resisted. The growth of love and the capacity for
loving, Williams comments, are fundamental to the development of
a society. In 1961, the year of publication of The Long Revolution,
these were far from received positions, on the political left or
anywhere else.
Williams remarks elsewhere that ‘it is scarcely possible to doubt
the absolute centrality of human reproduction and nurture and the
unquestioned physicality of it’ (PL, p. 340), and notes how sexuality
is among the subjects which have traditionally been excluded by
Marxism. He has, in fact, little directly to say of it himself; in fact,
there is a certain puritanical evasion of the issue in his work, as there
is a similar prudish streak in the writings of Leavis. Yet he also
approaches the now rather modish issue of the human body from a
291
revealing new angle, insisting on the ‘very deep material bond between
language and the body’ (PL, p. 340). As early as The Long Revolution,
he was interested in the effects of poetic rhythm ‘on the blood, on the
breathing, on the physical patterns of the brain’ (LR, p. 24). There is
a parallel here to Eliot’s concern with poetry’s effect on the visceral
regions. Unlike postmodern culturalism, for which biology is largely
an embarrassment, Williams retained a materialist grip on the idea of
human beings as physical organisms. Whatever nobility of spirit we
may attain, we remain in the first place lumps of material stuff.
Williams’s account of English rural society is developed on a
larger scale in The Country and the City (1973). It is a work which he
found harder to write than any of his other books, perhaps because it
touches on matters so central to his own identity. Among other
things, the study considers the country house tradition in English
poetry from the standpoint of the exploited farm labourers who were
Williams’s own ancestors, seeing such mansions as ‘commanding
statement[s] in stone’ (CC, p. 106). ‘Very few titles to property’, he
writes, ‘could bear humane investigation, in the long process of
conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the
power of money’ (CC, p. 50). These are not the terms in which
literary criticism has traditionally discussed such poetic masterpieces
as Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ or Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’, and
the book met with a frosty reception from a number of reviewers. Yet
it is worth noting that one of the earliest examples of pastoral verse
that we have, Virgil’s Bucolics, combines its idealisation of rustic life
with a cry of outrage at the plight of those smallholders evicted by
the Roman regime under which the author lived.
292
The Country and the City delivers an unflinchingly materialist

account of the history of struggle, deprivation and outright robbery
which underlies the picture-postcard image of a timeless rural England.
It is remarkable that there is hardly any discussion of Empson’s Some
Versions of Pastoral, apart from a couple of curtly dismissive sentences.
Perhaps this is partly because Williams found the book as baffling as
most other readers did. In any case, he came to dislike close textual
criticism, seeing it as a way of avoiding more general issues. He
certainly seems to have no sense of how political Empson’s book is. On
the subject of the city, which receives significantly less attention than
the countryside, the study is less enlightening. Williams was not fond
of urban life, despite his rather dubious claim of ‘needing’ to visit
foreign cities. He never lived in a city larger than Cambridge, and was
no more of a metropolitan figure than Leavis, let alone a cosmopolitan
one. Like all socialists, however, he was an internationalist, with a
belief in the global solidarity of working men and women.
From Culture and Society onwards, it is hard to give a name to

Williams’s intellectual project. As critic, sociologist, novelist, cultural
theorist and political commentator, he is a bookseller’s nightmare,
given that there is no obvious slot on the shelves to house his works.
He is also something of a sage or moralist in the tradition he records
in Culture and Society – the latest character, so to speak, in his own
drama. He himself comments on the first page of The Long Revolution
that ‘there is no academic subject within which the questions I am
interested in can be followed through’ (LR, pp. ix–x). In the end, he
himself helped to bring such a subject to birth, namely cultural
293
studies. Because the idea of culture concerns the quality of a way of

life, it is suitable that a study of it should spring chiefly from literary
criticism, which is similarly devoted to questions of value and quali-
ties of experience. Literary criticism is also a subject with such ill-
defined boundaries, encompassing everything from death to dactyls,
that it can open up to other fields of inquiry more easily than most
disciplines. Indeed, in Williams’s case it opens up so much that, as we
shall see later, it virtually disappears.
The term he was finally to use to define his project was cultural
materialism, the beginnings of which can be found in The Long
Revolution. The book includes studies of the growth of the popular
press and the reading public, the evolution of Standard English, the
social history of English writers and of dramatic forms. Only three
years had intervened since the appearance of Culture and Society,
but the tone is notably more abrasive. Whereas the earlier work uses
terms like ‘a common culture’, ‘mutual responsibility’ and ‘the
means of community’ almost as euphemisms for socialism, the later
one speaks openly of class and capitalism. All the same, the revolu-
tion referred to in the title is not of the kind that leaves the streets
running with blood. It signifies rather a process already well under
way: the gradual extension of democracy, industry, literacy, educa-
tion and new forms of communication. The revolution, in short, is
gradual and threefold: political, economic and cultural.
This, one might note, would not count as a revolution in classical
Marxist terms, which consists in the transfer of power from one social
class to another and which usually involves violent confrontation; but
Williams’s relation to Marxism was always a complex, ambiguous
294
affair. He is commonly described as a Marxist; but though he was a

member of the Communist Party for 18 months when he was a
student, he explicitly distances himself from the creed in Culture and
Society. The Long Revolution is certainly anti-capitalist, but its concept
of revolution, as we have just seen, is not one of decisive political
rupture; and though Modern Tragedy speaks of armed revolution, it is
mostly of an anti-colonialist rather than anti-capitalist kind. Some
years later, when Williams developed his theory of cultural materi-
alism, he spoke of it somewhat cautiously as ‘compatible’ with
Marxism rather than as an aspect of it.
The issue is complicated by the fact that what counts as being a
Marxist is far from self-evident. There are thinkers who have laid
claim to the title while rejecting one or several key doctrines of Marx
himself; and a number of ideas which are sometimes thought to be
Marxist were already well known when he came to write. They
include communism, revolution, alienation, social class, class struggle
and the class nature of the state. The concepts of use-value and
exchange-value, though not the terms themselves, can be found in
the work of Aristotle. Both Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
believed in the primacy of material production in social affairs, and so
in a sense did Sigmund Freud. One of the few theses which is argu-
ably peculiar to Marx is the contradiction between the forces and
relations of production, which is also one of the most controversial of
his claims. Williams makes scarcely any comment on this supposedly
indispensable feature of Marxist thought.
Even so, there is no doubt that by the time of Marxism and
Literature (1977), Williams’s position had shifted decisively to the
295
revolutionary left. In this sense, his career challenges the dreary

cliché of the street-fighting young firebrand who matures into a
placid middle age. The development of his views coincides with the
period from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s in which the political
left was briefly in the ascendant. Williams was even to speak posi-
tively at this time of the brutal Chinese Cultural Revolution.8 It was
also a time which witnessed the influx into Britain of various neo-
Marxist theories, in most of which culture, language, art, conscious-
ness and communication were granted a more pivotal role than the
Marxism of Williams’s student days had ever allotted them. As work
by Lukács, Gramsci, Goldmann, Sartre, Brecht, Bakhtin, Benjamin
and Adorno grew increasingly influential on the British left, it was
as though Marxism had caught up with Williams rather than the
other way round. There was now a humanistic, non-doctrinaire
version of the theory with which he could readily affiliate, and
which seemed to meet what had been his primary objection to
Marxism all along: the fact that it assigned culture and communica-
tion secondary rather than primary status. They belonged to the
so-called superstructure rather than to the material base, and this
was a case which Williams could never accept.
His rejection of it is evident as early as The Long Revolution. In a
chapter entitled ‘The Creative Mind’, he argues that communica-
tion is never secondary to reality; on the contrary, it is only through
language and interpretation that reality is constituted. Art is tradi-
tionally regarded as creative, in contrast to everyday consciousness;
but in Williams’s view the distinction is false, since the whole of our
routine activity depends on learning, description, communication
296
and interpretation. Perception itself is creative, and art is simply a

specialised case of it, with no particularly privileged status. In an
interaction of subject and object, consciousness continually reor-
ganises reality and is reorganised by it in its turn. Some of Williams’s
later work then turns this case against the orthodox Marxist claim
that culture and communication have only a secondary, derivative
place in social existence. To believe so, he argues, is to dematerialise
these activities, so that the trouble with orthodox Marxism is that it
is not materialist enough. It fails to grasp culture as a set of practices
quite as material as coal mining or cotton spinning. This is true, but
risks missing the point. What most Marxists have held is that
culture and communication are material practices, but not ones
which are finally determinant. They are not the main motors of
historical change.
It is this demotion of culture, as Williams sees it, that cultural
materialism can rectify. Culture, he insists, is a mode of production
in its own right, involving certain specific social relations and
historical conditions, and it is the analysis of this which should
take over from literary criticism as classically conceived. Means of
communication are also means of production, both in the sense
that they give rise to a product (speech, news, art, information), and
in the sense that they are an integral part of material production as
a whole. Language, similarly, is not just a ‘medium’ but is actively
productive of meaning. It is constitutive of social activity, and forms
an indispensable part of the social process. It is not a reflection of
reality but a reality in its own right; and it is less a closed system
than a process of production.
297
Williams tackles the topic of language directly in Keywords, a

strikingly original study in historical semantics. The book explores
the tangled, conflictive, sometimes discontinuous history of a range
of terms (class, democracy, elite, realism, tradition, literature, intel-
lectual and the like) which make up a vocabulary of culture and
society. It shows the way in which meanings are produced by innova-
tion, interaction, transfer, transformation, overlap and extension,
and how the history of language acts as the material body of the
history of thought. Somewhere behind the book, as somewhere
behind the linguistic work of I.A. Richards, lies Coleridge’s belief in
his Biographia Literaria in words as living growths or organs of the
human soul, along with his recording of what he calls language’s
periods of natural growth and accidental modifications. Given a
difference of idiom, this is not far from the project of Keywords.
The work might also be described as Williams’s equivalent to The
Structure of Complex Words – though Empson, misreading the book
as claiming that language exerts a deterministic power over thought
and action, gave it a rather negative review. (What Williams actually
claims is that an understanding of terms like ‘class’ contributes very
little to the resolution of actual class struggles. This contrasts with
the liberal-rationalist case, exemplified by I.A. Richards and perhaps
shared by Empson, that conflicts may be resolved by dispelling
misapprehensions.) Even so, Williams and Empson are at one in
rejecting Richards’s contention that meaning can be wholly dissolved
into context. Contexts are vital, but terms for Williams have ‘their
own internal developments and structures’ (K, p. xxxiv) which
cannot be reduced to their verbal surroundings. For him as for
298
Empson, they are mini-texts which weave a whole series of complex

historical strands into their compact space. Keywords unpacks over
130 words into their diverse historical components, reversing, so to
speak, the tapestry of the language in order to reveal the sprawl of
untidy stitching which went into its making.
It is worth adding that Williams has his own keywords, in the sense
of terms which crop up constantly in his work: complex, difficult,
diverse, variable, specific, active, changing, connecting, extending,
growth, form, relationship, negotiate, meanings and values, feeling,
experience. One or two of these words – ‘active’, for example – are
repeated so often that they end up almost entirely void of meaning.
‘Complex’ and ‘difficult’ are meant among other things to guard
against the oversimplifications of vulgar Marxism; ‘growth’, ‘changing’
and ‘variable’ belong to the questionable belief that mutability is gener-
ally positive, while ‘diverse’ is partly a strike at Stalinist uniformity. In
postmodern culture, diversity and plurality have become something of
a mantra, and are not easily reconciled with conviction and commit-
ment. One of the remarkable strengths of Williams’s work, by contrast,
is that diversity and commitment are in his view not in the least
incompatible. In fact, he can be found using the word ‘diversity’ almost
from the outset. He has no doubt that a genuinely socialist society,
given that it would extend active participation to a far greater number
of citizens, would inevitably be more complex and heterogeneous than
the social order we have at present, where meanings and values are
largely determined by a minority.
Culture on this view is a signifying system through which a
society is experienced and communicated, and is intrinsic to any
299
social, political or economic formation. This has implications for

literary studies. As long as Marxism provides us with just another
way of interpreting literary texts, it remains trapped within the
same paradigm as the criticism it opposes. Nor is it in Williams’s
view a question of relating two fixed, knowable entities called art
and society, since both of these are abstractions from the total social
process. What is needed rather is a decisive shift to new ground, in
which ‘writing’ (not simply the recent historical invention known as
literature) will be studied as a material, historical practice. Such an
approach will acknowledge that ‘we cannot separate art and litera-
ture from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make
them subject to quite special and distinct laws’ (PMC, p. 44).
In a period in which culture and communication have burgeoned
into massive corporations, Williams’s rejection of a distinction
between the primary (material production) and the secondary (art,
culture) makes obvious sense. If cultural materialism is not an
approach confined to advanced capitalism, it is certainly borne out
by it. It also has implications for political action, as when Williams
writes that ‘the task of a successful socialist movement will be one of
feeling and imagination quite as much as one of fact and organisa-
tion’ (RH, p. 76). Yet the fact that farms and concert halls are both
material does not necessarily mean that they weigh equally in
shaping the course of history. We could do without concert halls at
a pinch, but not without food. Human beings need shelter, but they
do not need strip joints. Williams overlooks this aspect of Marxist
theory for a while, before finally coming to acknowledge it in Politics
and Letters. He also recognises more fully than he did before that for
300
Marxism, areas like law, art, politics, religion and so on are super-
structural not because they are less material than sweatshops, but
because among other more admirable things they help to legiti
mate the kind of society in which sweatshops are possible.
Cultural materialism, then, is the study of the conditions of
production of art by real human agents in changing historical
circumstances. It involves ‘an analysis of the specific relationships
through which works are made and move’ (PM, p. 173), and treats
literature as one form of language and signification among many. In
his brief study Culture, Williams is no longer looking at individual
works of art but at questions of markets, patrons and sponsors, along
with such formations as guilds, schools, movements, fractions and
avant gardes. Literary works are to be considered less as objects than
as ‘notations’, to be variably interpreted according to specific conven-
tions; and these conventions have deep roots in social relationships as
a whole. The reception of art, in other words, must be examined
alongside its production. Without this historical context, we are left
only with ‘naked reader before naked text’ (WS, p. 189).
With the development of a market for literary products, litera-
ture becomes a commodity like any other, and what one might call
the literary mode of production merges with material production in
general. This provokes a reaction from artists who find themselves
confronted with an audience which has become anonymous, and
whose work seems degraded to the level of shirts and saucepans.
The creative imagination is now subject to the very mechanising
processes to which it deems itself superior. One name for this reac-
tion is Romanticism, which generally fails to reckon with the
301
benefits of mass production in the form of a vastly increased reader-

ship. In pre-modern times, however, there were more varied forms
of literary production: tribal bards who recited their poetry in
public, monastic scribes, hawkers of ballads and chapbooks, authors
of court masques in the pay of the monarch, theatres patronised by
the state, manuscripts passed by hand among a courtly coterie,
literary journalists whose writing was intended for clubs and coffee
houses, poetry dedicated to aristocratic patrons, fiction serialised in
‘high’ journals. Even when literature is driven primarily by market
forces, alternative practices and social relations emerge: the small
press, worker writers’ associations, radio and TV drama, book clubs,
literary festivals, amateur theatrical companies, public poetry read-
ings and so on. To attend to all this is not simply to inspect the
sociological outworks of culture, since it helps to shape the form
and technique of literary works themselves. W.B. Yeats, for example,
has behind him an Irish tradition of public, political poetry, so that
much of his verse is composed in ways which lend it to being
declaimed, as T.S. Eliot’s do not.
Cultural materialism is among other things a riposte to structur-
alism and post-structuralism, which were popular at the time but
which in Williams’s view are damagingly formalist and unhistorical.
In fact, his reaction to the growing influence of these theories prob-
ably helped to move him further to the left, and this at a time when
a number of erstwhile Marxists were scrambling in the opposite
direction. He has a rather British distrust of theory, which strikes
him as too remote from lived experience. As a radical historicist, he
is also hostile to what he sees as closed, static, absolute systems.
302
Instead, he prefers the changing, diverse and open-ended. This

inclination needs to be questioned. Change is not valuable in itself.
Nor is a diversity of fascist parties to be applauded. There is no
virtue in being variable in one’s degree of generosity. A guarantee
that you will not be buried alive should not be open-ended. The
static and immutable may be deeply desirable: one hopes that
women having the vote won’t ever mutate into women being
deprived of the vote. System is not to be rejected in itself: to think
through the interconnections between things in a rigorous spirit
may be emancipating rather than imprisoning. It is partly in reac-
tion to Stalinism that Williams, along with his New Left colleagues
E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall, is so wary of systematic thought.
Neither is there anything wrong with absolutes. In traditional moral
thought, ‘absolute’ simply means that there is no set of circum-
stances one could think up which would justify a certain action:
roasting infants over fires, for example.
It is not clear how cultural materialism differs from a traditional
sociology of culture, which also investigates such matters as reading
publics and artistic formations; and there would seem to be no
ready answer to this, beyond the fact that Williams’s brand of
cultural sociology is more Marxist than most. Yet if culture is to be
studied not so much in itself but in terms of its conditions of
production and reception, isn’t one in danger of overlooking the
role it can play as social critique? And what becomes of the pleasure
of the text – of its utopian aspect, along with its capacity to yield its
readers insight and enjoyment? Are these to be set aside for an
account of the social provenance of authors or the changing nature
303
of theatrical forms? Williams also overlooks the fact that historical

or sociological inquiries into art are by no means always radical.
From Edmund Burke onward, historicising has been at least as
typical of the political right as of the left. Besides, you do not
produce a subversive reading of Tom Jones simply by setting it in
historical context, even in a context of conflict, or by investigating
its means of production. Despite all this, there are important polit-
ical implications in this turn from texts to institutions. As we have
seen already, it allows Williams to advance concrete proposals for
the transformation of the culture industry in a way that Richards or
Scrutiny never did.
One might claim that Williams starts out by overrating the
importance of literary criticism, a mistake he inherits from Leavis,
and ends up by underestimating it. As we have seen, Drama from
Ibsen to Eliot approaches its subject primarily as a set of isolated
texts rather than as a matter of the theatre as institution, whereas
Williams’s later work, despite his insistence that ‘the varieties of
close readings . . . seem to me certain to be indispensable’ (WS,
p. 215), bends the stick in the opposite direction. One wonders
how far this is partly because close textual analysis, particularly of
poetry, was never among his strengths. Like Leavis’s The Great
Tradition, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence quotes
lengthy passages from novels without scrutinising them in any
detail, while The Country and the City treats literature purely as
social documentation. At one point the book quotes some verse by
the minor nineteenth-century writer James Thomson without
mentioning the most obvious fact about it, namely how atrocious it
304
is. In fact, Williams grew steadily more hostile to literary evaluation,

which he associated with the conventional criticism he wanted to
abandon. Like Leavis, he was suspicious of the idea of the aesthetic,
rejecting it as an abstract category but conceding that there are
specific, variable experiences which have been grouped under this
heading. These experiences, he believed, represent a range of values
which the dominant social order has sought to suppress. They also
protest against the reduction of human life to sheer utility. So if
there are times when Williams dismisses the concept of the aesthetic
as too abstract and universalist, there are other occasions when he
rather grudgingly recognises its force. Like many modern critics,
both Williams and Leavis tend to narrow the concept of the aesthetic
to the idea of a special, insulated form of experience, as well as to
the question of beauty, which then makes it easier to write off. But
classical aesthetics is much broader than this.
A distrust of abstract ideas is part of Williams’s Leavisite legacy.
But ‘class’, ‘culture’ and ‘equality’ are abstract ideas, and are not to be
sent packing on this account. It is the concrete and historically specific
which continually engage his attention; yet he discusses them in a
style so cocooned in abstraction that it is often hard to decipher. Take
this paragraph about Wuthering Heights from The English Novel from
Dickens to Lawrence:
Between the given and the willed, between the necessary and
that plausible world which can appear to be separable, the
action drives to its conclusion. A necessary experience of what it
is to be human – of that life-desire, that relationship which is
305
given – is frustrated, displaced, lost in these specific difficulties;

but is then in a profoundly convincing way – just because it is
necessary – echoed, reflected back, from where it now exists
only in spirit; the image of the necessary, seen moving beyond
that composed, that rearranged life; the reality of need, of the
human need, haunting, appearing to, a limited scaled-down
world. (EN, p. 68)
The passage is slightly more intelligible in context, but only just.

There are far more lucid stretches of prose in Williams, but there are
some even more opaque ones as well. Generally speaking, his writing
is stilted, ponderous and convoluted. His mind was strong, deep
and steady, but it had nothing of the nimble, mercurial quality of an
Empson. It is typical of his style, as the above quotation suggests,
that it manages to invest the abstract with the emotional, or abstract
from the emotional without dispelling it altogether. What is in one
sense a private, idiosyncratic language is cast into a resonantly
public, authoritative form of speech, sometimes in too self-
consciously sage-like a way. His voice is so weightily authoritative
that he hardly ever bothers to cite a source or quote a fellow critic.
There is, so the sociologist Michael Walzer tells us, ‘a saying in the
Talmud that when a scholar acknowledges all his sources, he brings
the day of redemption a little closer’, in which case Williams has
managed to postpone the Messiah’s arrival indefinitely.9 Not that he
always had that many sources to quote. There were many significant
thinkers whom he never read; and while this reflects something of
his originality and independence of mind, the way he draws so
306
deeply on his own resources, it also betrays a certain pride and

aloofness, a refusal to be beholden to his fellow intellectuals, which
is not easy to square with his politics. It is the style of a man who is
continually speaking up on behalf of others – of his own people, of
working people in general, even of humanity as such – yet who is
also curiously detached and self-isolating. Some of those who were
close to him detected these qualities in his personal life, curiously
combined with a warmth and geniality not always conspicuously on
show in Cambridge Senior Combination Rooms.
One of the most striking features of Williams’s work is the depth
of its humanity. In a period which witnessed some of the most
fundamental changes ever to take place in the forms and technolo-
gies of cultural production, he was the primary spokesperson in that
realm for working people, and the advocate of a social order which
would grant them full respect. ‘By my educational history’, he
writes, ‘I belong with the literate and the literary. But by inheritance
and still by affiliation I belong with an illiterate and relatively illit-
erate majority’ (WS, p. 212). Yet if Williams was much concerned
with culture, it was not at the expense of Nature. Like his favourite
poet William Wordsworth, he grew up among farms and moun-
tains. It was from him that I first learnt the meaning of the word
‘ecology’, which he himself had picked up from his son’s biology
homework. He was an ecologist long before the word was in general
currency. The ominous final words of Culture and Society pre-date
an awareness of ecological catastrophe, and have weapons of mass
destruction in mind instead; but it is not hard to read them as
prophetic of the global calamity that now confronts us: ‘There are
307
ideas, and ways of thinking, with the seeds of life in them, and there
are others, perhaps deep in our minds, with the seeds of a general
death. Our measure of success in recognising these kinds, and in
naming them making possible their general recognition, may be
literally the measure of our future’ (CS, p. 442).
308
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. I.A. Richards, ‘Our lost leaders’, in I.A. Richards: Collected Shorter

Writings 1919–1938, ed. John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001),
p. 337.
2. Raymond Williams, ‘Realism and non-naturalism’, in Jim McGuigan
(ed.), Raymond Williams on Culture and Society (London: Sage, 2014),
p. 200.
3. I have been unable to explore these critics’ creative writing in this
book, which would have made it at least twice as long. In any case,
Eliot has been analysed to death, Richards’s poetry is best passed over
in charitable silence and Williams’s fiction does not seem to me the
most valuable part of his work. Empson’s superb poetry would
certainly repay further study, though not, alas, here, and a competi-
tion could be held in which candidates would submit a version of the
kind of novel that Leavis might have written.
1 T.S. ELIOT
1. The works by Eliot quoted in this chapter, along with the abbrevia-
tions used for them after quotations, are as follows: The Sacred Wood
(London: Faber & Faber, 1920, reprinted London: Faber & Faber,
309
NOTES to pp. 14–73
1997), SW; For Lancelot Andrewes (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928,
reprinted London: Faber & Faber, 1970), FLA; Selected Essays
(London: Faber & Faber, 1932, reprinted London: Faber & Faber,
1963), SE; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber
& Faber, 1933, reprinted London: Faber & Faber, 1964), UPUC;
After Strange Gods (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), ASG; Essays
Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), EAM; The Idea
of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), ICS; Notes
Towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948),
NDC; On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957, reprinted
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), OPP; To Criticize the
Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1965, reprinted London: Faber &
Faber 1978), TCC.
2. For an excellent account of the journal, see Jason Harding, The
‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Quoted by Stefan Collini, Absent Minds (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), p. 314.
4. For this cultural heritage, see Francis Mulhern, Culture-MetaCulture
(London: Routledge, 2000).
5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1958, reprinted London: Vintage Classics, 2017),
p. 334.
6. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1961), p. 52.
7. Graham Martin, ‘Introduction’, in Graham Martin (ed.), Eliot in
Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 22.
8. Lachlan Mackinnon, ‘Aesthetic certainty’, Times Literary Supplement
(31 January 2020), p. 30.
9. Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2019), p. 186.
10. Quoted in Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination, p. 187.
11. I.A. Richards, ‘Nineteen hundred and now’, in Collected Shorter
Writings 1919–1938, ed. John Constable (London: Routledge, 2001),
p. 178.
12. Barry Cullen, ‘The impersonal objective’, in Ian MacKillop and
Richard Storer (eds), F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents (London:
Continuum, 2005), p. 161.
310
2 I.A. RICHARDS
1. In this chapter I have made use of I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919–
1938, superbly edited by John Constable, which comprises the following
volumes, all published by Routledge in 2001: vol. 1, co-authored with
C.K. Ogden and James Wood, The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922), FA;
vol. 2, co-authored with C.K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (1923);
vol. 3, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), PLC; vol. 4, Practical
Criticism, PC; vol. 5, Mencius on the Mind (1932), MM; vol. 6, Coleridge
on Imagination (1934), CI; vol. 7, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936),
PR; vol. 8, Interpretation in Teaching (1938), IT; vol. 9, Collected Shorter
Writings 1919–1938, CSW; vol. 10, I.A. Richards and his Critics, RC.
I have also used I.A. Richards, Speculative Instruments (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), SI. The abbreviations given after some
of these titles are those used in the text after quotations. The most
exhaustive study of Richards is John Paul Russo (ed.), I.A. Richards: His
Life and Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Among the more illuminating of the many critical studies available is
W.H.N. Hotopf, Language, Thought and Comprehension: A Case Study
of the Writings of I.A. Richards (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1965).
2. Quoted by Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 303.
3. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), p. 43.
4. See Basil Willey, ‘I.A. Richards and Coleridge’, in Reuben Brower,
Helen Vendler and John Hollander (eds), I.A. Richards: Essays in his
Honor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 232.
5. See Justus Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York:
Dover Publications, 1955), p. 99.
6. Ken Hirschkop, Linguistic Turns 1890–1950 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), p. 167.
7. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 51.
8. Geoffrey Hartman, ‘The dream of communication’, in Brower et al.,
I.A. Richards, p. 167.
9. Michael Moriarty, ‘The longest cultural journey’, in Christopher
Prendergast (ed.), Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 100.
311
10. I am reporting here on Richards’s own views of Mencius and the

Chinese language in general, without the competence to assess the
validity of his judgements.
11. I.A. Richards, ‘Semantic frontiersman’, in Roma Gill (ed.), William
Empson: The Man and His Work (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 100.
3 WILLIAM EMPSON
1. Quoted in John Paul Russo (ed.), I.A. Richards: His Life and
Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 526.
The works by Empson quoted in this chapter, along with the abbre-
viations used for them after quotations, are as follows: Seven Types
of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930, reprinted
London: Penguin, 1961), STA; Some Versions of Pastoral (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1935, reprinted London: Penguin, 1966),
SVP; The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus,
1951, reprinted London: Penguin, 1985), SCW; Milton’s God
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), MG; Using Biography
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), UB; Argufying:
Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London:
Hogarth Press, 1988), A.
2. See Haffenden, ‘Introduction’ to Argufying, p. 60.
3. William Empson, The Face of the Buddha, ed. Rupert Arrowsmith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
4. Paul Fry, ‘Empson’s Satan: an ambiguous character of the seventh
type’, in Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp (eds), William Empson:
The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p. 156.
5. Norris and Mapp, William Empson, ‘Introduction’.
6. John Haffenden, William Empson: vol. 1, Among the Mandarins
7. Haffenden, William Empson: vol. 1, p. 204.
8. Michael Wood, On Empson (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2017), p. 94.
9. Haffenden, William Empson: vol. 1, p. 4.
10. See Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini (eds), ‘Introduction’ to
William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
312
11. Quoted by Wood, On Empson, p. 145.

12. F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), p. 80.
13. What I hope is a rather less crude account of sacrifice can be found in
Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2018).
14. See, for example, Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 111–13.
15. See Thaventhiran and Collini, ‘Introduction’.
16. Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary
Criticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 86.
17. The comment is by Frank Kermode, on the dust jacket of Empson’s
Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984).
4 F.R. LEAVIS
1. Quoted by Ian MacKillop, F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London:

Penguin, 1997), p. 207.
2. The works by Leavis quoted in this chapter, along with the abbrevia-
tions used for them after quotations, are as follows: New Bearings in
English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932, reprinted London:
Chatto & Windus, 1961), NB; For Continuity (Cambridge: Minority
Press, 1933), FC; Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English
Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936, reprinted London: Chatto
& Windus, 1969), R; Education and the University (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1943), EU; The Great Tradition (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1948, reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), GT;
(ed.), Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London: Chatto & Windus,
1950, reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
MBC; The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952,
reprinted London: Faber & Faber, 2008), CP; D.H. Lawrence: Novelist
(London Chatto & Windus, 1955, reprinted Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978), DHL; ‘Anna Karenina’ and Other Essays (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1967), AK; with Q.D. Leavis, Lectures in
America (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, reprinted in Nor Shall
My Sword ), LA; with Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1970), DN; Nor Shall My Sword (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1972), NSS; The Living Principle (London: Chatto &
313
Windus, 1975), LP; Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), TC.
3. For an excellent account of this and other theoretical topics in Leavis’s
work, see Barry Cullen, ‘The impersonal objective’, in Ian MacKillop
and Richard Storer (eds), F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents (London:
Continuum, 2005).
4. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950
(London: Vintage Classics, 2017), p. 265.
5. Quoted in MacKillop, F.R. Leavis, p. 169.
6. See Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 72.
7. The words are from Leavis’s collaborator Denys Thompson, quoted
by Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (London: New Left
Books, 1979), p. 128.
8. Quoted by Mulhern, pp. 24–5.
9. The works in question include Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture
(Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930), with Denys Thompson, Culture
and Environment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), For Continuity
(1933), Education and the University (1943) and English Literature in
Our Time and the University (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).
Q.D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1932) is another key work in this area.
10. Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 270.
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 10.
12. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
13. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 109.
14. Denys Thompson, quoted in Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’,
p. 102.
15. ‘Scrutiny: a retrospect’, Scrutiny, vol. 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963), p. 4.
16. It might be thought an example of vulgar Freudianism to see in some
of Leavis’s key critical terms – vital, sane, robust, vigorous, muscular
and so on – an unconscious compensation for his disability. There
might also be some truth in it.
17. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books,
1979), p. 66.
314
5 RAYMOND WILLIAMS
1. Reported to me by Williams himself.

2. The term used nowadays is ‘continuing education’, since regular
students are adults as well.
3. See Dai Smith, Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale (Cardigan:
Parthian, 2008), a biography of Williams’s career up to 1961.
4. The works by Williams quoted in this chapter, along with the abbrevia-
tions used for them after quotations, are as follows: Drama from Ibsen to
Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952, reprinted London: Chatto &
Windus, 1961), DIE; Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1958, reprinted London: Vintage Classics, 2017), CS; The
Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), LR; Modern
Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), MT; Drama from Ibsen to
Brecht (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968, reprinted London: Hogarth
Press, 1996), DIB; The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1970), EN; The Country and the City (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1973), CC; Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976, reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), K;
Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ML;
Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), PL; Problems in
Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books, 1980), PMC;
Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), WS; Resources of Hope, ed.
Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), RH; The Politics of Modernism
(London: Verso, 1989), PM; Raymond Williams on Culture and Society,
ed. Jim McGuigan (London: Sage, 2014), RWCS.
5. Michael Moriarty, ‘The longest cultural journey’, in Christopher
Prendergast (ed.), Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 92.
6. In most Marxist thought, hegemony refers to all the ways in which a
ruling class secures the consent of the rest of society to be governed,
which might include such strategies as uses of the tax system or the
granting of civil rights. Ideology is one part of hegemony, concerned
with how consent is secured through the diffusion of values, sentiments
and beliefs. On this view, there would be no point in replacing ideology
with hegemony, as Williams does, because it already includes it.
7. Williams chiefly has in mind here the work of the Marxist philoso-
pher Louis Althusser, for whom ideology is pervasive throughout
social existence and always will be. Williams mistakenly takes this to
315
mean that all individuals are imprisoned by false or distorted social

ideas, and that there is no possibility of this ever changing. But by
ideology Althusser means, in effect, lived experience. This may not be
much use as a definition, but it does not suggest that false conscious-
ness is universal, and is here to stay.
8. See Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker (eds), From Culture to Revolution
(London: Sheed & Ward, 1968), p. 298.
9. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983),
p. xvii. On the question of ‘voice’ in Williams’s writing, see David
Simpson, ‘Raymond Williams: feeling for structures, voicing “history” ’,
in Prendergast (ed.), Cultural Materialism.
316
Index
Addison, Joseph, 231 Bradley, F.H., 37, 42, 46, 51, 52,
adult education movement, 257, 54, 209
258 Brecht, Bertolt, 261, 263
Akenside, Mark, 24 British Union of Fascists, 29
Andrewes, Lancelot, 54 Brontë, Emily, 211, 305
Aristotle, 96, 295 Brontë sisters, 285–6
Arnold, Matthew, 43, 106, 123, 214, Brooke, Rupert, 211
256, 272 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 25
Auden, W.H., 162, 199, 212 Browning, Robert, 68
Augustine, St, 114, 149 Bunyan, John, 208, 220, 232
Augustan age, 198, 231 Burke, Edmund, 268, 272, 304
Austen, Jane: F.R. Leavis on, 198, 221, Byron, George, Lord, 24, 199, 210
222, 223, 224, 230, 254; Raymond
Williams on, 286–7 Cambridge University English Faculty,
avant-garde movements, 104 1–8, 80–1, 83, 86, 135, 252–3
Ayer, A.J., 191 Carew, Thomas, 231, 292
Carlyle, Thomas, 269, 272
Basic English, 84, 85 Carroll, Lewis, Alice books, 154, 183,
Baudelaire, Charles, 21, 53, 61 184, 188
Beckett, Samuel, 218 Cecil, Lord David, 223
Benjamin, Walter, 28, 62 Chapman, George, 69
Bentham, Jeremy, 95–6, 239–40 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 198
Bentley, Richard, 184 Chekhov, Anton, 262
Blackmur, R.P., 180 Clare, John, 203
Blake, William, 40–1, 77, 268 classicism, 59–62
Bloomsbury Group, 199, 233 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 203
Bottrall, Ronald, 221 Cobbett, William, 268
317
I ndex
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: F.R. Leavis classicism, 59–62; conservatism, 21,

on, 199; Fancy and Imagination, 30, 55, 77; conversion to Church of
70; I.A. Richards on, 115, 120, 127; England, 15, 46; cosmopolitanism,
and literary criticism, 78, 87; 83; on critical method, 163; on
Raymond Williams on, 268, 272; criticism and theory, 78–9; dislike
Biographia Literaria, 298 of Milton, 38, 41, 54, 67, 73–4;
Collini, Stefan, 65, 180, 189 dissociation of sensibility, 49,
Collins, William, 67 68–70; editorship of the Criterion,
Conrad, Joseph: F.R. Leavis on, 198, 20, 22–3; elitism, 26, 31; on
221, 222, 225, 230; Raymond Elizabethan and Jacobean
Williams on, 259–60, 289; Heart of dramatists, 33, 41, 62; embraces
Darkness, 221, 259–60 England and Englishness, 14–16;
Constructivism, 104 on the ‘European mind’, 42; on
Criterion (journal), 20, 22–3, 29, 30, feeling in poetry, 50–2; and French
143 Symbolist movement, 74; on I.A.
Crouse, Hetta, 144 Richards, 80, 101; on ideas in
Cullen, Barry, 73 poetry, 75–7; indifference to
cultural relativism, 125 Romanticism, 199; influential
cultural studies, 257, 293–4 status, 12–13; interest in music-hall,
33; on liberalism, 22; literary
Dadaism, 104 put-downs, 24–5; on Marxism, 22;
Dante Alighieri: I.A. Richards on, 90; on meaning in poetry, 54–5; and
T.S. Eliot on, 14, 48, 54, 60–1, objective correlative, 51–3, 71;
63–4, 65, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76–7, 78 outsider status, 15–17, 41; on
Derrida, Jacques, 114, 121 poetic form, 50; on poetic
Dickens, Charles: F.R. Leavis on, 198, impersonality, 42–8, 51, 59; and
220, 226–7, 245; Raymond poetic language, 31–2, 64–7, 73–5;
Williams on, 281–2; Dombey and poetic practice, 35–6, 56–9, 76–7;
Son, 156 and poetic sensation, 71–2; racism,
discourse theory, 114 26; Raymond Williams on, 273;
Donne, John, 38, 68, 75, 112, 173, rejection of individualism, 14, 27,
201, 210 45–7, 57; rejects self-determination,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5 28–9; on the Russian revolution,
Dryden, John, 67, 198 29; self-assurance, 23–4; self-
Durkheim, Emile, 81 consciousness, 26; sexual ambiguity,
16–17; on Shakespeare, 41, 42, 50,
Education Act (1944), 237 62, 75; social views, 17–23; on
Eisenstein, Sergei, 83 tradition, 33–9, 57; on unity of
Eliot, George, 25, 198, 215, 221, form and content, 53–4; on wit, 49
222–3, 230, 254, 282 Writings: ‘A Cooking Egg’, 74; After
Eliot, Thomas Stearns: admiration for Strange Gods, 45–6, 72; To Criticize
Dante, 14, 48, 54, 60–4, 70, 75, the Critic, 36; essay on Hamlet,
77, 78; Anglo-Catholicism, 13, 51–3; The Family Reunion, 24; Four
21–2, 123; anti-Semitism, 15, 26; Quartets, 47, 60, 61, 66, 75, 208,
background and childhood, 13–14; 219; ‘Gerontion’, 59, 74; The Idea
and the Bloomsbury Group, 233; of a Christian Society (1939), 17;
318
I ndex
‘Little Gidding’, 15; Murder in the Writings: Argufying, 162, 167, 170;
Cathedral, 19; Notes Towards the Essays on Renaissance Literature, 164;
Definition of Culture (1948), 17; On The Face of the Buddha, 145; Milton’s
Poetry and Poets, 32, 54, 70, 78; God, 98, 145, 158, 168, 184, 185,
Selected Essays, 80; ‘The Hollow 192; Seven Types of Ambiguity, 143,
Men’, 20; ‘The Love Song of J. 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 158,
Alfred Prufrock’, 23, 37, 53, 69–70, 168–75, 188; Some Versions of the
72, 212; ‘Tradition and the Pastoral, 151–2, 153, 154, 162, 165,
Individual Talent’, 33–6, 55; The 167, 175–88; The Structure of
Use of Poetry and the Use of Complex Words, 115, 142, 150, 157,
Criticism, 78; The Waste Land, 16, 158, 163, 180, 188–91, 298; Using
23, 33, 47, 56, 57, 59, 61, 70, Biography, 161, 167
171–3, 208–9 Expressionism, 104, 263
Empson, William: on Alice in
Wonderland, 152, 162, 183, 184, Faber & Faber, 15, 16
188; on ambiguity, 155–6; anti- fascism, 29–30
Symbolism, 74; atheism, 160–1; Fielding, Henry, 167
attitude to theory, 163; on author’s Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 231
intentions, 162; background and Flaubert, Gustav, 225
education, 142–4; at the BBC, 144; formalism, 225
and Benthamite ethics, 157; on Forster, E.M., 234
character in the novel, 226; dislike Frege, Gottlob, 191
of F.R. Leavis, 195; on Eliot’s The Freud, Sigmund, 53, 57, 98, 168, 295
Waste Land, 171–3; on Elizabethan Futurism, 104
literature, 153, 182; on empathy,
149; enthusiasm for science, 160; Gardner, Helen, 82
historical linguistics, 188–90; Gaskell, Elizabeth, 220
hostility to Christianity, 160–1, Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera, 184,
178–9, 185–6; on human impulses, 188, 189
100; humour, 168, 170; influence Georgian movement, 211
of I.A. Richards, 135, 142, 160–1; Gibbon, Edward, 67
interest in Buddhism, 144, 145, Gramsci, Antonio, 285
157, 178–9, 184; lack of interest in Graves, Robert, 169–70, 221
literary tradition, 194; liberal Gray, Thomas, 67, 176–7
individualism, 157; member of the
Heretics Club, 143; on Milton, Haffendon, John, 168, 171
159, 165, 185, 193; on order and Hall, Stuart, 303
unity, 150–5; on the pastoral, 165, Hamsun, Knut, 235
175–88; patronage of T.S. Eliot, Hardy, Thomas, 41, 83, 211, 220,
143; poetry, 143, 159; rationalism, 245, 287–9
146–9; on Shakespeare, 159–60, Hartman, Geoffrey, 102
168–70, 184–5, 187; and social Hazlitt, William, 24, 204
class, 142, 165, 166–7; socialism, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 96
157–8, 163–4; teaches in Japan and Heidegger, Martin, 119, 194, 271
China, 144, 145–6; writing style, Herbert, George, ‘The Sacrifice’, 159,
167–8 173–5
319
I ndex
hermeneutics, 114 228–30, 235; political and social

Herrick, Robert, 243 views, 228, 272; Raymond Williams
Hirschkop, Ken, 88 on, 270–1, 289, 290; T.S. Eliot on,
Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 67, 112–13 24, 40, 75
Hoggart, Richard, 65, 245, 257 Leavis, Frank Raymond: admiration
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 35, 83, 153, for D.H. Lawrence, 20, 40, 199,
199, 203, 205, 211, 256 209, 217–18, 228–30, 235; attitude
Horace, 24 to science, 242–3; career and
Hough, Graham, 222 controversial status, 195–7, 236–7;
champions poetry of T.S. Eliot, 199;
Ibsen, Henrik, 262, 263 and civility, 233–4; critical method,
Idealism, 91, 121–2, 209 212–15; cultural pessimism, 200;
Imagist poets, 118 dislike of Empson, 195; dislike of
intentionality, 113 Milton, 198, 205, 206–7; dismisses
concept of literary value, 90;
Jacobean dramatists, 33, 41, 62, 64–5, editorship of Scrutiny, 235–9; on
68, 198, 243 Eliot as a ‘literary bolshevik’, 12–13;
James, Henry: F.R. Leavis on, 198, on Eliot’s The Waste Land, 208–9,
211, 221, 224–5, 230–1, 235, 254; 256; and the ‘fall’ from organic
Raymond Williams on, 289–90; society, 243–8; on human desire,
T.S. Eliot on, 16 186; and impersonality, 208–9; on
James, William, 92 the individual and society, 232–3;
Johnson, Samuel, 37, 62, 70, 77, 198, influence of T S Eliot, 63–4, 200–1,
208, 233; ‘The Vanity of Human 205, 213; legacy, 254–6; and
Wishes’, 203, 205 literary criticism, 249–50; literary
Jonson, Ben, 58, 210, 231, 292 judgements, 198–201, 210–12,
Joyce, James: F.R. Leavis on, 83, 199, 220–3; on literature and life,
220, 225; outsider status, 16, 17; 216–20; ‘Little Englander’, 204,
Raymond Williams on, 289–90; 254; and Marxism, 251–2; moral
T.S. Eliot on, 40, 56; Ulysses, 83, ideals, 96; moralism, 219–20;
199, 225, 262, 290 parochialism, 146; and poetic
language, 201–8; on Raymond
Kant, Immanuel, 90, 96 Williams, 257; relation between
Keats, John, 101, 168, 199, 203; ‘To author and work, 208; repudiation
Autumn’, 202; Ode to a Nightingale, of I.A. Richards, 234; role in
215 establishing English literature
Kermode, Frank, 124 studies, 254; on the role of the
King, Martin Luther, 99 university, 250–3; sexism, 254; on
Kipling, Rudyard, 17, 31 Shakespeare, 210, 256; writing
Kulturkritik tradition, 26–7 style, 10
Writings: The Common Pursuit, 79,
Landor, Walter Savage, 211 221, 235; For Continuity, 238–9;
Langland, William, 246 Culture and Environment, 236; The
Language Research Inc, 84 Great Tradition, 220–7, 254; Mass
Lawrence, D.H.: F.R. Leavis on, 20, Civilization and Minority Culture,
198, 199, 209, 217–18, 221, 225, 239; New Bearings in English Poetry,
320
I ndex
35, 221; Nor Shall My Sword, 253; New Criticism, 48, 113, 136
‘Two Cultures? The Significance of Newman, John Henry, 272
C.P. Snow’, 240–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 89, 121
Leavis, Queenie Dorothy, 196, 227, nominalism, 112
237–8, 245, 247, 249; Fiction and Norris, Christopher, 147, 191
the Reading Public, 257 North, Joseph, 94
Lewis, C.S., 87, 189
Lloyd, Marie, 33 O’Casey, Sean, 261
Locke, John, 193 Ogden, C.K., 84, 89, 202
Lowell, Robert, 144, 159 Olivier, Laurence, 256
Lowry, Malcolm, 4 ‘organic society’, nostalgia for, 243–8,
Lukács, Georg, 264 271
Orrom, Michael, 260
Machiavelli, 20 Orwell, George, 65, 144, 268; 1984,
MacNeice, Louis, 143 84, 144–5
Macpherson, C.B., 247 Ovid, 246
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 66
Mao Zedong, 144, 165 Peirce, C.S., 88
Marlowe, Christopher, 49 Picasso, Pablo, 102
Marvell, Andrew, 49, 158, 231; ‘The Plato, Republic, 85
Garden’, 187 Plumb, J.H., 241
Marx, Karl, 63, 71, 96, 99, 103, 118, Pope, Alexander, 60, 198, 206, 231–2
248 postmodernism, 125, 140, 222, 292
Marxism, 63, 251, 294–7, 300 post-structuralism, 302
Massinger, Philip, 71–2 Pound, Ezra, 14, 143, 199, 212, 256
Maurras, Charles, 15
media and mass communication, 276 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 80–1, 86,
Meredith, George, 211, 220 135
Metaphysical poets, 44, 68, 69, 70, 198
Middleton, Thomas, 65 Ransom, John Crowe, 143
Mill, John Stuart, 193; On Liberty, reception theory, 125–6
103 Renaissance, 62–3
Milton, John: Empson on, 159, 165, Richards, Ivor Armstrong:
192–3; F.R. Leavis on, 206–7; background, 80; at Cambridge
Paradise Lost, 54, 73–4, 128, 145, English Faculty, 80–3, 86; and close
152, 159, 185, 193, 206; T.S. Eliot reading, 134–5; collaboration with
on, 28, 38, 41, 54, 67, 73–4 Walt Disney studios, 85; and
modernism, 4, 6, 34, 42, 66, 265, 273 communication, 84–5, 131, 136;
Montaigne, 67 Confucian influences, 87, 97, 121;
Moriarty, Michael, 116, 283 cosmopolitanism, 83; on critics, 82;
Morris, William, 270, 273 cultural pessimism, 137–9; and
Murdoch, Rupert, 277 cultural relativism, 125, 131;
music-hall, 33 egalitarianism, 90; English-language
teaching, 84–5; ethics and morality,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 246 98–100, 109–11; evaluation of
naturalism, 260–3 literary works, 95–8; as founder of
321
I ndex
modern literary criticism, 86–7; on Rossetti, Christina, 203, 210–11

grammar, 89; influence of Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 211
Coleridge, 87, 109, 115, 120, 127; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 295
influence of Utilitarianism, 91; Ruskin, John, 269–70, 272
influence on education, 83–5; Russell, Bertrand, 155, 191
influence on Empson, 142; and
intentionality, 113; Saintsbury, George, 24
internationalism, 82–4, 131–2; on Sappho, 60
language, 87–90, 116–19; Saussure, Ferdinand de, 112
liberalism, 85–6, 90, 99, 102–4; Scott, Walter, 220
materialism, 91–2, 121–2; and Scrutiny (journal), 235–9, 243–53,
meaning, 111–16, 127–9; member 257
of the Heretics Club, 85; on semiotics, 112, 125
metaphor, 119–21; moral ideals, 96; Shakespeare, William: Empson on,
mountaineering, 81; on myth, 153, 159–60, 168–9, 187; F.R.
123–4; and nominalism, 111–12; Leavis on, 207–8, 210, 256; T.S.
physiology of poetry, 71; poetic Eliot on, 41, 42, 50; Antony and
language, 107; poetry as salvation, Cleopatra, 172
123; practical criticism, 3, 86, Shaw, George Bernard, 261
134–6; pragmatism, 92, 111; and Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 75, 170, 199,
pseudo-statements, 105–11; and 210
psychology, 93–5; and role of the Sidney, Philip, 246–7
reader, 125–7; on science as myth, Smith, Adam, 295
107–8, 122; and semantic Snow, C.P., 240–2
instability, 115–16; as speaker of Spender, Stephen, 143
verse, 117; supporter of League of Spenser, Edmund, 159, 198
Nations, 131; T.S. Eliot on, 80; on Spinoza, Baruch, 44
tone in poetry, 129–30; visits to St Louis, Missouri, 13
China, 82–3, 125, 130–1; visits to Stephen, Leslie, 238
Japan, 82, 83; writing style, 10 Sterne, Laurence, 220–1
Writings: The Foundations of Stevens, Wallace, 75–6
Aesthetics, 96; How to Read a Page, Strindberg, August, 262, 263
115; Interpretation in Teaching, 113; structuralism, 302
The Meaning of Meaning, 88–9; Surrealism, 104
Mencius on the Mind, 130–4; ‘Our Swift, Jonathan, 186, 198, 208, 218
Lost Leaders’, 94; The Philosophy of Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 205
Rhetoric, 113; Practical Criticism Symbolist Movement, 74
(1929), 82, 92, 125, 134–7; The Synge, J.M., 261
Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924), 82, 95; Speculative Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 68, 102, 205,
Instruments, 89 210
Richardson, Samuel, 220 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 220,
Riding, Laura, 170 256, 284
Rockefeller Foundation, 85 Thomas, Dylan, 55, 143
Romanticism, 44–5, 198, 268–9, 302 Thomas, Edward, 212, 256
Rosenberg, Isaac, 212, 256 Thompson, Denys, 236
322
I ndex
Thompson, E.P., 257, 303 tragedy, 265–7; and the working

Thomson, James, 304 class, 278; writing style, 10, 306–7
Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger’s Writings: Communications, 277; The
Tragedy, 65 Country and the City (1971), 292–3,
Trollope, Anthony, 220 304; Culture and Society (1958),
Trotsky, Leon, 28, 251 259, 263, 267–76, 280, 293,
307–8; ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (essay),
Utilitarianism, 91, 95–6, 226–7, 275; Drama from Ibsen to Eliot
239 (1952), 259, 260–1, 304; Drama in
Performance (1954), 259; The
Virgil, 59–60, 292 English Novel from Dickens to
Voltaire, 67 Lawrence, 281, 285–91, 304,
305–6; Keywords, 115, 165, 298–9;
Walzer, Michael, 306 The Long Revolution, 263–4, 279,
Weber, Max, 103 280, 291, 292, 293, 294–7;
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 101 Marxism and Literature (1977),
Willey, Basil, 86 295–6; Modern Tragedy (1966),
Williams, Raymond: background and 265–7, 295; Politics and Letters, 277,
career, 258–9; on convention, 286; 300; Preface to Film (1954), 260;
cultural materialism, 294–7, 300–3; Reading and Criticism (1950), 259
dismisses aestheticism, 305; distrust Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 94, 109,
of theory, 302–3; and drama, 115, 129, 138, 190, 191
259–63; and F.R. Leavis, 254–5, Wood, Michael, 168
262; historicism, 303–4; hostility to Woolf, Virginia, 22, 199, 220, 233,
modernism, 290–1; humanity, 307; 238, 289, 291
on the individual and society, 279; Wordsworth, William, 78, 199, 210,
and Marxism, 262, 283–4, 291, 268
294–7, 300–1; on media and mass Workers’ Educational Association, 258
communication, 276–7; and the Wyatt, Thomas, 203
novel, 280–2, 285–91; and poetic
form, 50; and realism, 264–5; Yeats, W.B., 18, 29, 40, 162, 199, 203,
sexuality and the body, 291–2; 212, 222, 256
socialism, 257, 275, 293; and Young, Robert J.C., 247
‘structure of feeling’, 65–6, 97,
282–6; and tradition, 28, 39; on Zola, Émile, 262
323
324

Critical Revolutionaries - Five Critics Who Changed The Way We Read

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FIVE

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930345

3 William Empson 142

4 F.R. Leavis 195

5 Raymond Williams 257

The conviction underlying this book is that a vital tradition of

Britain and beyond. Ironically, however, what one might call

presence felt in an institution which had traditionally been domi-

pioneers knew at first hand. Richards came over to English from

tread the formalist path and treat literature as though it were an

language, persons, values and relationships could be treated as ends

a professor’.2 Only Leavis stuck to criticism, though even he consid-

cathedral. Richards’s brisk, rather bloodless prose is quite distinct

For much of the twentieth century, the most revered, influential

‘literary Bolshevik’, audaciously avant-garde and bafflingly opaque;

shortly become an exile in reality. (The poet whom he came to revere

European but, like the United States, ethnically Anglo-Saxon. His

gay pornographic verse among a coterie of friends) reinforced this

common; but though society will thus constitute an organic unity, it

which for most people are a matter of habitual behaviour. The

Charles Baudelaire that it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Evil

The whole of modern literature, including a certain ‘Mrs Woolf ’, is

English poetry, he asks in typically mischievous spirit, ‘What about

repudiates in any case. ‘I have no general theory of my own’ (SE,

By this point, the enlightened reader may well be wondering

inherits.4 Many an eminent twentieth-century intellectual held

example. ‘We Marxists have always lived in tradition’, observes

are, to be sure, affinities between fascist ideology and Eliot’s brand of

classical ‘European mind’, Eliot laments in the final edition of the

– even, indirectly, to those who don’t read poetry at all. This, at

to give pleasure to as large and diverse a mass of people as possible;

celebrated critical statements of the twentieth century. For such a

The existing [literary] monuments form an ideal order among

An example of this backward transformation can be found in F.R.

worth posing, since Eliot’s tradition, unlike the socialist movement

Conformity is the decisive criterion. But how exactly does ‘Prufrock’

It would seem that Eliot tries to combine a classical sense of

in the present. This is another way in which the supposedly timeless

victim to the cranky, fanciful, extravagant and eccentric. D.H.

Eliot’s desire to belong – to a church, tradition or social Establishment

– about the way he can speak in such grandly generalising terms of

or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations’

subjectivity. The Romantics lived through an age of industrial and

redeemed by divine grace; yet selfhood in the post-conversion Four

reader; instead, there must be a necessary relation between the work

(SE, p. 76). This is the comment of a master craftsman, not simply

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by

is a necessary rather than contingent link between most of our states

form. Subjective emotion or experience represents the content of a

English, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – ‘a monstrous masterpiece’,

Poets, in Eliot’s view, must be both the most primitive and

finally arranged their words in an appropriate form, they can purge

‘Gerontion’. If modern reality is spiritually bankrupt, one can

The idea of poetic impersonality is closely related to Eliot’s self-

registering a sterility and spiritual devastation which is nearer to

accomplish. We shall be looking more closely at this aspect of Eliot’s

of a wealth of complex feeling and exhilarating new modes of

which (so we are told) manifests a unified sensibility more strikingly

Sensory and linguistic development are sides of the same coin. It is

criticism of Raymond Williams, an adversary of Eliot in most other

of innovation. We are the servants of our discourse, not its masters;