Book description
F.R. Leavis was the most influential literary critic of the English-speaking world in the mid-20th century, and Revaluation, first published in 1936, is the book that made his name. In the years since, especially with the rise of postmodernism, his style and assumptions have become so unfashionable that to encounter them again is positively exhilarating.
This book surveys a vast swath of English poetry, from Donne to the Victorian Romantics. It famously upgrades Donne and Marvell while showing skepticism towards Milton, and offers a complex treatment of the "holy trinity" of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Above all, though, it’s the best exemplar of Leavis’s modus operandi: take particular poems by particular poets, add a rich appreciation of their historical and social circumstances, and try to make convincing judgments about their achievements without deferring to some overarching theory.
Undoubtedly, the Leavis style has dated; if it struck some contemporaries as pedantic and heavy-handed, it seems even more so now. Yet the language is subtle, capable of convoluted yet precise sentences that make unexpected distinctions sharply. Look, for example, at his brilliant analysis of the difference between good and plodding excerpts from Paradise Lost.
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION
I. THE LINE OF WIT
1. Carew and the Line of Wit
2. Cowley
3. Herrick
II. MILTON’S VERSE
1. Proserpin Gath’ring Flow’rs
2. The Verse of Samson Agonistes
III. POPE
Pope’s Satiric Modes
IV. THE AUGUSTAN TRADITION
1. Gray, Thomson, Fancy and Spenser
2. The Ode to Evening and Milton
3. Akenside, Wordsworth and Landor
4. Matthew Green
5. The Coffee-house
6. Without Unseasonable Passions
7. Blake and Ash Wednesday
8. Coleridge’s Beginnings
9. Byron’s Satire
V. WORDSWORTH
1. Arnold, Wordsworth and the Georgians
2. Shelley and Wordsworth
3. A "Lucy" Poem
VI. SHELLEY
1. Coleridge and Mont Blanc
2. Shelley and Othello
3. Swinburne
VII. KEATS
Beauty is Truth
