The last public lecture Q. D. Leavis gave and saw published in her lifetime was the Cheltenham Festival lecture “The Englishness of the English Novel.” If Dr. Leavis were to have given a lecture on “the Englishness of English Poetry”—hardly a Leavisian title, I should have thought, until I recalled his essay on “The Americanness of American Literature”—­William Wordsworth would surely figure in it as a key name or, to use a Poundian phrase, a key “exhibit,” just as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens figure in Q. D. Leavis’s lecture. And, if only non‑dramatic poetry were in question, perhaps the key figure. Of course Leavis didn’t write on Wordsworth as much or as often as he did on Lawrence or Eliot; nor did he, in matters relating strictly to form, technique, and style, consider Wordsworth as important, or, at least, as interesting as, say, Donne, Pope, or Hopkins. And insofar as he responded to the mystical, the religious, or the visionary in poetry, he valued Blake more than Wordsworth; one could go even so far as to suggest that he valued Blake even more than Eliot.

Yet Wordsworth’s poetry at its best meant a great deal to Leavis. What it meant is as difficult to pinpoint or illustrate as it is to give, in Leavis’s own words, “a satisfying account of Wordsworth’s greatness.” Leavis responded to Wordsworth’s poetry at its best, with the utmost powers of perception, analysis, and judgment at his command; and he wrote about it with an unusual degree of sympathy and inwardness. In fact there is no major poet except Shakespeare vis-à-vis whom Leavis had fewer critical reservations than Wordsworth. The earlier essay of his from Revaluation (1936)—the weightiest and the most original in that volume—is a landmark in Wordsworth criticism, and more significant than any other single piece of Wordsworth criticism since Arnold’s es­say, not excepting James Smith’s Scrutiny essay that Leavis himself admired.

After Revaluation Leavis’s critical in­terest shifted to and was mostly focused on T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But in later years he returned to Wordsworth. He gave seminars on him at York Univer­sity; delivered the “Wordsworth Bicentenary Lecture” at Bristol Univer­sity; and, in the last two years of his life, whatever he was engaged in writing was directly or indirectly connected with Wordsworth, whom he came to see both as a corrective and as a supplement to Eliot—and not least so because like Eliot, Wordsworth too had been responsible for altering expression.

In his earlier essay Leavis was con­cerned with discriminating not only be­tween Wordsworth’s poetry and his philosophy, but also between critical recognition of Wordsworth’s greatness as such and its “current acceptance, the estab­lished habit of many years.” He agreed with Arnold that Wordsworth’s philoso­phy was an “illusion” and set out to dem­onstrate what constituted its reality and its greatness. “If not a philosophy,” Leavis observed, Wordsworth had “a wisdom to communicate.” Leavis’s own strength and originality as a critic lie in the fact that while dealing with Wordsworth’s poetry, he doesn’t feel called upon, as René Wellek had hinted in his criticism of Revaluation he should have, to discuss and interpret that wisdom in terms of abstract moral, philosophical, or ethical concepts or assumptions, nor does he evaluate the poetry merely as a vehicle of that wisdom. And it is precisely what is unparaphrasable about that wisdom, and the way it works into and through Wordsworth’s poetry, that engages Leavis as a critic (i.e., as an anti-philoso­pher). Even what he himself calls the “convincingly expository tone and man­ner” of Wordsworth’s philosophical po­etry evokes in Leavis what is primarily and essentially a critical rather than a philosophical response. Such poetry, Leavis points out, might give one the impression of offering “paraphrasable arguments,” but a real critic cannot re­ally paraphrase it, and it would be worse than futile to try. And this because Wordsworth’s triumph is precisely “to command the kind of attention he requires and to permit no other.” What that kind of attention means it takes a literary critic, an ideal reader, to per­ceive and determine, and this is what Leavis, in his first essay on Wordsworth, does so superbly.

He sets out to work his way into what he calls “an essential Wordsworthian habit”—namely, that of producing “the mood, feeling and experience,” and at the same time appearing to be “giving an explanation of it.” Such a habit enables Wordsworth to register his kinship with the universe, “inwardly through the ris­ing springs of life and outwardly in an interplay of recognition and response.” Without insisting on the demarcation between poetry and philosophical argu­ment as such, Leavis assumes the demarcation when he comments on the most overtly philosophical and discursive pas­sages of The Prelude. For instance, he notices how the verse “evenly medita­tive in tone and movement, goes on and on, without dialectical suspense and cri­sis or rise and fall”—verse in which not only thought is presented in disjunction from poetry, but also even the language it is presented in hasn’t succeeded in exer­cising its own discipline on the thought expressed. It is by virtue of this discipline that creative literature becomes the lan­guage of thought—a phenomenon that makes Leavis bracket Wordsworth with Eliot. For “the withdrawn contemplative collectedness of Wordsworth’s poetry” and what it represents find their corre­spondence or counterpart in Eliot’s po­etry as exemplified by such a line as “Thus devoted, concentrated in pur­pose.” For Leavis, his bracketing Wordsworth and Eliot became increas­ingly charged with a significance that was at once critical and historical. For both Wordsworth and Eliot had not merely effected a revolution in poetic diction; they were also engaged in “thinking” creatively in and through their po­etry, and the presentation of “thought” in Wordsworth’s poetry, as in Eliot’s, demanded, “not only what the full attention of the working mind suggests,” but also “a sustained and alert delicacy of attention, a quick and delicate responsiveness of full apprehension.”

Leavis himself impressively displays such attention in his dealings with Wordsworth, and to be aware of the vary­ing degrees and manifestations of this attention is a proof of one’s being instinc­tively in sympathy with the critical grounds on which Leavis advances Wordsworth’s claim to greatness and originality. One factor that made a funda­mental difference to Leavis’s attitude to Wordsworth is the latter’s embodying in his poetry “a type and a standard of human normality, a way of life”; so that what Leavis says concerning the theme of time in Four Quartets—“an attitude towards time is an attitude towards life”—one can apply to Wordsworth’s “preoc­cupation with sanity and normality . . . at a level and in a spirit that it seems appro­priate to call religious,” and say that Wordsworth’s attitude to sanity and normality stands for and amounts to his attitude to life. Coupled with, and to a large extent both determined by and determining this preoccupation was Wordsworth’s handling of his own thought and experience in poetry, which entailed a creative use of language, so that the language of poetry becomes the language of thought at its most subtle and perceptive, and it has, according to Leavis, a bearing upon life, upon actual living.

Hence, in his attempt to give a “satis­fying” account of Wordsworth’s great­ness, Leavis didn’t lay as much stress, as perhaps Wordsworth himself would have laid, on the mystic element in his poetry, or on “the visionary moments” or “spots of time,” but on Wordsworth’s “essential sanity and normality”—the sanity and normality of one who was, unlike Shelley, “surely and centrally poised” and whose “firm hold upon the world of common perception” was the more notable be­cause he knew “falling from us, vanishings, blank misgivings.” And yet there was nothing complacent about such sureness in Wordsworth. It rested “consciously over unsounded depths and among mysteries, itself a mystery.” The analysis of what constitutes the sanity and normality in Wordsworth’s poetry is part of Leavis’s account of Wordsworth’s poetic greatness, and of his critical dem­onstration as to how Wordsworth’s “inveterately human and moral preoccupation” leads to the creation of thought no less than that of poetry.