Abstract

Philosophers almost by profession are minders of other people's business, that is their intellectual business; which, though a necessary trade, is not always a popular one. So Socrates found long ago. Discretion may therefore seem called for, and still more so in writing of Dr Leavis. Leavis is, so to speak, a hot subject; and not only so in himself, hence to be taken up with caution, but a cause that heat is in other men. Nor is that all; other, harder obstacles remain. It would seem that Leavis explicitly shuts the door on any philosophical approach. Philosophers, broadly speaking, deal in abstractions . Leavis wrote long ago, at the start of Revaluation , ‘No treatment of poetry can be worth much that does not keep very close to the concrete’. That ruling, which might debar my whole enterprise, I can take instead as raising immediately its main theme