Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means.

- F. R. Leavis

Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.

- F. R. Leavis

The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact - that is, never to say anything. …

- F. R. Leavis

A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying.

- F. R. Leavis

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they…

- F. R. Leavis

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a…

- F. R. Leavis

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

- F. R. Leavis

The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up y…

- F. R. Leavis