His father was a cultured man who ran a shop in Cambridge that sold pianos and other musical instruments,[4] and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life.

Rouse was a classicist and known for his "direct method", a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek.

After the introduction of conscription in 1916, when his brother Ralph also joined the FAU,[7] he benefited from the blanket recognition of the members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors.

Despite graduating with first-class honours in his final examinations, Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship and instead embarked on a PhD, then an unusual career move for an aspiring academic.

[14] In 1927 Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and, when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was much influenced by the demands of teaching.

Scrutiny provided a forum for (on occasion) identifying important contemporary work and (more commonly) reviewing the traditional canon by serious criteria.

This criticism was informed by a teacher's concern to present the essential to students, taking into consideration time constraints and a limited range of experience.

He has been frequently (but often erroneously) associated with the American school of New Critics, a group which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry over, or even instead of, an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications.

New Bearings, devoted principally to Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, was an attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry.

Leavis found Bentham to epitomize the scientific drift of culture and social thinking, which was in his view the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed.

[22] Leavis's ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence and abilities were widely decried in the British press by public figures such as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling.

As Leavis continued his career he became increasingly dogmatic, belligerent and paranoid,[25] and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to be "fanatic and rancid in manner".

I think it is a pity he became so intemperate in his views and was extravagant in his admirations, as I had, in the earlier stages of the magazine, felt great sympathy for its editor.

[25]Leavis's uncompromising zeal in promoting his views of literature drew mockery from quarters of the literary world involved in imaginative writing.

[27] Leavis (as "Simon Lacerous") and Scrutiny (as "Thumbscrew") were satirized by Frederick Crews in the chapter "Another Book to Cross off your List" of his lampoon of literary criticism theory The Pooh Perplex A Student Casebook.

"[28] Tom Sharpe, in his novel The Great Pursuit, depicts a ludicrous series of events ending in the hero teaching Leavisite criticism as a religion in the American Bible Belt.

[1] In the mock epic heroic poem by Clive James, Peregrine Pykke, the eponymous hero studies literature under the prophet F R Looseleaf at Downing College, Cambridge.

Stories of Frank Leavis and his harridan of a wife Queenie snubbing, ostracising, casting out and calumniating anyone who offended them went the round, and those English academics at the university who had been in their orbit were callously dismissed by the elite as dead Leavisites.

[30]The literary critic John Gross accuses Leavis of "narrowness, spitefulness, dogmatism", "distortion, omission and strident overstatement" and says that "the overall effect of his teaching has plainly been calculated ... to produce many of the characteristics of a religious or ideological sect.

"[31] In 2006, Brooke Allen wrote "In the end, Leavis fell short of his own high humanistic ideals, through intellectual exclusivity and sheer bloody-mindedness, and the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.

In discussing the nature of language and value, Leavis implicitly treats the sceptical questioning that philosophical reflection starts from as an irrelevance from his standpoint as a literary critic – a position set out in his early exchange with René Wellek (reprinted in The Common Pursuit).

[36] Authors within this "tradition" were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, but excluded Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.