FR Leavis

Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis CH (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was a British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge and later at the University of York.

Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge in 1895, about a decade after T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, literary figures whose reputations he would later contribute to enhancing. His father, Harry Leavis, a cultured man, ran a shop in Cambridge which sold pianos and other musical instruments, and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Leavis was educated at a fee-paying independent school (in English terms a minor Public School), The Perse School, whose headmaster at the time was Dr. W. H. D. Rouse. 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. Though he had some fluency in foreign languages, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority. His extensive reading in the classical languages is not therefore strongly evident in his critical publications.

Leavis was nineteen when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. He left Cambridge after his first year as an undergraduate and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit at York in 1915. After the introduction of conscription in 1916 he benefited from the blanket recognition of the members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors. Leavis is quoted as saying: "But after the Bloody Somme there could be no question for anyone who knew what modern war was like of joining the army."

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