There are obvious dangers attendant on any criticism which assumes that there are absolute standards of perfection against which we can measure works of art. The critic who starts off with this assumption is driven as he proceeds to elaborate and define his measuring rod of what art should be. Before long he is in danger of usurping the creative function: we find that he has unconsciously invented a schematic poetry of his own, which is simply the kind of poetry he might have written had he been poet instead of critic. Instead of remaining a student with limited but sensitive reactions to poetry, he has become an unconscious creator with a highly developed sense not of what poetry is but of what it ought to be….

Dr. Leavis seems not so much an example of the poet turned critic because he cannot write poetry as of the...