Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

while at the same time, establishing the reputation of Eliot as well as Ezra Pound and
Gerard Manley Hopkins. He particularly admired the fact that by representing “the most
conscious point of the race in his time” (New Bearings 16) modern poets overthrow the
tenets of nineteenth-century poetry, which he perceived to be temporarily dissociated and
over-emphasizing the sensuous and the expressive rather than “wit, play of intellect,
stress of cerebral muscle” (14). But perhaps Leavis’ most influential work as it pertains
to the idea of a “Canon” in literature is The Great Tradition, in which he argues that “the
few really great—the major novelists ... not only change the possibilities of the art for
practitioners and readers, but they are significant in terms of the human awareness they
promote; awareness of the possibilities of life” (10). Yet it appears that like Arnold, he
believes that “great” literature is inseparable from moral consciousness; his selection
names but five novelists —Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and
D.H. Lawrence—who are “all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of
reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity” (18). Interestingly so, the
revisions prompted by Eliot and Leavis would not only influence subsequent orderings
within the so-called “tradition” but would also advance the concept of “minority”
literature which would act subversively to topple established hierarchies; as Guillory
argues, “[t]he status of Eliot’s ‘canon’ (if it can be called that) corresponds exactly to the
status of a minority within literary culture … [poets and writers] who are at the time of
Eliot’s essays are written still relatively marginal to literary culture” (147-8). Yet, as
Guillory points out, this endeavor is clearly not “disinterested” and is heavily tainted with
ideological purposes that would ultimately be revealed as conservative. Not only do the
metaphysical poets championed by Eliot fit adequately within the network of influences
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