The main aim of this article is to uncover how F. R. Leavis carves out his own theoretical space and re/draws the map of English poetry by re-reading T. S. Eliot’s theory of tradition and the dissociated sensibility. In his well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talents,” Eliot underlines the significance of literary tradition in the development of culture and literature, and valorizes it as an “ideal order” that endlessly re/adjusts and re/organizes itself by merging the new with the existing. Profoundly influenced by Eliot’s criticism and poetry, Leavis published two seminal books, New Bearings in English Poetry and Revalution, in the 1930s, where he thoroughly examines the real value of his contemporary poets as well as the past ones and, thereby, re/constructs the great tradition of English poetry. In the books, Leavis redresses Eliot’s notion of tradition, which allows for the dominating power of the past tradition over the present and individuals, by highlighting that it is a small number of talented individuals that challenge the existing order and establish a new tradition. In doing so, Leavis registers the significance of the active and creative role of the subject in the establishment and revaluation of tradition. Unlike Eliot’s notion of tradition, his theory of the dissociation of sensibility is constantly championed by Leavis, who utilizes it as a significant theoretic tool by which to map out the stream of English poetry. However, this does not mean that Leavis unconditionally embraces Eliot’s theory. Rather, Leavis re-enacts the theory by filling up the theoretic ‘empty gaps’ overlooked by Eliot. One of them is the social background that underlies the dissociation of sensibility. For Leavis, it is not just the socio-political changes around the English Civil War but cultural and intellectual factors, including the decay of the court culture and the development of modern science and modern prose, that lead to the dissociation. Another problem of Eliot’s theory is that it forestalls the possibility of the restoration of the unified sensibility in modern poetry by assuming that it has never recovered itself from the damaging effects of the dissociation. However, for Leavis, it is possibile for great individuals to restore the unified sensibility in the age of the dissociation of sensibility, The poet that fully realizes this, Leavis claims, is no other than Eliot himself, who never takes into serious consideration this possibility.

• 이홍섭(인제대학교) | Hong-Seop Lee