Leavis was, as I have said, an indulgent teacher, but then he needed to be. As he looked round his latest recruits in the fight against low standards, he must sometimes have felt like a desperate German general in the last days of the Second World War. Many of his seminars were surveys of the main figures in various set periods of English literature, but there were also sessions of what is usually known as ‘practical criticism’. Because this is a term which in a few years is likely to become incomprehensible, it may be worth recording that it derives from the title of a book published in 1929 by I. A. R ichards, one of the founders of the Cambridge English degree and at that time a potent influence on Leavis. Richards had had the idea of distributing to his students, and a few colleagues, a number of short poems and then asking them to write analytical commentaries that made clear which they preferred and why. Crucial was that the authorship of these poems was kept secret. The results constituted the bulk of his book and were meant to ‘prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.’

Downing men had a reputation for being adept at practical criticism. They had, after all, a fine model in Leavis himself, who was a particularly gifted close reader of poetry, able to identify with a conviction that was often devastating loose rhythms, stale diction and conventionalities of feeling; but also to make his readers aware of subtleties and refinements in a good poem they had not noticed before, and thereby raise them up (if only momentarily) to his own level of sensitive awareness. The complaint often voiced against practical criticism as either a pedagogic method or an approach to reading was that it was only appropriate when the poems were indeed short (because then the whole of a work's linguistic organisation was there before you), and not therefore much use with longer ones, or with novels and plays.