{"product_id":"9780571306732","title":"New Bearings in English Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it  was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge  college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by  poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer  foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry  matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary  intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat followed was  nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set  against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the  First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and  disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late  Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra  Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard  Manley Hopkins. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe tone of high moral urgency, and the message  that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life  that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and  abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both  poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to  the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the  journal \u003ci\u003eScrutiny\u003c\/i\u003e, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Faber and Faber","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47103422857456,"sku":"9780571306732","price":10.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780571306732_p0.jpg?v=1763720009","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780571306732","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}