In 2012 I was studying for an MA in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. I was reading the New Critics for that week’s work, including two critics who were not part of New Criticism, but are associated with the movement because of their focus on the literary text: F. R. Leavis and Yvor Winters. In Leavis’s essay on Anna Karenina he deems the novel to be a mode of thought, ‘thought about the nature, the meaning, and the essential problems of human life’. ‘Thought, to come at all near truth and adequacy, must engage the whole man’—person—and ‘relate in a valid way […] all the diverse elements of experience’. I thought how the stipulation that a work must engage and appeal to the human whole does not refer only to content; it also applies to the form of writing. A work cannot engage the whole human person if it is written in the language of sequential proposition, language without imagination and vividness, language without imagery, if it is not language of the kind we now call ‘embodied’, which might create a somatic as well as emotional and intellectual experience. The content will not come without the form, as Michael Tanner, a friend and colleague to Leavis, long ago pointed out.