Attending to the attitudinal realm, to ways and modes, to responses, means beginning with literature as an experience of language, not a sphere of its own; and it makes it possible to explore the role language plays, in a text, in our own particular attitudes to it, and more broadly and structurally in society. Writing of Milton in Revaluation, Leavis uses the phrase ‘the poet’s relation to his words’. The comment is almost offhand, but Revaluation as a whole is concerned with elaborating its meaning. Throughout the discussions of how thinking and feeling interact in Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, attention is drawn both to language as a mode of relating to and realising experience, and to the idea of a writer having a relationship to words.