Let’s begin with that tricky word, ‘literary’, which is used either to designate something from a piece of literature or to signal the presence of the characteristics of literature: implicit, allusive, exploratory, flexible, associative, working emotionally, with a physical immediacy, atmospheric, meaning lost if paraphrased or restated, evocative, constitutive of an experience, felt. Again, these characteristics appear both in and out of texts we readily call literature. Leavis’s early work struggles vigorously against the apparent double-bind of articulating how literature is relevant to living in a way that gains its significance precisely by being what it is as literature. The trajectory that emerges most urgently in the first significant decade of his work is the necessity to subvert consideration of literature and any aspect of it as for its own sake: the overwhelming stance generated by the 1930s texts is against for-its-own-sakeness. The difficulty is in expressing this, given no words exist for form-content, or how-what, or verbal-moral, or literary-conceptual/philosophical/worldly. The way one thing relates to or entails another, and the nature of the connection between them, is a truth easily lost ‘in the process of critical analysis’.