In the Augustan section of Revaluation, Leavis, remarking that Pope’s ‘“correctness”’ cannot be discussed in ‘prosodic’ terms, follows with this bracketed aside: ‘(one cannot say “technical”—technique in any serious sense does not exist for discussion at that level)’. As For Continuity suggests, then, technique cannot be thinned to ‘technical’; and criticism isolating ‘technique’ from other aspects of a poem will be searching for something that no longer exists. A few pages later comes this:So the idea of technique being invoked here isn’t ‘superficial’ or secondary, or a rearrangement of a façade. The suggestion of sarcasm in ‘verbal surface’ indicates that the formulation is always mistaken; what is verbal is never only surface. Presumably ‘craftsmanship’ is unsuitable because it suggests the shaping or refining of something from outside, the fashioning of something whose substance is already complete. The way Leavis uses ‘technique’, however, is as a cognitive act, something like a mode of grappling with ideas. The first of the OED’s definitions for technique is ‘way of doing something’, a broad definition, but appropriate here.