The relationships between the work of all three critics are complex. Only seven years separated them in age. Eliot and Richards were close friends whose correspondence spanned some forty years; Leavis was deeply influenced by both Eliot’s poetry and his analysis of the develop- ment of the literary tradition; and Leavis and Richards were contempo- raries at Cambridge, although relations between them were strained (Leavis felt that Richards should have … Read the rest