13 MAY 1978, Page 16

F.R. Leavis

Sir: One may admire Dr Leavis and deplore his treatment by Cambridge without giving him credits he would never have claimed. Dr Leavis did not invent the steam engine nor did he rediscover the Metaphysical poets as suggested by Mr Peter Ackroyd (22 April). We were all reading the Metaphysical poets at Oxford in the early 1920s, thanks to Sir Herbert Grierson whose edition of Donne's poems had appeared in 1912 and his splendid anthology of Metaphysical Lyrics in 1921 fifteen years before Dr Leavis's Revaluation.

Graham Greene 130 Boulevard Malesherbes Paris 17