Lascelles Abercrombie
09.01.1881 - 27.10.1938
British poet and literary critic
Lascelles Abercrombie (/ˈæbərˌkrɒmbi, -ˌkrʌm-/; also known as the Georgian Laureate, linking him with the "Georgian poets"; 9 January 1881 – 27 October 1938) was a British poet and literary critic, one of the "Dymock poets".
Life
He was born in Ashton upon Mersey, Sale, Cheshire and educated at Malvern College, and at Owens College.
Before the First World War, he lived for a time at Dymock in Gloucestershire, part of a community that included Rupert Brooke and Robert Frost. Edward Thomas visited. During these early years, he worked as a journalist, and he started his poetry writing. His first book, Interludes and Poems (1908), was followed by Mary and the Bramble (1910) and the poem Deborah, and later by Emblems of Love (1912) and Speculative Dialogues (1913). His critical works include An Essay Towards a Theory of Art (1922), and Poetry, Its Music and Meaning (1932). Collected Poems (1930) was followed by The Sale of St. Thomas (1931), a poetic drama.
During World War I, he served as a munitions examiner, after which, he was appointed to the first lectureship in poetry at the University of Liverpool. In 1922 he was appointed Professor of English at the University of Leeds in preference to J. R. R. Tolkien, with whom he shared, as author of The Epic (1914), a professional interest in heroic poetry. In 1929 he moved on to the University of London, and in 1935 to a prestigious readership at Oxford University. He wrote a series of works on the nature of poetry, including The Idea of Great Poetry (1925) and Romanticism (1926). He published several volumes of original verse, largely metaphysical poems in dramatic form, and a number of verse plays. Abercrombie also contributed to Georgian Poetry and several of his verse plays appeared in New Numbers (1914). His poems and plays were collected in 'Poems' (1930).
Lascelles Abercrombie died in London in 1938, aged 57, from undisclosed causes.
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