author
Lascelles Abercrombie
1881–1938
A leading voice among the Georgian and Dymock poets, he wrote verse and verse drama with a strong feel for psychology, landscape, and big philosophical questions. Later, he became an influential literary critic and university teacher, helping shape how poetry was discussed in early 20th-century Britain.
2 Audiobooks
The Epic An Essay
by Lascelles Abercrombie
Emblems of Love
by Lascelles Abercrombie
About the author
Born in Ashton upon Mersey, Cheshire, on January 9, 1881, he was educated at Malvern College and at Owens College, Manchester, where he studied science before turning toward journalism and literature. His first collection, Interludes and Poems (1908), announced a writer drawn to dramatic situations and reflective, idea-rich verse.
He became associated with Georgian poetry and with the circle later known as the Dymock poets, a group that also included figures such as Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. Alongside poems, he wrote plays in verse, and reference works on his career note that his writing often sits between poetry and drama, with close attention to inner life and to the natural world.
After the First World War, he built a distinguished academic career as a professor of English literature at several English universities while also publishing criticism, including The Theory of Poetry (1924). He died in London on October 27, 1938, remembered both for his own writing and for the thoughtful critical work that accompanied it.