Ласселс Аберкромби: Жизнь и творчество британского поэта

British poet

Lascelles Abercrombie, (9 January 1881 – 27 October 1938) He was educated at Malvern College, and at Owens College, Manchester. In 1929 he moved on to the University of London, and in 1935 to the prestigious Goldsmiths' Readership at the University of Oxford, 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 suffered in his later years from serious diabetes, and died in London in 1938, aged 57.

Abercrombie was the brother of architect and noted town planner Patrick Abercrombie. In 1909 he married Catherine Gwatkin (1881–1968) of Grange over Sands. They had 4 children, a daughter and three sons. Two of the sons achieved prominence, David Abercrombie as a phonetician and Michael Abercrombie as a cell biologist. The latter's son Nicholas Abercrombie is a sociologist. A grandson, Jeffrey Cooper, produced an admirable bibliography of his grandfather, with brief but important notes, while a great grandson is author Joe Abercrombie. Arthur Ransome dedicated his second children's adventure novel Swallowdale to Lascelles's daughter Elizabeth.

Abercrombie's poetry consists very largely of long poems in blank verse, mainly in dramatic form. They treat the extremes of imagined rather than actual experience, from ecstasy to anguish and malice, with little in between, in verse full of sharp, gem like imagery and generally rugged in sound and metre. Admired for a time by good judges such as Charles Williams, Oliver Elton and Una Ellis Fermor, and respected by his fellow 'Georgian' poets, it was never popular, and by the 1930s no longer corresponded to what readers sought in modern verse. His 'Four Short Plays' of 1922 have fared better and still receive some attention, particularly 'The Staircase', because of their more realistic characters and setting. They compare favourably to the poetic plays of the other Georgian poets, such as John Drinkwater and John Masefield.

Title Year DescriptionInterludes and Poems 1908PlayAn Essay Towards a Theory of Art 1922 The Theory of Poetry1924 EssayThe Idea of Great Poetry1925 EssayPoetry, Its Music and Meaning 1932 BookCollected Poems 1930 Book of poems"The Sale of St. Thomas" 1930 Poem