Lascelles Abercrombie

Lascelles Abercrombie (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". He was born in Ashton upon Mersey and educated at Malvern College, and at the University of Manchester.

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 also visited. 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 also published several volumes of original verse, largely metaphysical poems in dramatic form, and a number of verse plays. His poems and plays were collected in 'Poems' (1930). In the same year he published separately his most ambitious poem, 'The Sale of Saint Thomas' in six 'Acts'.

A number of fellow poets and professors of literature (including Oliver Elton and Una Ellis-Fermor) admired the sublimity of his themes and his ability to clothe metaphysical thought in vivid imagery. His critical studies of Hardy (1912) and Wordsworth (published posthumously) are still sometimes referred to. He is remembered because of his contacts with Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and other 'Georgian' poets.

He was the brother of the architect Patrick Abercrombie. His son was the cell biologist Michael Abercrombie. His great-grandson is the author Joe Abercrombie.