F. L. Lucas
| Frank Laurence Lucas | |
|---|---|
Lucas in 1957
|
|
| Born |
28 December 1894 Hipperholme, Yorkshire |
| Died | 1 June 1967 (aged 72) Cambridge |
| Occupation | Academic, writer, critic |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Genre | Essay, literary criticism, fiction, poetry, drama, polemic, travel writing |
| Notable works | Style (1955), The Complete Works of John Webster (1927) |
| Notable awards | OBE (1946) |
Frank Laurence Lucas (28 December 1894 – 1 June 1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.
He is now best remembered for his scathing 1923 review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and for his book Style (1955; revised 1962), an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' (1927, substantially revised in 1957) was for over fifty years a standard introduction. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt the Younger (1857), itself an inferior copy of Dyce (1830). Eliot called Lucas "the perfect annotator"; and subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007).
Lucas is also remembered for his anti-fascist campaign in the 1930s, and for his wartime work at Bletchley Park, for which he received the OBE.
Except in reviews of work by contemporaries, early examples of which appear in Authors Dead and Living (1926), Lucas adopted the historical and biographical approach to criticism and examined the views of earlier critics, whose dogmatism he was swift to rebut. He increasingly linked his studies to developments in Psychology, notably in Literature and Psychology (1951). "The real 'unwritten laws'," he observed, "seem to me those of human psychology." Centrally, he discussed the writer's psychology as revealed through style. "Even science has invented no pickle for embalming a man like style," he noted.
The poets to whom he returned most often in publications were Tennyson (1930, 1932, 1947, 1957) and Housman (1926, 1933, 1936, 1960), but he ranged widely over Classical, European and English literature. Conscious that books can influence for good or ill, he admired authors he saw as defenders of sanity and good sense – men like Montaigne and Montesquieu – or as compassionate realists, like Homer in the Iliad, Euripides, Hardy, Ibsen and Chekhov. "Life is 'indivisible'," he wrote.
...
Wikipedia