F. L. Lucas (Frank Laurence Lucas) Biography

British critic, novelist, and poet, born at Hipperholme in Yorkshire, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected in 1920 to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, where he lectured until 1962. His early publications include Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922), Euripides and His Influence (1924), and his edition of The Complete Works of John Webster (4 volumes, 1927). From the mid-1920s onward he wrote prolifically across the wide range of his literary interests. Among his more notable works are Authors Dead and Living (1926), Eight Victorian Poets (1930), and The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936), which vividly reflects the intellectual history of the 1930s. As a critic he was hostile towards the new modes of criticism associated with Scrutiny and defended traditional notions of sound judgement in The Search for Good Sense (1955) and The Art of Living (1959). Delights of Dictatorship (1938) and Journal under the Terror, 1938 (1938) are political commentaries written in response to the worsening international situation on the eve of the Second World War. Following the favourable reception of his semi-autobiographical novel The River Flows (1926), he produced a succession of historical fictions, which include Cecile (1930) and Dr Dido (1938). Time and Memory (1929), Marionettes (1930), and Poems 1935 (1935) are his principal collections of verse; his poetry, which uses conventional forms, frequently displays a romantic extravagance of imagery and is sometimes sharply epigrammatic. Among his other works are a study of Ibsen and Strindberg (1962) and numerous translations from the Greek, which include a version of the Iliad (1950) and the anthology Greek Poetry for Everyman (1951).