News Archive

Professor Tony Curtis gives the Warton Lecture On English Poetry

’We keep the bread and wine for show’ - consistent irony and reluctant faith in the poetry of Dannie Abse

Thursday, 25 October 2007
5.30pm - 6.30pm, followed by a drinks reception
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace,
London, SW1Y 5AH
Free Admittance

Tony Curtis, Professor of Poetry, School of Humanities Law and Social Sciences at the University of Glamorgan will this week give the Warton Lecture On English Poetry at the British Academy. Welsh Academy President Dannie Abse will be the subject of the lecture entitled ’We keep the bread and wine for show’ - consistent irony and reluctant faith in the poetry of Dannie Abse. Professor Wynn Thomas, of the University of Wales, Swansea will chair the event.

Dannie Abse (1923-) had his first collection of poetry accepted by Hutchinsons in 1946 when he was a medical student in London. Although he wishes few of those early Dylanesque pieces to survive, he has gone on to publish poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction for sixty years. Despite that fact, despite the continuing success of his autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, which has remained in print since 1954, Dannie Abse is a writer who has not received the critical attention which he deserves.

Professor Curtis will talk about Abse’s early activities as editor of the magazine Poverty and Poetry in the 1950s and the ’Mavericks’ group of poets; also Dannie Abse’s roles as doctor and poet; wearing both ’the white and purple coat’. He will discuss the tensions between those roles and examine the ways in which the writer’s identity as Londoner and a Cardiff Welshman also underpins his work. Abse’s Jewish family was part orthodox, part secular: ’Hitler made me more a Jew than Moses did’; this lecture will address those issues of faith, anger and compassion compelled by the events of the Twentieth century, Abse’s century.

Professor Tony Curtis has taught writing at the University of Glamorgan for more than twenty years. He has published over twenty books of poetry, criticism and cultural commentary.

Mrs Frida Mond endowed the Warton Lecture on English Poetry as a tribute to Thomas Warton, ‘the first historian of English poetry, whose work not only led the way to the scientific study of English Literature, but also stimulated creative genius, and played no small part in the Romantic Revival’. Lectures in this series are routinely published in the Proceedings of the British Academy.

Click here for full details of the Autumn Programme.
020 7969 5246 / lectures@britac.ac.uk  

Please note the ticketing and seating policy:
British Academy Lectures are freely open to the general public and everyone is welcome; there is no charge for admission, no tickets will be issued, and seats cannot be reserved. The Lecture Room is opened at 5.00pm, and the first 100 audience members arriving at the Academy will be offered a seat in the Lecture Room; the next 50 people to arrive will be offered a seat in the Overflow Room, which has a video and audio link to the Lecture Room. Lectures are followed by a reception at 6.30pm, to which members of the audience are invited.