John Lucas

John Lucas most recent book is Romantic to Modern Literature: Essays and Ideas of Culture 1750-1900. He is Professor of English and Drama at Loughborough University.

Letter

Socialism and Art

5 May 1983

SIR: If I understand Donald Davie (LRB, 5 May), he wishes to challenge my claim that Hardy’s poetry is remarkable for its generosity of vision. He does this by quoting Edward Clodd’s remark that Hardy ‘was a great author: he was not a great man; there was no largeness of soul.’ Clodd’s ‘judgment’ or ‘diagnosis’ is, according to Davie, ‘the verdict of a friend over many years with...
Letter

Subjects

6 October 1983

SIR: Craig Raine is right (LRB, 6 October). Subject-matter cannot be considered apart from style. What you write about is utterly dependent for its success on how you write about it. If this weren’t so then every halting piece of doggerel in the obituary columns of local newspapers could claim kinship with, say, Ben Jonson’s great poem on the death of his first son. Donald Davie says some-where...
Letter

Fallen Language

21 June 1984

SIR: Donald Davie may well be right to say (LRB, 21 June) that I have no firm footing for distinguishing ‘acceptable from unacceptable depravities (decadent refinements) that British English, at Geoffrey Hill’s hands, indulges in’. But the point I was trying to make – admittedly an obvious one – is that language belongs within and is an expression of history. Matthew Arnold wanted the poet...
Letter

The Case for Geoffrey Hill

4 April 1985

SIR: Martin Dodsworth is running for cover. He now says (Letters, 7 November) that when he disagreed with Tom Paulin’s pronunciation of ‘twilight’ he was merely wondering whether Paulin had been spending his time among ‘speakers of some other language – French, perhaps, or German’. In fact, he originally invited Paulin to consult the OED, if there was ‘no experienced speaker of English’...
Letter

Conrad and Eliot and Prejudice

22 June 1989

Towards the end of his sharply-focused review of Chinua Achebe’s book of essays Hopes and Impediments, Craig Raine remarks that ‘all minorities will treat representations of themselves as typical, whereas art deals with actualities, and not necessarily with truth and justice.’ I don’t think he means to suggest that blacks are a minority, but it is odd to imply that what is actual may be untrue....

Pieces about John Lucas in the LRB

‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff: The radical twenties

Joanna Kavenna, 1 April 1999

In 1916, D.H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith of his abiding ‘sadness’: ‘for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing’....

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Footpaths

Tom Shippey, 26 July 1990

‘Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in...

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Cut-Ups

Robert Crawford, 7 December 1989

Till recently, I’ve dodged most of Peter Reading’s work. He seemed so much the darling of the TLS and of a metropolitan circle whose powerfully disseminated views it is often...

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