F. L. Lucas

Frank Laurence Lucas
Born	(1894-12-28)28 December 1894 Hipperholme, Yorkshire
Died	1 June 1967(1967-06-01) (aged 72) Cambridge
Occupation	Academic, writer, critic, political activist
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Genres	Essay, literary criticism, literary fiction, poetry, polemic, travel writing
Notable work(s)	Style (1955), The Complete Works of John Webster (1927)
Notable award(s)	OBE (1946)
Influences Henry Nevinson

Frank Laurence Lucas (1894–1967) 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 attacks on the poetry of T. S. Eliot during the 1920s, and for his book Style (1955), 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 half a century 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 (1857), itself largely a copy of Dyce (1830). T. S. Eliot called Lucas “the perfect annotator”; and all subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007). Lucas is also remembered for his wartime work at Bletchley Park.

Literary criticism

Lucas adopted the contextual approach to criticism, including historical and biographical detail, and examining the views of earlier critics, whose dogmatism he was swift to rebut. He increasingly linked his studies of writers to the "as yet infant science – some think, a bastard one – of psychology": "The real 'unwritten laws'," he noted, "seem to me those of human psychology." Centrally, he discussed the writer's psychology as revealed through style. The poets to whom he returned most often in his 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.

"A public tends to get the literature it deserves: a literature, to get the public it deserves. The values men pursue in each, affect the other. They turn in a vicious, or a virtuous, circle. Only a fine society could have bred Homer: and he left it finer for hearing him."

Lucas's criticism, while acknowledging that morality is historically relative, was thus values-based. "Writers can make men feel, not merely see, the values that endure." Believing that too many modern writers encouraged men and women to flee to unreason, decadence and barbarism, he condemned the trahisons des clercs of the twentieth century, and used his lectures and writing to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom. "One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat," he wrote in his last published letter, "that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it." The serious note in his criticism was counterbalanced by wit and urbanity, by lively anecdote and quotation, and by a gift for startling imagery and epigram.

What Lucas wrote about Housman’s Name and Nature of Poetry in 1933 (though he contested some of its ideas) sums up what he himself aspired to as a literary critic: "… the kind of critical writing that best justifies itself before the brevity of life; that itself adds new data to our experience as well as arguing about the old; that happily combines, in a word, philosophy with autobiography, psychology with a touch of poetry – of the ‘poetic’ imagination. It can make acceptable even common sense. There are sentences here which recall the clear-cut Doric strength of the Lives of the Poets ..."

Controversy

Lucas was a formidable controversialist, and his impatience with the "obscurantism" of much modern poetry made him in the interwar years one of the foremost opponents of the new schools. "As for ‘profundity’," he wrote, "it is not uncommonly found also in dry wells; which may likewise contain little but obscurity and rubbish." He opposed also what he saw as the narrow dogmatism of the New Critics, those "tight-lipped Calvins of art", as he called them, of Criterion and Scrutiny. Discussions of I. A. Richards's criticism appear in his essay 'English Literature' in the volume University Studies: Cambridge 1933 and in Chapter 4 of his Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936), and of Eliot's in the 1929 essay 'Modern Criticism', reprinted in his Studies French and English (1934). An anonymous New Statesman review (29 Dec. 1928) of Eliot's criticism, however, to which F. R. Leavis replied apparently believing it was by Lucas, and which Leavis's biographer says "was certainly by Lucas", was in fact by R. Ellis Roberts. Lucas had stopped reviewing for the New Statesman in 1926, and never reviewed anonymously. His critique of Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) in University Studies: Cambridge 1933 was described by F. R. Leavis's biographer as "improper": "senior academics do not use quasi-official publications to attack graduate students". The volume, however, though printed by the University Press, was not published there; its editor stressed that the contributions were "unofficial" glimpses into the "intense mental activity" of each Cambridge department; and published theses are not normally considered exempt from criticism.

Recent reputation

Lucas is respected by Webster scholars, as the references to and quotations from his 1927 edition in the new Cambridge Webster (1995-2007) show. Perhaps because he was hostile to new trends – playing devil's advocate he described the literary criticism of the 1950s as "largely pseudo-scientific bubble-blowing" – his criticism is now out of fashion and mostly out of print. L. P. Wilkinson has written: "The literary world has passed on, but that does not mean that what supervened was better; and just because of his uncompromising brilliance the whirligig of time may bring in his criticism again. His Style (1955) has a permanent value in any case, unaffected by trends." Style is now back in print (2012). Lucas's two earliest books, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) and Euripides and His Influence (1923), have not yet been superseded in similar concise form, so continue to be reprinted.

“	Even science has invented no pickle for embalming a man like style.	”
—F. L. Lucas

Verse translation

Lucas dedicated much of his time to making classical poetry accessible to modern readers through verse translations. His Greek Poetry for Everyman (1951, Everyman Library 1966) and Greek Drama for Everyman (1954) (many reprints) were praised for their grace and fidelity, and were hailed by reviewers as "Cambridge’s single-handed answer to the [collaborative] Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation". With introductions and notes the two volumes were an ambitious project – nothing on this scale had been attempted by a single translator before, or has since. His versions pre-suppose, however, an understanding of metre and the caesura, and a taste for a poetic style closer to Morris than to Pound.

Original writing

Novels

The scholar’s wit and verve that mark Lucas’s literary studies are present in his creative work. Of his novels the best received was Cécile (1930), a "tenderly brilliant story" (New Statesman, 24 May 1930) of love, politics and philosophy in the France of 1775-1776. "For grace and style and insight into character,” wrote Kathleen Tomlinson, "Cécile is reminiscent of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Only reminiscent, for Mr Lucas has a more profound philosophy, or wisdom, and is not content with the challenge and interplay of the individual, but extends his psychological understanding to classes and nations." "His extraordinary gift for delightful persiflage," noted the New York Bookman, "contributes not a little towards making this novel almost as dix-huitième in spirit as Manon Lescaut is in fact." Vita Sackville-West also praised the novel: "It seemed to me to be full of the deepest and truest feeling," she wrote, "never sentimental, but always convincing and extremely moving. The relationship between Andrée and Gaston is admirably true to nature. No-one could fail to be moved by this picture of a woman struggling against her own love for a husband who disappoints and betrays her at every turn." Lucas dedicated the novel to T. E. Lawrence, a friend and admirer. He wrote two further historical novels, Doctor Dido (1938), set in Cambridge in 1792-1812, and The English Agent: A Tale of the Peninsular War (1969), set in Spain in 1808.

Poems

As a poet Lucas was a polished ironist. Early collections were mostly personal lyrics or satires, but he came to specialise in dramatic monologues and narrative poems based on historical episodes "that seem lastingly alive". His First World War poems, including ‘Morituri - August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt’ (1935) and ‘ ”The Night is Chilly but not Dark” ‘ (1935), offer a retrospect of his experiences at the front. If they lack the stark immediacy of Owen or Rosenberg, they nevertheless add poignant post-war perspectives.

On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky

And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey,

A voice still whispers in me, far away -

A good night, this, for wiring - and suddenly

There rises from the dead that shadowy hell,

The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand,

The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land,

A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle.

Then fades the phantom, and once more I know

Our spider-webs of wire are dust by now,

Our battlefields reconquered by the plough,

And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago.

Its appearance in various mid-twentieth century anthologies of English verse has made ‘Beleaguered Cities’ (1929) Lucas’s best-known poem. Others that have gained currency through anthologies include ‘The Destined Hour’ (1953), a re-telling in verse of the old ‘appointment in Samarra’ fable, and ‘Spain 1809’, the story of a village woman's courage during the French occupation in the Peninsular War. His most ambitious poem was Ariadne (1932), an epic re-working of the Labyrinth myth. Simon Tidworth in The Quest for Theseus summarises: "Lucas invents another sweetheart for Theseus, Aegle, one of the sacrificial maidens who accompany him to Crete. The real stroke of originality is to make the Minotaur Minos himself in a bull-mask. On Naxos Ariadne learns of Theseus’s earlier love for Aegle, and decides to leave him while the image of her own love is still fresh. An ordinary love-affair is not what she wants; she has to seek the Ideal [Dionysus]."

Plays

Lucas's most successful play was the thriller Land's End (Westminster Theatre, Feb.-March 1938, 29 performances, with Cathleen Nesbitt, Cecil Trouncer and Alan Napier among the cast) – "as full of drama as an egg is full of meat", noted The Stage. The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London’s West-end stage (Garrick Theatre, Oct.-Nov. 1932, with Elena Miramova, Abraham Sofaer and Olga Lindo). This play, though it closed early in London, was revived by various repertory theatres in the North of England in the later 1930s. It was an attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in his words) "grew full of very green young men going very Red".

History, politics and society

Pharsalus

Outside literature, Lucas is remembered for his solution to one of the more contentious problems of ancient topography. His "north-bank" thesis on the location of the Battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.), based on his 1921 solo field-trip to Thessaly and on a re-examination of the sources, is now widely accepted by historians. John D. Morgan in his definitive 'Palae-pharsalus – the Battle and the Town' writes: "My reconstruction is similar to Lucas’s, and in fact I borrow one of his alternatives for the line of the Pompeian retreat. Lucas’s theory has been subjected to many criticisms, but has remained essentially unshaken."

Appeasement

In the 1930s Lucas was widely known for his outspoken attacks in the British Press on appeasement. "Since the War," he wrote in 1933, "British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble." He urged in September of that year that Nazi Germany be prevented from re-arming. "Versailles was monstrous", he wrote in The Week-end Review,

"but one thing surely comes first: Germany must not be allowed to re-arm. How prevent it? By an international police-force? It would be ideal. Unfortunately it does not exist. The French have urged it. We in our muddle-headedness want neither it nor the alternative – war. Are we prepared to see France do its work instead and take action in Germany? – or are we going to sit sanctimoniously on the fence, disapproving, but secretly relieved? I devoutly hope the first. Germany must not re-arm; even if the French had to invade it once every five years, that would be better than the alternative."

And in 1937: "We have not kept agreements we made; we have made agreements we should not; we have tried to cheat our way to security, and now the security proves a cheat. We have forgotten the wisdom which says that since we cannot foresee where any road will lead in the end, we should stick to the straight and honest one." He argued that a hatred of war "can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries ‘peace’ where there is none." Despite the prevailing pacifism of the time, such sentiments struck a chord. "This is the voice of the England I love," wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, "and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich." Not everyone admired the letters, however: the pro-appeasement Times refused to publish him after 1935, and when he condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the democracies' inadequate response, Ezra Pound sent him a threatening and abusive reply. (Lucas put Pound's letter on display at the Cambridge Anti-Fascist Exhibition.) As well as letters to the press (some forty in all) there were articles, satires, books, public speaking, fund-raising, petitions, meetings with émigrés and help for refugees. Believing that future readers would be interested in what it had been like to live through such times, he kept and published in March 1939 a diary for 1938, Journal Under the Terror, 1938. Of Chamberlain at Munich he wrote (30 Sept.):

"Even if what he did were the right thing to do, this was not the way to do it... The surrender might have been necessary: the cant was not. Any statesman with a sense of honour would at least have stilled that hysterical cheering and said: My friends, for the present, we are out of danger. But remember that others, who trusted in us, are not. This is a day for relief, perhaps; but for sorrow also; for shame, not for revelling. But this Chamberlain comes home beaming as fatuously as some country-cousin whom a couple of card-sharpers in the train have just allowed to win sixpence, to encourage him."

As a leading anti-fascist campaigner, Lucas was placed by the Nazis on their Special Search List G.B. of Britons to be arrested and liquidated.

Bletchley Park

A brilliant linguist with infantry and Intelligence Corps experience from 1914–18, proven anti-fascist credentials and a scepticism about the Soviet Union, Lucas was one of the first academics recruited by the Foreign Office – on 3 September 1939 – to Bletchley Park. He was one of the original three members of Hut 3 and for a time acting head. He remained a central figure there, working throughout the war on the Enigma decodes as translator, intelligence-analyst and (from July 1942) head of the Research Section, on the busy 4 p.m. to 1 or 2 a.m. shift. Among the intelligence-reports he produced for the War Office was a study of Hitler's intentions in the east in May 1941, which contrasted with the Foreign Office view that the Germans were just "building up pressure [on the U.S.S.R.] to extract more raw materials". "It becomes harder than ever to doubt," Lucas wrote,

"that the object of these large movements of the German Army and Air Force is Russia. From rail movements towards Moldavia in the south to ship movements towards Varanger fjord in the far north there is everywhere the same eastward trend. Either the purpose is blackmail or it is war. No doubt Hitler would prefer a bloodless surrender. But the quiet move, for instance, of a prisoner-of-war cage to Tarnow looks more like business than bluff."

He also wrote, with Peter Calvocoressi, the report in early 1945 on the failure of Allied intelligence to foresee the German counter-offensive through the Ardennes in December 1944. Lucas and Calvocoressi concluded that Bletchley Park had accurately reported German preparations. (E. J. N. Rose, head Air Adviser in Hut 3, read it at the time and described it in 1998 as "an extremely good report" that "showed the failure of intelligence at SHAEF and at the Air Ministry". The report is not known to have survived.) The two "expected heads to roll at Eisenhower's HQ, but they did no more than wobble". The most "exciting" work he did at Bletchley Park, he recalled, was handling operational signals on Axis convoys to North Africa in 1942 and deducing convoys' routes using decrypts, maps, pins and pieces of string. The high standards of accuracy and clarity that prevailed in Hut 3, his chief maintained, were "largely due to his being such a stickler" for them. In off-duty hours till 1943 he was Officer Commanding the Bletchley Park Home Guard, a "rabble of egg-heads" that he turned, contrary to stereotype, into an efficient unit that outwitted the local regular forces in military exercises. From June 1945 to the end of the War he was head of the Hut 3 History Section. Lucas was awarded the O.B.E in 1946 for his wartime work. His recollections of Hut 3, now in the National Archives, are quoted in the history books.

Demographics

“	Principles, however liberal, are no substitute for common sense.	”
—F. L. Lucas

In the post-war years, Lucas early took up the cause of population-control, "a problem not talked about nearly enough", discussing the dangers of world overpopulation in his book The Greatest Problem (1960). Having laid out the statistics to 1959 and future projections, he argued that the "reckless proliferation" of homo sapiens, as well as impoverishing the world by environmental damage and species-extinctions, would be damaging to the individual and to society:

"The finest human qualities are endangered, because the size of populations increases, and ought to be diminished; the size of states increases, and ought to be diminished; the size of cities increases, and ought to be diminished. Vast communities lead to small individuals; and the real worth of any community lies in the worth of its individuals... The individual comes to feel himself a mere drop in the ocean; and feeling impotent, he grows irresponsible... Vast democracies cannot keep the virtues of democracy."

If population-growth went unchecked, he felt, "the damage to national efficiency might drive governments to act more intelligently"; but better would be "a concentrated drive for population-planning, despite the formidable practical, scientific and psychological obstacles". "Common sense percolates," he had written in 1934, "despite the Roman Church; which with its half-cynical sense of reality will doubtless end by swallowing the inevitable, as with Copernicus and Darwin, and evolve some doctrine of Immaculate Contraception." He was not optimistic about post-war immigration: "Persons of liberal principles are shocked if one views this influx with misgiving. But the advantages are far from certain. Principles, however liberal, are no substitute for common sense."

Biographical

Early life and the War

F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's, where his father F. W. Lucas was a reforming headmaster, and from 1910 at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw. A prize-winning Classics scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1913, Lucas was elected Apostle in January 1914 and came under the influence of G. E. Moore. He volunteered in October 1914 and was commissioned, serving from 1915-17 in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France. From August 1915 he was in the Somme trenches opposite Fricourt; he was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. He returned to the front in January 1917, went into battle near Grandcourt on 17 February, was mentioned in despatches on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war-hospitals. From August 1918 to the Armistice he was in the Intelligence Corps, examining German prisoners near Bapaume and Le Quesnoy. His life hung in the balance in November 1918, when his lung wounds reopened in the influenza pandemic. He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell-walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning [1919] on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blucathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience."

Career

Lucas was elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920 before he had completed his degree, John Maynard Keynes personally paying for him to holiday in Greece with Sebastian Sprott on the eve of his Tripos. He duly took a starred first. He began his career as a Classics lecturer, switching in 1922 to the newly-formed Cambridge University English Faculty, of which he was a member from 1922–1939 and from 1945–1962. His move from Classics to English and his edition of John Webster were inspired in part by the seminal 1920 Marlowe Society production of The White Devil, which made a powerful impression on him, but his preference lay from first to last with Comparative Literature. His students at King's included George Rylands, John Hayward, F. E. Halliday, Alan Clutton-Brock, Julian Bell, Desmond Flower and Christopher Burstall. At the invitation of its literary editor, Desmond MacCarthy, he reviewed poetry and criticism for the New Statesman from 1922 to 1926, having begun his career as reviewer with the Athenaeum in 1920-21.

Following the publication of his Webster, scholars turned to him for editorial advice: he helped in the preparation of, among other volumes, Hayward's Nonesuch Donne (1929), Housman's More Poems (1936), and Theodore Redpath's acclaimed Songs and Sonets of John Donne (1956). He also performed an editorial and advisory role for Christopher Sandford at the Golden Cockerel Press, where he introduced Victor Scholderer's New Hellenic typeface (1937). In the middle years of his career he was much in demand as an invitation lecturer, giving seven BBC wireless talks in 1930, on Dorothy Osborne and on the Victorian Poets, delivering the 1933 Warton Lecture on English Poetry to the British Academy, lecturing at the Royal Institution on Classicism and Romanticism (1935) and at the Royal Society of Literature on travel writing (1937), and, as part of a British Council drive to counter Soviet propaganda, lecturing in German on European literature to packed halls at the British Information Centre in West Berlin in October 1948 during the Berlin Blockade.

In later years he turned encyclopedist, contributing the articles on ‘Poetry’, ‘Epic’, ‘Lyric’, ‘Ode’, ‘Elegy’ and ‘Pastoral’ in the new Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1950), among others, and serving on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World series (1952).

Personal life

From February 1921 to 1929 he was married to the novelist E. B. C. (Emily Beatrix Coursolles) Jones (1893-1966). Jones dedicated two novels to Lucas and based the character Hugh Sexton in The Singing Captives (1922) on him; he based the character Margaret Osborne in The River Flows (1926) on her - a semi-autobiographical novel that shifts some of his experiences of 1919-1920 to 1913-1915. Through Jones and the Apostles he was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf describing him to Ottoline Morrell as "pure Cambridge: clean as a breadknife, and as sharp". Jones's admiration for George Rylands undermined the marriage by 1927. After affairs with Dora Carrington and Shelagh Clutton-Brock (d.1936), in December 1932 Lucas married the young Girton Classics graduate and artist Prudence Wilkinson (1911-1944). To Lucas, interviewed in 1958, Bloomsbury had seemed "a jungle":

"The society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. They tormented each other with endless love affairs. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind ... Dickinson and Forster were not really Bloomsbury. They were soft-hearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that."

His travel writings, accounts of long walks through wild landscapes with literary associations, date mainly from the years of his second marriage (1932–1939): a book on a 1933 walking tour of Greece, From Olympus to the Styx (1934) (one of five journeys he made to the country), which his publisher considered "his most famous book"; a travelogue on a 1934 tour of the saga sites of Iceland; and journal-entries on visits to Norway, Ireland, Scotland, France. From Olympus to the Styx argues for the return of the Elgin Marbles:

"Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens."

Prudence Lucas, as well as sharing this interest, also designed the costumes and sets for the first production of his Icelandic tragedy The Lovers of Gudrun. Her nervous breakdown in 1938 is touched on in Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938; Lucas sought help from, among others, Wilhelm Stekel, whom he met in London in 1939, but the rift proved irreparable. The emphasis on psychology in his post-war books – Literature and Psychology, Style, The Search for Good Sense, The Art of Living, the essay on 'Happiness' in The Greatest Problem – reflects an interest shared with his third wife, the Swedish psychologist Elna Kallenberg (d.2003), whom he married in 1940 - "the stranger who came to me from beyond the sea when I most needed her" (Kallenberg had flown from Sweden to join him in 1939). They had two children. He summed up his thoughts on happiness thus:

"Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are."

Lucas lived at 7 Camden Place, Cambridge, from 1921-25; at 20 West Road, Cambridge from 1925-39 and from 1945-67; and at High Mead, Great Brickhill from 1939-45.

The dissident Czech academic Otakar Vočadlo (1895-1974) celebrated his restoration, during the Prague Spring of 1968, to his Chair of English at Prague, by giving a course of lectures on Webster in memory of Lucas, who had died the year before and whose support for the Czech cause in 1938-39 had not been forgotten.

D. W. (Donald William) Lucas, the classical scholar (1905-80), Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, University Director of Studies in Classics, and Perceval Maitland Laurence Reader in Classics, was F. L. Lucas's brother.

Works

Books

• Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 1922 [13] ; C.U.P. paperback 2009, ISBN 1-108-00358-3)
• Euripides and his Influence (Marshall Jones, Boston, 1923 [14] ; Harrap, London, 1924; Literary Licensing LLC paperback 2012, ISBN 1-258-33712-6)
• Euripides: Medea, partly in the original and partly in translation; with introduction and notes (Oxford University Press, 1923)
• Euripides: Medea; verse translation, with introduction and notes (Oxford University Press, 1924)
• Ferenc Békássy: 'Adriatica' and other poems; selection with preface (Hogarth Press, London, 1925)
• Authors Dead and Living; reviews and essays from the New Statesman [Li-Po, Drayton, Donne, Vaughan, Cotton, Marvell, Leopardi, Melville, Whitman, Swinburne, O'Shaughnessy, Flecker, Masefield, Housman, de la Mare, Bottomley, Davies, Rosenberg, Drinkwater, Dobson, Luce, Campbell, H.D., Edna St Vincent Millay, Belloc, Blunt, Sara Teasdale, Yeats, Lawrence, Wolfe, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Graves] (Chatto & Windus, London, 1926 [15] ; essay on Housman reprinted in the Critical Heritage series, ed. Philip Gardner, 1992)
• The River Flows; novel (Hogarth Press, London, 1926)
• The Complete Works of John Webster; edition in four volumes: 1 [16], 2 [17], 3 [18], 4 [19] (Chatto & Windus, London, 1927; O.U.P., New York, 1937; Chatto & Windus, London, 1966)
• Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' (Hogarth Press, London, 1927)
• Time and Memory; poems and verse translations (Hogarth Press, London, 1929)
• Cécile; novel (Chatto & Windus, London, 1930; Henry Holt, New York, 1930; Chatto & Windus Centaur Library, London, 1931)
• Marionettes; poems (Cambridge University Press, 1930; paperback 2012, ISBN 1-107-60498-2)
• Eight Victorian Poets; essays [Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Hardy] (Cambridge University Press, 1930)
• The Art of Dying - an anthology of last words; selected with Francis Birrell; preface by Lucas (Hogarth Press, London, 1930)
• The Wild Tulip; novella (Joiner & Steele, London, 1932)
• Ariadne; poem, in four books (Cambridge University Press, 1932)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1932) [20]
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1932)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1933)
• George Crabbe - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1933)
• The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts; drama, with political essay: 'The Gospel According to Saint Marx' (Cassell, London, 1933)
• The Criticism of Poetry; essay [The Warton Lecture on English Poetry, 1933; Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol.19.] (Oxford University Press, London, 1933)
• Studies French and English; essays [Hesiod, Langland, Ronsard, Montaigne, Dorothy Osborne, Crabbe, Beddoes, Flaubert, Proust] (Cassell, London, 1934; revised 1950); (essay on Ronsard reprinted in The Cassell Miscellany, London, 1958)
• From Olympus to the Styx; Greek travelogue, written with Prudence Lucas (Cassell, London, 1934)
• Marie Mauron: Mount Peacock, or Progress in Provence; translation, with introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1934)
• Poems, 1935; poems and verse translations, with preface (Cambridge University Press, 1935)
• Four Plays: 'Land's End'; 'Surrender to Discretion'; 'The Lovers of Gudrun'; 'Death of a Ghost' (Cambridge University Press, 1935)
• The Awakening of Balthazar; poem for the Abyssinian Red Cross Fund (Cassell, London, 1935)
• The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal; literary criticism, with Iceland travelogue and essay on Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge University Press, 1936 [21] ; Read Books paperback 2012, ISBN 1-4067-2311-8)
• The Golden Cockerel Greek Anthology; originals and verse translations, with introduction and notes; engravings by Lettice Sandford (Golden Cockerel Press, 1937)
• The Woman Clothed with the Sun, and Other Stories; short stories (Cassell, London, 1937)
• The Delights of Dictatorship; history and politics (Heffer, Cambridge, 1938)
• Doctor Dido; novel (Cassell, London, 1938)
• A Greek Garland; a Selection from the Palatine Anthology; originals and verse translations, with introduction and notes [enlarged version of 1937 volume] (Oxford University Press, 1939)
• Journal Under the Terror, 1938; diary (Cassell, London, 1939)
• The Vigil of Venus; the original and a verse translation, with introduction and notes; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Golden Cockerel Press, 1939)
• Messene Redeemed; a verse drama (Oxford University Press, 1940)
• Ten Victorian Poets; essays [Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Patmore, Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Hardy] (Cambridge University Press, 1940; essay on Hardy reprinted in the Macmillan Casebook series, editors Gibson & Johnson, 1979)
• Critical Thoughts in Critical Days; essay (Allen & Unwin, London, 1942)
• Tennyson, Poetry and Prose; an anthology, with introduction and notes (Oxford University Press, 1947)
• The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; the original and a verse translation, with introduction and notes; engravings by Mark Severin (Golden Cockerel Press, 1948)
• Aphrodite - two verse translations: the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Pervigilium Veneris; with the originals; brings together 1939 and 1948 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 1948)
• Gilgamesh, King of Erech; poem in free verse, re-telling the Sumerian epic; engravings by Dorothea Braby (Golden Cockerel Press, 1948) [22]
• Homer: The Odyssey; verse translation in selection, with introduction and notes; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Folio Society, 1948)
• Musaeus: Hero and Leander; verse translation, with introduction; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Golden Cockerel Press, 1949)
• Homer: The Iliad; verse translation in selection, with introduction and notes; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Folio Society, 1950)
• Literature and Psychology; literary criticism based on the case-notes of Wilhelm Stekel [Shakespeare, The Romantics, Romanticism in Decay] (Cassell, London, 1951; revised edition, University of Michigan Press, 1957)
• Greek Poetry for Everyman; verse translations, with introductions and notes (Dent, London, 1951) [23]
• From Many Times and Lands; poems of legend and history (Bodley Head, London, 1953)
• Greek Drama for Everyman; full verse translations [Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Hippolytus, Bacchae, Clouds] and selections, with introductions and notes (Dent, London, 1954)
• Style (Cassell, London, 1955; 2nd ed., with footnote translations: Collier Books, 1962, Pan Books, 1964; 3rd ed. Harriman House Publishing, 2012 ISBN 978-0-85719-187-8)
• Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics'; revised and enlarged version of 1927 volume (Hogarth Press, London, 1957; with footnote translations: Collier Books, 1962)
• Tennyson; essay [British Council 'Writers and their Works' series] (Longman, London, 1957)
• Webster: The White Devil; revised edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1958)
• Webster: The Duchess of Malfi; revised edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1958)
• The Search for Good Sense: Four Eighteenth-Century Characters: Johnson, Chesterfield, Boswell, Goldsmith (Cassell, London, 1958) [24]
• The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth-Century Minds: Hume, Horace Walpole, Burke, Benjamin Franklin (Cassell, London, 1959) [25]
• The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays; an essay on world overpopulation, literary essays [Tolstoy, Housman], and autobiographical pieces (Cassell, London, 1960)
• The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg; literary criticism (Cassell, London, 1962)
• August Strindberg: Inferno; translation by Mary Sandbach, introduction by Lucas (Hutchinson, London, 1962)
• The Drama of Chekhov, Synge, Yeats and Pirandello; literary criticism (Cassell, London, 1963)
• Greek Poetry; verse translations; revised and renamed version of 1951 volume, without the passages from Homer (Everyman Library, Dent, London, 1966)
• Greek Drama for the Common Reader; verse translations, revised and renamed version of 1954 volume (Chatto & Windus, London, 1967)
• Greek Tragedy and Comedy; verse translations, renamed version of 1954 volume (Viking Press, New York, 1968)
• The English Agent: A Tale of The Peninsular War; novel (Cassell, London, 1969)

Other writings

• ’The Boar’; short story (Athenaeum), 10 September 1920)
• ’The Fortune of Carthage’; short story on the Battle of the Metaurus (Athenaeum, 28 January 1921)
• ’The Brown Bag’; short story (Cambridge Review, 6 May 1921)
• ’The Battlefield of Pharsalos’; report on a field study (Annual of the British School at Athens, No. XXIV, 1919–21) [26]
• ’The Reverse of Aristotle’; a discussion of Peripeteia (Classical Review, August–September 1922) [27]
• ’The Waste Land’; review (New Statesman, 3 November 1923; reprinted in the Macmillan Casebook series and the Critical Heritage series)
• ’The Duchess of Malfi’; essay (New Statesman, 1 March 1924)
• ’Playing the Devil’; theatre-review of The White Devil (New Statesman, 17 October 1925)
• ’English Literature’; essay on English at Cambridge (University Studies, Cambridge 1933; editor Harold Wright)
• ’Poetry Examined by Professor Housman’; review of Housman’s Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge Review, 8 June 1933)
• ’Mithridates - The Poetry of A.E. Housman’; essay (Cambridge Review, 15 May 1936; reprinted in the Critical Heritage series, ed. Philip Gardner, 1992)
• ’Julian Bell’; a memoir (Cambridge Review, 15 October 1937; reprinted in The Cambridge Mind, editors Homberger, Janeway & Shama, 1970)
• ’Proud Motherhood (Madrid A.D. 1937)’; poem (Poems for Spain, 1939; editors Spender & Lehmann; reprinted in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse)
• ’William Wordsworth’; essay (Fifteen Poets, an anthology, Oxford University Press, 1941) [28]
• History of Hut 3, Public Records Office documents, ref. HW3/119 and /120
• ’Poetry’; ‘Epic’; ‘Ode’; ‘Elegy’; ‘Lyric’; ‘Pastoral’; articles, Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1950–66
• ’Long Lives the Emperor’; essay on The Hundred Days, The Historical Journal, Vol.8, No.1, Cambridge, 1965 [29]
• ’On the Fascination of Style’; essay (Holiday, March 1960; reprinted in The Odyssey Reader: Ideas and Style, 1968, and in Readings for Writers, ed. Jo Ray McCuen and Anthony C. Winkler, N.Y., 2009, ISBN 1-4282-3128-5) [30]
• ’Johnson’s Bête Grise’; essay on Johnson's criticism of Gray's poetry (The New Rambler: Journal of the Johnson Society of London, June 1960)

Political letters

• 'Germany, Europe and Peace' (Week-end Review, 16 September 1933)
• 'Germany and Europe' (Week-end Review, 21 October 1933)
• 'Abyssinia : Our Duty' (Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1935)
• 'Italy and Abyssinia' (Daily Telegraph, 31 July 1935)
• 'Italy’s Claims' (Daily Telegraph, 7 August 1935)
• 'An Italian Teacher’s Political Views' (Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1935)
• 'Impartiality at Cambridge' (Manchester Guardian, 14 August 1935)
• 'Home-truths from Italy' (New Statesman and Nation, 24 August 1935)
• 'Reply to an Italian’s defence' (Morning Post, 12 October 1935)
• 'Mussolini’s War' (Manchester Guardian, 14 October 1935)
• 'Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Letter' (The Times, 24 October 1935)
• 'The Italians in Tripoli' (Manchester Guardian, 11 January 1936)
• 'Congratulations to the University of Heidelberg' (Cambridge Review, 14 February 1936)
• 'The League’s Abyssinian Front' (Manchester Guardian, 12 March 1936)
• 'British Policy in World Crises' (Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1936)
• 'Democracy and Progress' (Time and Tide, 10 October 1936)
• 'Blackshirt Marches and Meetings' (Manchester Guardian, 23 October 1936)
• ' “Non-Intervention in Spain” ' (Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1937)
• 'Barbarities of Modern War' (Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1937)
• 'The National Government’s Foreign Policy' (Manchester Guardian, 6 September 1937)
• 'Pacifism and Panic-Mongering' (Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1937)
• 'Pacifism and Air-Raid Precautions' (Manchester Guardian, 7 December 1937)
• 'The Absolute Pacifist Position' (Manchester Guardian, 15 December 1937)
• 'Mr. Chamberlain’s “Realistic” Policy' (Manchester Guardian, 10 March 1938)
• 'To the Editor of The Times ' (Journal Under the Terror, 17 March 1938)
• 'An Open Letter to Lord Halifax' (Journal Under the Terror, 12 May 1938)
• 'Labour and the Popular Front' (New Statesman and Nation, 14 May 1938)
• 'Air Defence' (Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1938)
• 'Britain and Political Refugees' (Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1938)
• 'Refugee Jews and England' (Manchester Guardian, 26 August 1938)
• 'The European Crisis' (Manchester Guardian, 15 September 1938)
• 'The Munich Agreement–and after' (Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1938)
• 'The Refugees in Czechoslovakia' (Manchester Guardian, 3 November 1938)
• 'The Two Voices' (Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1938)
• 'After Barcelona' (Manchester Guardian, 7 February 1939)
• 'Germany and World Empire' (Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1939)
• 'Hitler as “The Friend of Peace” ' (Manchester Guardian, 24 February 1939)
• 'Friendship with Germany' (Manchester Guardian, 8 March 1939)
• 'German Opinion about England' (Manchester Guardian, 15 August 1939)

External links

• Online texts by Frank Laurence Lucas at Hathi Trust Digital Library [31]
• 'Frank Laurence Lucas', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [32]
• F. L. Lucas papers, Janus, Cambridge [33] [34] [35] [36]
• Portrait, photographer unknown, c.1919: kings.cam.ac.uk [37]
• Portrait by Bergne Porträttstudio, Stockholm, 1946 (print by Edward Leigh, FRPS, 19 King's Parade, Cambridge): harriman-house.com [38]
• Portrait by Antony Barrington Brown, 1957: npg.org.uk [39]
• Portrait by Erich Hartmann, Magnum Photos, 1961: magnumphotos.com [40]

Adaptations

• Gerald Finzi set to music Lucas's poem ‘June on Castle Hill’ (1935) in his collection To a Poet, op.13a no.5
• Margaret Wood's play A Kind of Justice (1966) is based on Lucas's poem ‘Spain 1809’ (1953)