But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

He wrote a series of works on the nature of poetry including The Idea of Great Poetry (1925) and Romanticism (1926). In 1929 he moved on to the University of London and in 1935 to a prestigious readership at Oxford University. He also publiLascelles Abercrombied several volumes of original verse largely metaphysical poems in dramatic form and a number of verse plays.