SOURCE: Wroe, Nicholas. “Is There a Poet in the House?” Guardian (29 September 2001): 13.

In the following essay, Wroe discusses Abse's combination of medicine and literature.

The Abse brothers of Cardiff have proved to be one of the most remarkable groups of 20th-century Welsh siblings. Wilfred was an acclaimed psychiatrist, and Leo a longstanding Labour MP who was instrumental in reforming laws on homosexuality and divorce. Dannie, the youngest, not only became one of the country's leading poets, but did so while maintaining a career as a doctor in a London chest clinic.

Next month Dannie, now 78, publishes an updated version of his acclaimed 1974 autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, and a collection of verse celebrating his relationship with Wales, Welsh Retrospective. Although there were a few poetry anthologies in the house when he was a child, Abse never felt any desire to look at them. “I loathed poetry in school because...