SOURCE: Scannell, Vernon. “A Vision of the Street.” In The Poetry of Dannie Abse, pp. 26-38. London: Robson Books, 1983.

In the following essay, Scannell assesses Abse's contribution to poetry.

The vacillations of literary reputation and fashion, especially among poets and poetry, are a curiosity of history, and those of the final quarter of the 20th Century will no doubt seem as strange to posterity—provided, of course, that there is to be a posterity, and that it will be a literate one—as any of the evaluative oddities of the past. Looking back at what seem now to be the misjudgements of the critics of former times—the high estimate for example, of the poetry of Nicholas Rowe, whose translation of Lucan (1718) was, according to Johnson, ‘one of the greatest productions of English poetry,’ the admiration expressed by Coleridge and Wordsworth for the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles...