Second son of Eric Charles Abbs, a bus driver, and Mary, a shop assistant, Abbs was born at Cromer, and grew up on the North Norfolk coast. The bare landscape was to exert a significant influence on his later poetry, as was the walled garden at Upper Sheringham Hall, where his grandfather was head gardener. His mother was deeply committed to the Catholic faith and this influenced his boyhood desire to become a priest. After leaving St Joseph’s School in Sheringham in 1954, Abbs travelled to Liverpool to join Saint Peter’s College, a seminary run by the Mill Hill missionary fathers. However, he quickly became disillusioned and in 1956, with the active support of his father, he left to continue his education at Norwich Technical College. Here he completed his O- and A-levels and in 1961 began a joint degree in English and Philosophy at the University of Bristol, which he completed in 1963.
Career
In 1964, inspired by progressive ideas in education, he trained as an English teacher, taking his first post at Filton High School, then a grammar school on the edge of Bristol. His first book, English for Diversity, proclaiming the power of creativity and imagination, drew largely from his experience there. After three years of teaching, Abbs took up his first academic position as a research fellow in the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he edited the independent quarterly journal Tract from 1971 to 1981. His time in Wales produced his first collection of poetry, For Man and Islands, as well as several works on English and education, including Autobiography in Education and Root and Blossom: the Philosophy, Practice and Politics of English Teaching. In 1977 Abbs became Lecturer in Education at the University of Sussex. He took a DPhil from the University in 1986. The University was to become his permanent academic home. Committed to aesthetic education and the potency of Socratic learning, he became increasingly opposed to the dominant pedagogic instrumentalism of the day. In 1986 he began editing The Falmer Press Library of Aesthetic Education, a series of twelve volumes on the theory and practice of teaching the arts. The library proposed the radical idea that the six arts – drama, dance, art, music, film and literature – belonged together as a single community of expression and understanding, and that each discipline, seen both as an expressive and critical activity, should be represented in any balanced school curriculum. While developing his pedagogical philosophy, Abbs continued to write poetry. In 1981 he published a 'sonnet autobiography', Icons of Time, which was particularly praised for the long sequence on the poet’s relationship with his father. It was followed in 1995 by Personae and in 1999 by Love after Sappho; both collections ranged widely across the western tradition of poetry and philosophy. In his poetry and in his poetics Abbs has consistently urged the need for musical cadence, metaphysical imagination and historic continuity. In later work, Viva la Vida, The Flowering of Flint, and Voyaging Out, these elements found a further union, both sparse and wide-ranging. In 2000, he became poetry editor of Resurgence and helped produce one of the first anthologies of eco-poetry, Earth Songs. In 2002, having been made first Professor of Arts Education and then Professor of Creative Writing, Abbs took up a new role within the Humanities department at Sussex, where he directed a D.Phil programme in creative writing. During this period Abbs wrote his most passionate defence of what he saw as authentic education: Against the Flow. This sets out his critique of the encroaching managerialism in the organisation of schools and, drawing on both seminal principle and good practice, posited a bold alternative: education for wholeness of being and the creative life. Drawing on his doctorate The Development of Autobiography in Western Culture from Augustine to Rousseau, Abbs's ongoing project, The Story of the Self, is a critical history of Western notions of selfhood. The work focuses on key figures who have shaped the tradition of introspection and reflexivity. Related essays on Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Montaigne, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud and Jung have already appeared in recent issues of The London Magazine. Abbs retired in 2006 and is currently Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. In 1963, Abbs married Barbara Beazeley; they had a son, Theodore, and two daughters, Annabel and Miranda, before divorcing in 2002.
Poetry
1981 Songs of a New Taliesin
1991 Icons of Time
1995 Personae
1996 Angelic Imagination
1999 Love After Sappho
2002 Earth Songs: a Resurgence Anthology of Contemporary Eco-poetry
