[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 it seemed to be all about daffodils. But then my elder brother Leo brought some political magazines into the house which had poems about unemployment in the Welsh valleys and the Spanish civil war. And only then I found out that poetry didn't have to be about birds and flowers.”

The Spanish civil war was pivotal in forming Abse's early political and artistic temperament. The poetry as well as the early violent deaths of writers such as Cornford, Lorca and Caudwell had a considerable impact on him.

As a schoolboy he would write essays, purely “to clarify my own attitudes,” with titles like “On Fascism” or “On Socialism” or “On Jazz.” But despite these serious-minded projects, he says now that he was never precocious. “If anything I was an extremely late developer, and truth to tell that was a good thing. That's why my early poetry was so defective, and why even Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve [his 1954 autobiographical novel], which people say is one of my most popular books, has got too many adjectives in it.”

Abse left Cardiff in 1943 to study medicine in London and stayed in the profession until his retirement in 1982. Despite the long hours he worked as a junior doctor, he remembers writing at least one poem every week. “I had the need to write,” he explains. “A critic once said that poetry is not a career, it's a destiny, and I like that. I get irritated when I see people making a career out of poetry without much evidence of talent or a fundamental need to write it.”

The first of his 11 volumes of poetry, After Every Green Thing, was accepted for publication in 1946, but due to post-war paper shortages wasn't published until 1949. It provided him with an introduction into post-war London's literary bohemianism, although he recalls an early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a Swiss Cottage pub petering out into excruciating silences. “But Swiss Cottage was a rather bohemian and promiscuous area,” he recalls. “There were many young women available and it didn't hurt to write poetry in that kind of atmosphere.”

Abse says the fact that he has maintained one foot in this louche world and the other in the conservative profession of medicine has been an advantage. His relation to his two careers is best summed up in the subtitle of his Collected Poems, “White Coat, Purple Coat.” “I've always felt a bit of a maverick wherever I was,” he explains. “In a way Cardiff is a border city and has problems about being English or Welsh. And I was a socialist Jew in a working-class Catholic school where they were all for Franco. Then, when I went to Westminster Hospital medical school, most of the other students had been to public school; in the officers' mess in the RAF I had different political views from most people. But in a way every poet is an outsider. It was Freud who pointed out that being an outsider can either cripple you or help you. I hope and think it's been the latter.”

He now says he is lucky to produce half a dozen poems in a year. “But I still have the need to write and when I can't write poetry, which I find difficult, I write prose,” he says. “I find I write poetry uphill and write prose downhill.” As well as fiction he has written criticism, books on medical issues and drama. As a young playwright he won an award for the best play outside the West End, which brought him to the attention of the legendary Peggy Ramsay, who became his agent. “Whenever I went to her office she would jump on to her desk, pull her skirt up very high and talk about Robert Bolt,” he laughs. “I told this to Maureen Lipman, who recently played Ramsay, and I think I did influence her performance in that she was inclined to hitch her skirt up a bit.”

Abse has been often praised for his own performances reading his poetry, and is about to embark on a short reading tour. Although he has achieved so much as a writer, does he now have any regrets about continuing with his medical career and not writing full-time? “I did once consider giving up medicine just after I'd failed a pathology exam,” he says. “By this time I'd already had a play produced and a book of poems accepted for publication.

“But I was under great pressure to carry on, both from my brothers and my father, who basically lived vicariously through his sons. I remember him saying,'I don't care if he's Homer. He's got to earn a living.’ And looking back, I'm glad I did stick with it. In the end I always liked being able to sometimes wear a white coat and sometimes a purple one.”