The following article, which may take a few moments to download, appeared in the Brighton Gazette, October 7, 1908 (article reproduced by kind permission of Brighton Local Studies Library):
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Powys would become renowned for his lecturing style and many who attended his lectures in America were inspired by the experience. His art of 'dithyrambic analysis' involved feeling himself into the flesh and spirit of the subject of his lecture and becoming Dickens, Blake or Dostoyevsky on the lecture platform, acting out the part with the Dionysiac exuberance of the Greek dithyramb and using physical as well as verbal means of expression, the whole as far removed from the detached, linear progression of a conventional lecture as could be imagined.
He describes how he expressed himself in his lectures 'by a whisper, by a silence, by a gesture, by a bow, by a leer, by a leap, by a skip, by the howl of a wolf, by the scream of a woman in travail'. Whether the audience at Hove was treated to anything on this scale, we are not told.
To read a review of the lecture on Charles Lamb, continue to the next page.