Famous Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
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But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
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Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
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By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
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If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
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That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
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The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
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Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
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With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
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But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.
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