The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling. — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
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. — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word,… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching. — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and… — Lascelles Abercrombie Copy Share Image
