Age Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.

— Lascelles Abercrombie

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

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

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

— Lascelles Abercrombie