Best quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie on Poetry

Checkout quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie on Poetry

• ‟ 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.

  - Lascelles Abercrombie
  

• ‟ 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.

  - 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
  

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

  - Lascelles Abercrombie
  

• ‟ Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

  - 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 similar, so the invention itself has been.

  - Lascelles Abercrombie
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Lascelles Abercrombie
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Lascelles Abercrombie