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Quotes by 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.
- The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.
- The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.
- 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.
- There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.
- 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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