Quotes about Poetry by Lascelles Abercrombie

Lascelles Abercrombie British Poet

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable unless the subject has become integrated with the poet's mind and mood.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

The invention of epic poetry corresponds with a definite and, in the history of the world, often recurring state of society.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry

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.

Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie about poetry