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 of making verbal beauty tell.

Lascelles Abercrombie

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.

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 on individuality, and on nothing else.

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

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

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.

Lascelles Abercrombie