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“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
#Important #Achieve #Difficulty
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“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
#Community #Mind #Artistic
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“If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Fall #Epic #Poetry Is
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“It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Attention #Difficult #Reader
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“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
#Epic #Needs #Invention
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“The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Successful #Epic #May
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“The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Epic #Style #Matter
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“The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Epic #Firsts #Meant To Be
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“The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Epic #World #Artistic
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“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
#Attitude #Epic #Said
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“How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Teaching #Looks #Students
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“For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Expression #Individuality #Firsts
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“No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Art #Poet #Substitutes
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“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
#Tired #Would Be #Stories
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“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
#Age #Doe #Heroic
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“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
#Individuality #Balance #Age
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“It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.”
-- Lascelles Abercrombie
#Believe #Mean #Sometimes
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“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
#Age #Important #Robins
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“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
#Destiny #Men #Epic
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“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
#Determination #Epic #Men
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