15 Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

Lascelles Abercrombie quotes

1. The glory of the king of all the kings. You with the golden power on your brows, You kings, I think you know not what you are. First you shall learn yourselves: for neither light Understandeth itself, nor darkness light.

2. Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone Hurled in by the Assyrians: the town-walls Crumbling out of their masonry into mounds Of foolish earth, so smitten by the rams: The hunger-pangs, the thirst like swallowed lime Forcing them gulp green water maggot-quick That lurks in corners of dried cisterns: yea, Murders done for a drink of blood, and flesh Sodden of infants: and no hope alive Of rescue from this heat of prisoning anguish Until Assyrian swords drown it in death.

3. And where is now that palace gone, All the magical skill'd stone, All the dreaming towers wrought By Love as if no more than thought The unresisting marble was? How could such a wonder pass? Ah, it was but built in vain Against the stupid horns of Rome, That pusht down into the common loam The loveliness that shone in Spain. But we have raised it up again! A loftier palace, fairer far, Is ours, and one that fears no war. Safe in marvellous walls we are; Wondering sense like builded fires, High amazement of desires, Delight and certainty of love, Closing around, roofing above Our unapproacht and perfect hour Within the splendours of love's power.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.

4. An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

5. Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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