Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

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.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with 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.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

And you read your emily dickinson, And I my robert frost. And we note our place with bookmarkers That measure what weve lost.

The form [of literature] matters little to me, classical or not.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.