 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. |
| 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. |
| Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. |
| 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. |
| The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read. |
| An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers. |
