Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie is taking a swing at the comforting museum-diorama version of origins: the idea that you can build a great epic the way you assemble a jigsaw, collecting heroic ballads, sanding down contradictions, and gluing them into a smooth storyline. As a poet writing in an era newly obsessed with philology and “scientific” literary history, he’s resisting a late-19th- and early-20th-century temptation to treat epics like archaeological composites. The target is the editorial fantasy of the scholar-as-master-builder, turning messy oral culture into an orderly book.

The subtext is almost polemical: epic isn’t an aggregate, it’s an organism. “Adjusting their discrepancies” sounds innocuous, like proofreading, but Abercrombie makes it feel like a crime against the form. Discrepancy is not a bug; it’s a feature of living tradition, evidence of competing local truths, shifting audiences, and the social function of storytelling. To “make them continuous” is to mistake continuity for authenticity, and coherence for greatness.

What makes the line work is its quiet refusal of a whole intellectual posture. It doesn’t romanticize the folk, but it distrusts the modern urge to rationalize art into a linear product. Coming from a poet associated with early modernist ferment, it reads like a defense of creative synthesis: the epic imagination isn’t stenography. It’s an act of shaping so forceful that it can absorb contradiction without pretending it never existed.