"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"
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Abercrombie is diagnosing a problem that only shows up when poetry leaves the page and tries to live in air. “Recitation” sounds like a neutral delivery system, but he treats it as a hostile environment: language has to compete with breath, pacing, a performer’s personality, and an audience’s impatience. The sting is in his refinement of terms. It’s not hard, he implies, to achieve “verbal beauty” in the abstract; the real crisis is making that beauty “tell” - to register as force, to land as meaning, not as decorative sound.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two temptations of early 20th-century verse culture: the elocutionary tradition that prized sonorous polish, and the literary habit of treating musicality as a substitute for thought. Abercrombie, a Georgian poet writing in the shadow of modernism, sits in a moment when poetry’s authority is up for renegotiation. If the poem is “meant solely for recitation,” it risks becoming performance craft rather than literary art, judged by vocal charm instead of intellectual pressure.
That’s why the sentence pivots on “or rather.” He’s correcting himself midstream, performing the very sensitivity he demands: precision over prettiness. “Beauty” must do rhetorical work; it has to guide attention, sharpen argument, or intensify feeling. Otherwise the recited poem becomes a kind of audible lacework - impressive, yes, but inert. Abercrombie’s point is less about condemning sound than about insisting that sound earns its keep.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two temptations of early 20th-century verse culture: the elocutionary tradition that prized sonorous polish, and the literary habit of treating musicality as a substitute for thought. Abercrombie, a Georgian poet writing in the shadow of modernism, sits in a moment when poetry’s authority is up for renegotiation. If the poem is “meant solely for recitation,” it risks becoming performance craft rather than literary art, judged by vocal charm instead of intellectual pressure.
That’s why the sentence pivots on “or rather.” He’s correcting himself midstream, performing the very sensitivity he demands: precision over prettiness. “Beauty” must do rhetorical work; it has to guide attention, sharpen argument, or intensify feeling. Otherwise the recited poem becomes a kind of audible lacework - impressive, yes, but inert. Abercrombie’s point is less about condemning sound than about insisting that sound earns its keep.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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