Art & Creativity Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Epic poetry, in Abercrombie's hands, stops being a museum piece and becomes a kind of social technology: a form built to metabolize whatever a culture can’t process in ordinary speech. His phrase "general process" sounds almost clinical, deliberately draining the epic of misty reverence. He’s arguing that epic isn’t defined by hexameters, heroes, or size, but by function: it answers "profound needs" that a society can feel but not yet name.

The subtext is a warning against treating the epic as timeless decoration. If epic is responsive, it’s also contingent. The Iliad isn’t great because it’s old; it’s old because it solved something urgent for its world: how to stage violence, honor, fate, and communal loss at a scale a city could recognize as its own. Abercrombie’s emphasis on "constantly" pushes against the idea of the epic as a single golden-age artifact. He wants a lineage of adaptations, not a canon frozen in amber.

Context matters: Abercrombie was writing in a modernist era that loved to announce ruptures with the past while still scavenging it. Post-Victorian Britain, shadowed by industrial upheaval and looming war, was obsessed with what collective story could hold a fractured public together. By framing epic as society’s answer to its deepest pressures, he’s also defending poetry’s relevance: not as personal confession, but as a public instrument, built to carry history, anxiety, and aspiration when other genres buckle.