Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

"Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life"

Lascelles Abercrombie, Poet

About this Quote

Abercrombie is quietly pushing back against the lazy idea that epic is just a big, well-upholstered mirror held up to “life.” His distinction is razor-clean: epic poetry doesn’t symbolize life itself, as if existence were a single, coherent object waiting to be translated into verse. Epic selects. It frames. It strikes a pose. What it offers is “some great symbolic attitude” - a posture toward living that’s been enlarged until it can carry a culture’s self-image.

The word “attitude” matters because it’s half aesthetic, half ethical. An epic isn’t a diary of how people actually behave; it’s an argument about what counts as meaningful behavior when stakes are maximal: loyalty, rage, duty, piety, cunning, sacrifice. Achilles isn’t “life,” he’s a concentrated stance on honor and mortality. Odysseus isn’t “human nature,” he’s a theory of survival by intelligence and narrative control. The subtext is a warning to readers and critics: if you approach epic expecting documentary realism, you’ll miss the point and then blame the form for not being a novel.

Context helps explain the precision. Abercrombie, writing in the early 20th century as modernism questioned inherited grand narratives, is defending the epic not as an antique museum piece but as a machine for symbolic coherence. Epic’s scale isn’t mere bigness; it’s a method for turning a “manner of life” into an emblem you can argue with, inherit, revise, or reject.

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Topic	Poetry
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Lascelles Abercrombie (January 9, 1881 - October 27, 1938) was a Poet from United Kingdom.

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