Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Keeping an audience from mentally slipping their leash is a harder craft than holding a reader because listeners have no pause button. Abercrombie, a poet who lived through the churn from late-Victorian literary culture into mass radio and public lecturing, is quietly undercutting the romantic idea that speech is the most “natural” form of art. On the page, attention can be repaired: you reread a line, linger, backtrack, let syntax unfold at your pace. In the room, time only moves forward. Miss a clause and you’re not just confused; you’re gone.

The intent isn’t to flatter readers so much as to warn speakers (and perhaps poets who perform) that attention is a physical, social phenomenon. Hearers are distracted by coughs, bodies, status dynamics, the heat of the room, the little theater of who is looking at whom. Readers are distracted too, but in private the text waits. A reader’s attention is negotiated with language; a hearer’s attention is negotiated with everything.

The subtext is also a critique of authority. Public speech traditionally presumes a captive audience and a hierarchy: one voice, many receivers. Abercrombie’s line punctures that presumption. Attention isn’t owed; it’s earned, moment by moment, with rhythm, clarity, and surprise. Coming from a poet, the remark doubles as a defense of written form: the page isn’t a weaker cousin of oratory, but a medium that respects the mind’s actual habits - intermittent, recursive, stubbornly autonomous.