Art & Creativity Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie is quietly picking a fight with the page. For a poet, that sounds almost heretical, until you remember the moment he’s speaking from: early 20th-century Britain, when poetry was being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, print culture is exploding - cheap books, mass literacy, the poem as a private object. On the other, modernity is remaking sound itself: public lectures, the gramophone, radio on the horizon. Against that backdrop, his claim isn’t nostalgia; it’s a theory of where poetry actually lives.

The line works because it refuses the common assumption that writing is the poem and speech is merely a delivery system. Abercrombie flips it: the written word is a compromise, a set of stage directions for the real event. Subtextually, he’s defending the body - breath, pace, hesitation, emphasis - as meaning-making tools, not decorative extras. The “substitute” phrasing is pointed: print can preserve, circulate, and canonize, but it can’t replicate the social contract of being heard, or the way sound forces language to unfold in time. You can skim a page; you can’t skim a voice without breaking it.

There’s also a canny assertion of craft and authority. If poetry is founded on speech, then the poet isn’t just a maker of texts but a designer of experience, accountable to the ear. Abercrombie’s intent reads like a corrective to the bookish habit of treating poems as puzzles for silent decoding. He’s insisting that poetry is closer to music and rhetoric than to literature-as-archive, and that the reader who never hears the poem is missing the art it was built on.