Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

There’s a polite provocation baked into Abercrombie’s certainty: he’s yanking poetry away from the crowd and handing it back to the solitary maker, as if to say that “the people” are a category error when we’re talking about art. Written in the early 20th century, the claim pushes against two temptations of the era: the romanticization of folk culture as the pure voice of a nation, and the growing taste for mass movements that wanted culture to function as social glue, propaganda, or “collective expression.” Abercrombie, a poet in the Georgian orbit, stakes out a defensible elitism: poems have signatures for a reason.

The line works because it’s less about denying influence than about defending responsibility. Calling art “the production of an individual mind” is a way of insulating the poem from being conscripted. Communities can transmit language, myths, rhythms, and themes, but they can’t be blamed or credited for the final act of selection: the ruthless choosing of one image over another, one cadence over another, one moral emphasis over another. That choosing is where style lives, and style is where ideology often hides.

The subtext is also a warning about flattening. If poetry becomes “of peoples,” it risks becoming representative before it becomes true - obligated to speak for a group rather than speak precisely. Abercrombie’s insistence privileges the strange, the idiosyncratic, the private obsession that refuses to poll well. It’s a counterweight to the comforting fiction that art is just a communal mirror, when it’s more often a solitary argument with what the community thinks it already knows.