Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Epic poetry, Abercrombie implies, isn’t a quirky European heirloom so much as a recurring piece of social technology. The sentence does two things at once: it punctures the romance of a single “origin” story (“invented many times and independently”) and then immediately restores order by arguing that those multiple beginnings converge because the pressures that produced them converge. Epic isn’t a miracle; it’s an answer.

That logic carries a quiet polemic. Early 20th-century literary culture was busy ranking “civilizations” by their canons and treating Homer or Virgil as the master template. Abercrombie, a poet-critic working in the shadow of modernism and anthropology, pushes back: if epics keep appearing across cultures, the genre’s authority can’t rest on pedigree. It rests on function. Communities reach for long narrative song when they need memory before archives, identity before nation-states, legitimacy before bureaucracies - a portable monument that can be performed aloud and agreed upon in public.

The subtext is also about art’s relationship to necessity. By calling epic an invention, he demystifies inspiration and turns attention to conditions: war, migration, founding myths, dynastic claims, the need to bind strangers into “we.” His unfinished final clause (“so the invention itself has been...”) hints at the punchline: similar needs yield similar forms - recurring patterns of heroes, journeys, divine machinery, catalogs, genealogies. It’s a cool, bracing way to say that greatness can be structural, not singular, and that culture repeats because the problems it’s built to solve repeat.