Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie is drawing a hard line between a poem that lives in the mouth and a poem that lives on the page, and he does it with the cool authority of someone watching modern literature professionalize in real time. “Intended for recitation” is more than a historical footnote about Homeric bards; it’s a claim about design. Oral epic is built to survive breath: repeated epithets, rolling rhythms, scenes you can re-enter midstream. Its “reader” is a room, not an individual. Memory and performance aren’t accessories; they’re the medium.

Then comes the pivot: “the literary epic is meant to be read.” That phrase carries a faint reproach. The literary epic, in Abercrombie’s formulation, trades communal immediacy for private scrutiny. It assumes silence, a fixed text, the ability to pause, re-read, notice structure. The subtext is that print culture doesn’t just distribute epics; it rewires them. Once the audience becomes a solitary reader, epic can afford complexity that would collapse in live delivery: dense allusion, syntactic intricacy, ironic distance, footnote-level architecture.

Context matters. Abercrombie is writing in the early 20th century, when modernism is pressuring poetry to justify its techniques and its public role. His distinction quietly defends difficulty. If an epic is “meant to be read,” then opacity isn’t necessarily failure; it’s an adaptation to a new arena where attention is intense but fragmented, and meaning is negotiated line by line rather than received in a single communal sweep. It’s also an obituary notice for a lost social function: the epic as shared civic event, replaced by literature as a private technology.