Politics & Power Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Abercrombie is needling a very modern temptation: to treat “epic material” like a museum hoard, where mere age and provenance stand in for artistic power. By calling it a “vast stock” scattered among nations, he frames culture as an unevenly distributed archive - stories, legends, oral traditions - that scholars and poets can mine. The diction is deliberately commercial and archaeological at once: stock suggests inventory, something amassed and cataloged; archaeological interest suggests artifacts valued for what they prove about a people, not for what they do to a reader.

The sly turn comes in the clause “but not always.” It punctures romantic nationalism and antiquarian fever in one stroke. Plenty of inherited material is extraordinary; plenty is also dull, repetitious, or only meaningful as evidence. Abercrombie’s intent is partly disciplinary: he’s warning poets and critics not to confuse cultural significance with aesthetic excellence. An epic can be invaluable to historians and still fail as art; the past doesn’t automatically confer greatness.

Context matters: early 20th-century Britain was saturated with revivalism and collecting projects - folklore studies, Celtic Twilight moods, and the broader European hunger for foundational myths. At the same time, modernism was raising the bar for what “works” on the page. Abercrombie, a poet thinking about tradition, is positioning himself between reverence and refusal: yes, the nations are rich with epic matter, but the artist’s job is selection, transformation, judgment. Archaeology preserves; poetry must persuade.