Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

Auden gets credit for making poetry sound like a public utility, but Abercrombie is already there: poetry as a service industry for the bored. His claim is bracingly unsentimental. “Traditional matter must be glorified” isn’t a defense of heritage for heritage’s sake; it’s a practical aesthetic policy for an audience with limited patience and plenty of fatigue. Familiar stories, buffed to a shine, go down easier than “new and unexpected things” because the listening public isn’t showing up to be challenged. They’re showing up to be carried.

The subtext is a quiet demotion of originality. Abercrombie’s “must” suggests compulsion, almost an economic necessity: poets tailor their wares to demand. And “glorified” implies embellishment rather than invention, a kind of value-add treatment applied to known material. That’s not nostalgia; it’s UX design avant la lettre. The poem works when it reduces friction, when it offers the comfort of recognition with just enough heightened language to make the old feel briefly renewable.

Context matters. Abercrombie is writing out of an early 20th-century Britain where modernism is starting to valorize rupture, difficulty, the shock of the new. He’s resisting that elite posture, but not by idealizing “the people.” He remembers the conditions of listening: tired hours, crowded days, attention spent elsewhere. In that light, tradition isn’t a museum; it’s a shared playlist. The poet’s job is to remix the communal archive so it can keep doing what it’s always done: make endurance feel like meaning.