Life & Wisdom Quote by Lascelles Abercrombie

The slyness here is in the almost bureaucratic way Abercrombie describes artistic ambition: poetry as a menu, the poet as a consumer making a sensible selection. An “epic poet” isn’t presented as a vocation seized by necessity or vision, but as the prestige option a man “would decide” to prefer, like choosing the biggest house on the street. That mild, procedural phrasing quietly mocks a particular modern delusion: that the highest forms can be willed into existence by sheer resolve.

The line turns on “conscious determination,” a phrase that belongs to self-improvement manuals and committee minutes, not to the messy origin stories of epics. Epics are supposed to be the byproduct of a civilization’s pressure - history, war, religion, migration - condensed into narrative. Abercrombie suggests the opposite: a private individual setting out to manufacture grandeur. The humor is dry, but the critique is pointed. You can decide to write in epic scale; you can’t decide to have an epic’s necessity.

Context matters. Abercrombie, writing in the long shadow of Victorian certainties and amid early 20th-century fracture, is watching traditional hierarchies of genre wobble. Modernity prizes intention, professionalism, and technique; it also produces artists hungry for legitimacy and cultural weight. His sentence exposes the insecurity beneath that hunger. The epic becomes less a living form than a status badge, and the “man” who chooses it reveals a culture where art is increasingly planned, self-conscious, and anxious about its own seriousness.