Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. – Lascelles Abercrombie
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. – Lascelles Abercrombie
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. – Lascelles Abercrombie
The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age. – Lascelles Abercrombie