Top 35 Lascelles Quotes
#1. 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.
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#3. The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.
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#4. By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
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#5. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.
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#6. But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
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#7. For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality.
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#8. Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
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#9. The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
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#10. 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.
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#11. Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder.
Mary Lascelles
#12. With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
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#13. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.
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#14. The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.
Mary Lascelles
#15. Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
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#17. Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she.
Mary Lascelles
#18. How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.
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#19. A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.
Mary Lascelles
#20. The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.
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#21. Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character.
Mary Lascelles
#22. A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman.
Mary Lascelles
#24. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.
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#25. In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women.
Mary Lascelles
#26. Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility?
Mary Lascelles
#27. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.
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#28. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.
Mary Lascelles
#29. Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him.
Mary Lascelles
#30. Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
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#31. 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.
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#32. An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.
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#33. Mr. Lascelles whispered to Mr. Drawlight that he had not realized before that doing kind actions would lead to his being addressed in familiar terms by so many low people - it was most unpleasant - he would take care to do no more.
Susanna Clarke
#34. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.
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#35. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
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