Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
Chris Abani
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or... →
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... →
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
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... →
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.
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... →
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... →
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms... →
Peter Abrahams