Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

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.

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.

For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality.

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.

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.