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.

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.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

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.

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

How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.

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.