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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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