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