"Couplet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attains its highest excellence in poetry. The art of composing short poems in which a thought, emotion or spiritual experience is expressed with a few simple but pregnant words in the compass of a single couplet or short hymn, was carried by the early Buddhists to a perfection which has never been excelled. The Dhammapada[645] is the best known specimen of this literature. Being an anthology it is naturally more ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... leave the general concern To track our Hero on his path of Fame: He must his laurels separately earn— For fifty thousand heroes, name by name, Though all deserving equally to turn A couplet, or an elegy to claim, Would form a lengthy lexicon of Glory, And, what is worse still, a much ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... which must be laid chiefly to the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms. Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace, "'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... gravest have more than one light passage. To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found in any similar production ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Latin language. Horace, by adopting stricter rules, produces a much more harmonious effect. The same is true of Catullus's treatment of the elegiac, as compared with that of Propertius or Ovid. The Greek elegiac does not require any stop at the end of the couplet, nor does it affect any special ending; words of seven syllables or less are used by it indifferently. The trisyllabic ending, which is all but unknown to Ovid, occurs continually in Catullus; even the monosyllabic, which is altogether avoided by succeeding poets, occurs once. [124] Another ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
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