"Classicism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Financial Reform Almanack. The sentimental Tory found little to please him in the House of Hanover and Whig domination. The lovers of poetry, with Shelley in their ears and Wordsworth at their hearts, made merry with the trim muses of Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, their dilapidated classicism, and still more with their town- bred descriptions of the country, with its purling brooks and nodding groves, and, hanging over all, the moon—not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,' but 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, on all hands, the poor century was weighed in a hundred ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... France with the Contes Arabes was that their style is peu correcte; in fact they want classicism. Yet all Gallic imitators, Trebutien included, have carefully copied their leader and Charles Nodier remarks:—"Il me semble que l'on n'a pas rendu assez de justice au style de Galland. Abondant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... that such points should need mentioning; but Greek drama has always suffered from a school of critics who approach a play with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic defect of classicism. One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists heroes and heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals; and, though there was in the New Comedy a mask known to Pollux as "The Entirely-good Young Man" ([Greek: panchraestos neaniskos]), such a character ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... inventor of the loom which bears his name. In the French Salon in spring, "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey in the Tower," by Paul Hippolyte Delaroche, took the highest prize. The picture was a happy medium between the ultra-romantic method of Delacroix and the classicism of David. Three years previous to this, Delaroche sent to the Salon his famous paintings "Cromwell at the Bier of Charles I.," and "The Children of Edward IV. in the Tower." At this same time he was engaged on the greatest of his works, "The Hemicycle," now in the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... always are after the stress of any great emotional crisis. Between them, they made very short work of a cold chicken, a salad, a gooseberry-tart and a Camembert. The Duke filled his glass again and again. The cold classicism of his face had been routed by the new romantic movement which had swept over his soul. He looked two or three months older than when first I showed him ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... population, supported by the great merchants, interest in matters of art and science strongly develops, though as we noticed before, in the case of the town-hall architecture, with a marked preference for classicism and all foreign civilization. It seems as though these clever merchants could not understand that their own genial countrymen were sufficiently gifted and quite capable of astonishing the world by their work; ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... minor poets. He was a judicious discoverer, and he did not turn all his minor poets into major prophets. If his geese were swans, they were not all Swans of Avon. He had even incurred the deadly suspicion of classicism by differing from his young friends, the Punctuist Poets, when they produced versification consisting exclusively of commas and colons. He had a more humane sympathy with the modern flame kindled from the embers of Celtic mythology, and it was in reality the recent ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of mediaeval society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately planned rules and formulas, is technically called "classicism"; and the outburst against it established "romanticism," the spirit of desire, the longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... its philosophers, and its School of Philosophy is due to the influence of their history and teachings in American literature, and it is pleasant to recognize in this work such reverence of their classicism. Mrs. Anagnos has written a prose poem in which the last two sessions of the Concord School of Philosophy, which include that in memory of Emerson, and its lecturers excite her feeling and inspire her thought. It is sung in lofty strains that resemble those of the sacred woods ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Two of the most important contrasting tendencies of style in the general sense are Classicism and Romanticism. Classicism means those qualities which are most characteristic of the best literature of Greece and Rome. It is in fact partly identical with Idealism. It aims to express the inner truth or central principles of things, without anxiety for minor details, and it is by nature largely ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... generation of readers. This much is clear, that a study of Shakespeare's influence is in part a study of changing ideas and ideals in literature—that as he survived the Restoration taste, so he survived the new classicism of the eighteenth and the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. It is also clear that a full record of the influence of Shakespeare on English-speaking readers would touch on almost all the varied changes ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... specializing on late seventeenth century British classicism. Apparently he considers that the flower of British scholarship of that time wrote a very ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... them roundly when they failed to point out to him a given number of chords of the ninth and seventh, augmented or diminished, in a selected fugue of that mad iconoclast Bach; or to mark two dozen examples of canon and counterpoint in the first act of the latest opera by the staid pillar of classicism, Richard Wagner! After which betrayal of his mental state, the master leaped to his feet, jammed his ancient hat over his eyes, called out that his classes for the next three days were to take their instruction ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... regularly and substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between classicism and romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as in the later event, his feeling might have been romantic. I think ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "classic," and Hawthorne as a "romantic." A loud voice made this doubly TRUE and SURE to be on the examination paper. But this teacher of "truth AND dogma" apparently forgot that there is no such thing as "classicism or romanticism." One has but to go to the various definitions of these to know that. If you go to a classic definition you know what a true classic is, and similarly a "true romantic." But if you go to both, you have an algebraic ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... paintings of the third century bear less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit. But at the beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato, where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski, from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi in Isauria. The century in which the East finally dominated the West (350-450) is a period ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... impression of them more or less exactly, completely, and profoundly; next, leaving the things, it decomposes its impression, and classifies, distributes, and expresses more or less skilfully the ideas that it draws from that impression. In the second of these processes the classic is superior.' Classicism is only the organ of a certain reason, the raison raisonnante; that which insists upon thinking with as little preparation and as much ease as possible; which is contented with what it has acquired, and takes no thought about augmenting or renewing it; which either cannot or will not embrace ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... "Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... criticism, and very difficult to define. But in contrast with its opposites it can be made to mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes embraces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. But it is the opposite of classicism. It is emotional expansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of measure and restraint. By this, the older meaning of romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that will help to identify them. Their desire is to free their souls from the restraints ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Confucianism lacked. And, as in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., when Buddhism and Taoism joined forces and a working union existed between them, they practically excluded for the time all the "chilly growth of Confucian classicism." ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... elegance, purity, grace, ease; gracefulness, readiness &c adj.; concinnity^, euphony, numerosity^; Atticism^, classicalism^, classicism. well rounded periods, well turned periods, flowing periods; the right word in the right place; antithesis &c 577. purist [Slang]. V. point an antithesis, round a period. Adj. elegant, polished, classical, Attic, correct, Ciceronian, artistic; chaste, pure, Saxon, academical^. graceful, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget |
