"Unpoetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the pictures, chuckling over those that caught his unpoetic fancy, and nudging Karl in the ribs ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... While he was delivering himself with lively rapidity, he took the baby from his wife and holding it on his arm presented his features to be explored by its small fists. Deronda, not in a cheerful mood, was rashly pronouncing this Ezra Cohen to be the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: his phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament: and no shadow of a suffering race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous, pink-and-white ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... you wrote Too many things for me to quote, Though Bartlett, of quotation fame, Plays up your unpoetic name More than he did to Avon's bard. Your stuff's on every page, old pard. Bouquets to you the writer flings; You wrote ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... constitution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic. The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... sister-in-law of Leo's), the dawn of Josie cleft open something in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions that stung his eyeballs. He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of her apartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, his head, not unpoetic with its shag of black hair, lowered as if to bash at the impotence of the ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... theatricality, have been made use of by Silius, but find only a feeble echo in his lifeless verse. Nothing stands out sharply defined; the epic lacks impetus and has no salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by lightning flashes'. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, learned allusion, and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Gruyere" whose acts are recorded in the dry and unpoetic parchments of the time, were united in a paternal and pacific rule under which people and country reached a legendary height ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... had an undisputed moral claim to primacy. 'As far as I am personally concerned,' he said, 'I shall go to Rome with sorrow; not caring for art, I am sure that among the most splendid monuments of ancient and modern Rome I shall regret the sedate and unpoetic streets of my native town.' It grieved him to think that Turin must resign her most cherished privilege, but he knew his fellow-citizens, and he knew them to be ready to make this last sacrifice to their country. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... simultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the mushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not with their reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are such dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans call the "heaven-scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand hogs," whirring factories, and ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Strikes a Contemporary" is a portrait of the Poet as the unpoetic gossiping public of his day sees him. It is humorously colored by the alien point of view of the speaker, who suspects without understanding either the greatness of the poet's spiritual personality and mission, or the nature of his life, which is withdrawn from that of the commonalty, yet spent in ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... not be thought that any one could have mistaken her for a nervous, sensitive, high-strung nature, cast unduly upon a cold, calculating, and unpoetic world. Such certainly she was not. But women are peculiarly ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she should have no later than this exact date for at least "naming the day." Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny that ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... in his comedies generally, shows a kind of philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flimsier, if fairer, creature than man, and he sustains his bad judgment with infinite ingenuity of wilful wit and penetration of ungracious analysis. In "The Widow's Tears" this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the whole plot and incidents, as well as gives edge to many an incisive sarcasm. My sense, says Tharsalio, "tells me how short-lived widows' tears are, that their weeping is in truth but laughing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... their organs of vegetation are reduced to a stem and filiform branches that have obtained for them the names of Cheveux de Venus (Venus' Hair) and Cheveux du Diable (devil's hair) in French, and gold thread in English. Because of their destructive nature they have likewise been called by the unpoetic name of hellweed; and, for the reason that they embrace their host plants so closely, they have been called love weed and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art—and by his oriental mysticism. He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:—he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art. Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer's theory, is on a lower grade of Will Objectification or Manifestation, than men and animals are, and landscape painting is, therefore, altogether on a different plane. Through ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... and for a brief portion of the day, that he shone upon that side where stood their dusty windows. And then the noise!—a ceaseless torrent of sounds, of stony sounds, of iron sounds, of grinding sounds, of clashing sounds, of yells and cries—of all deafening and unpoetic discords! Letty had not much poetry in her, and needed what could be had from the outside so much the more. It is the people of a land without springs that must have cisterns. It is the poetic people without poetry that pant and pine for the country. When such get hold ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... exuberance of strength which bursts through all the barriers of law, must of necessity conflict with the rules of social life. To these enthusiast dreams of greatness and efficiency it needed but a sarcastic bitterness against the unpoetic spirit of the age to complete the strange Don Quixote whom, in the Robber Moor, we at once detest and love, admire and pity. It is, I hope, unnecessary to remark that I no more hold up this picture as a warning exclusively to robbers than the greatest Spanish satire was ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... juices of the precious fruit—all these southern peculiarities of costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy questions and more saucy retorts—of what, in fact, in the humble and unpoetic, but expressive vernacular, is called "chaff"—is kept up with a vigour which seldom flags, except now and then, when the but-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus, strikes the general fancy, and procures for the morceau a lusty encore. Meantime, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... 265-316 A.D. and it is quoted in the Maha-prajna-paramita-sastra ascribed to Nagarjuna.[132] The first part is probably not later than the first century A.D. The Lotus is unfortunately accessible to English readers only in a most unpoetic translation by the late Professor Kern, but it is a great religious poem which starting from humanity regards religion as cosmic and universal, rather than something mainly concerned with our earth. The discourses of Sakyamuni are accompanied in it by stupendous miracles culminating in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... fails to furnish a fatal occasion which betrays the secret of the two hearts, and suddenly launches the thunderbolt which has been gradually gathering in the clouds. This is the crisis of all love. This occasion presented itself to Madame de Tecle and M. de Camors in the form of an unpoetic incident. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet |
