"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other writers have given to accent. He conceived of a line of poetry as consisting of a definite number of bars (or feet), each bar containing, in dactylic metre, three equal "eighth notes", of which the first is accented, or in iambic metre (which has the same "triple" time), of one "eighth note", and one "quarter note", with the accent on the second. Thus the accented syllable is not necessarily "longer" than the unaccented, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the same time, antique forms are still conventionally used, though violated in the using. In other words, the modern metres of the modern European races—the Italian Hendecasyllable, the French Alexandrine, the English Iambic and Trochaic rhythms—have been indicated; and a moment has been prepared when these measures shall tune themselves by means of emphasis and accent to song, before they take their place as literary schemes appealing to the ear in rhetoric. This phase, whereby the metres of antiquity ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... sweetness and boundless wealth of imagination have been now for three hundred years a joy to every lover of poetry. Something, too, he learned from Waller and from Sandys, both of whom, but especially the former, had been of service in giving smoothness to the iambic distich, in which all of Pope's best poems are written. Dryden, however, whom when a little boy he saw at Will's coffee-house—'Virgilium tantum vidi' records the memorable day—was the poet whose influence he felt ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... into ten cantos, containing one thousand one hundred and two stanzas. Its metre is the heroic iambic, in rhymed ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... have introduced the first canto of Midsummer Idylls in a revised form, and it has been my especial care to correct, as far as it was consistent with the meaning of the passage, any hitch in the Iambic Measure which might offend the ear. An author has himself to please as well as his public, and it has been to me a matter of much study that the Iambics should be as pure, or at least as tolerable, ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... for my prologue. I am not going to change my caesuras and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for his first models, and had translated a great French poem; and Anglo-Saxon verse-methods were hardly usable any longer. So it may well have appeared to him that serious poetry was naturally French in meter and method. There was no model for what he wanted to do in English; the English five-iambic line had not been invented, and only the popular lyricists, of the proletariat, sang in stresses. And anyhow, as the upper classes, to which he belonged more or less, were only growing out of French into English, very likely they pronounced ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... of the "Agamemnon," Mr. Browning has used the double ending continuously, so as to reproduce the extended measure of the Greek iambic trimeter.] ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... assigning the primary model to the incantations of the Druids.[25] The lyrical measures of the Gael are various, but the scansion is regular, and there is no description of verse familiar to English usage, from the Iambic of four syllables, to the slow-paced Anapaestic, or the prolonged Alexandrine, which is not exactly measured by these sons and daughters of song.[26] Every poetical composition in the language, however lengthy, is intended to be sung or chanted. Gaelic music is regulated by no ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a lively conversation with two Samian Greeks: the celebrated worker in metals, sculptor and goldsmith Theodorus, and the Iambic poet Ibykus of Rhegium, who had left the court of Polykrates for a time in order to become acquainted with Egypt, and were bearers of presents to Amasis from their ruler. Close to the fire lay Philoinus of Sybaris, a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bearing another meaning. They see there a sculptured figure, in its lower part a stone, in its upper part a youth with flying hair. Does this look like Erasmus in any respect? If this is not enough, they see written on the stone itself Terminus: if one takes this as the last word, that will make an iambic dimeter acatalectic, Concedo nulli Terminus; if one begins with this word, it will be a trochaic dimeter acatalectic, Terminus concedo nulli. What if I had painted a lion and added as a device 'Flee, unless you prefer to be torn to pieces'? Would they attribute ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... At the same moment the Choral Ode is finished and the Chorus take up their usual position during the Episodes, drawn up in two lilies in front of the Altar facing the Stage. They speak only by their Foreman (or Corypliceus), and use the ordinary Iambic Metre (equivalent to our ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... rhythm. Every one seems to agree that there is a certain danger in mixing these infinitely subtle and "syncopated" tunes of prose with the easily recognized tunes of verse. There is, unquestionably, a natural "iambic" roll in English prose, due to the predominant alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in our native tongue, but when Dickens—to cite what John Wesley would call "an eminent sinner" in this respect—inserts in his emotional ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... meter of a poem two things are considered: First the character of the feet, and second, the number of feet. In this poem the feet are iambic and there are four of them, consequently we name the meter of this poem iambic tetrameter. Whenever you hear those words you think of a poem whose meter is exactly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... swagger or strut; but for all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they perform. I love to see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres that Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most lovely. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... his spirit than numbers; yet the music of verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419] Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into English metre, especially when the poet to be translated is Virgil. The use of rhyme causes trouble. It "is certainly a constraint even to the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... the verse of Shakspere and was introduced into Germany from England. It is an unrhymed iambic verse of five ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... and we may readily allow that English versification had not, in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries, the numerical regularity of classical or Italian metre. In the ancient ballads, Scots and English, the substitution of the anapaest for the iambic foot, is of perpetual recurrence, and gives them a remarkable elasticity and animation; but we never fail to recognize a uniformity of measure, which the use of nearly equipollent feet cannot, on the strictest metrical principles, be thought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... has mingled one or two others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the beginning of a trochee in ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... The Introduction is written on a basis of regular four-beat couplets, each line being technically an iambic tetrameter; lines 96, 205, and 283 are Alexandrines, or iambic hexameters, each serving to give emphasis and resonance (like the ninth of the Spenserian stanza) to the passage which it closes. Intensity of expression is given by the triplet which closes the passage ending with ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... over almost without a word of comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Greeks and Romans have preferred the iambic to the heroic verse in their tragedies; not only because the first has a kind of dignity better adapted to the stage, but, whilst it approaches nearer to prose, retains sufficiently the air of poetry to please the ear; and yet has too little of it to put the audience in mind of the poet, who ought ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... literature more ancient than the Chanson de Roland.[20] And the form of this, though from one point of view it may be called rude and simple, is of remarkable perfection in its own way. The poem is written in decasyllabic iambic lines with a caesura at the second foot, these lines being written with a precision which French indeed never afterwards lost, but which English did not attain till Chaucer's day, and then lost again for more than another century. Further, the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury |
