"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost all the types of verse — iambic, trochaic, blank, the sonnet, etc. — and with about equal skill. Three features, however, specially characterize his verse: the careful distribution of vowel-colors and the frequent use of alliteration and of phonetic syzygy,*1* by which last is meant a combination ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... are far too delicate for 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. There ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Iambic and hexameter, farewell! In that moment the poet died in Thomas; I mean, the poet who had to dig his expressions of life out of ink-pots. Things boil up quickly and unexpectedly in the soul; century-old impulses, undreamed of by the inheritor; and when these bubble and spill over the kettle's ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... the cantilena, rather than the metron, rules the flow of verse; but, at 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 ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... 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, as circumstances would ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... was one of the earliest and most celebrated of all the lyric poets. He was a native of the island of Paros, and flourished about the year 700 B.C. His fame rests chiefly on his terrible satires, composed in the Iambic metre, in which he gave vent to the bitterness of ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... 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'? ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... As SOTADES Maronites, the Iambic poet, gave himself wholly to write impure and lascivious things: so SKELTON (I know not for what great worthiness, surnamed the Poet Laureate) applied his wit to scurrilities and ridiculous matters; such [as] among the Greeks were ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... by Felice Giardini (1716-1796), author of the "Italian Hymn," has clung, and still clings lovingly to Bonar's hymn in many communities. Its simplicity, and the involuntary accent of its sextuple time, exactly reproducing the easy iambic of the verses, inevitably made it popular, and thousands of older singers today will have no other music with "I heard ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... critic quotes it as being vicious in sound, and running into metre, which was considered a great fault in Roman prose, as it is also in English. Our ears, however, are hardly fine enough to catch the iambic twang of which ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... modifications to the days of Spenser and the Virgin Queen. The House of Fame and other minor poems are written in the octosyllabic verse of the Trouveres, but the Canterbury Tales give us the first vigorous English handling of the decasyllabic couplet, or iambic pentameter, which was to become so polished an instrument afterward in the hands of Dryden and Pope. The English of all the poems ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Westphal and others into the metrical system of the Vedic Aryans, the Turanians, and the Greeks, since the fact that their metres were the same implies a common origin. The demonstration is complete, if we compare the iambic metre of Archilochus with that of the Vedic hymns. There are in both three series of iambuses—the dimeter, the cataleptic ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... afterwards, while Candaules was sleeping, Gyges came privily up to him 10 and slew him, and he obtained both his wife and his kingdom: of him moreover Archilochos the Parian, who lived about that time, made mention in a trimeter iambic verse. 11 ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... Clamor itself and strenuously swearing that you wrote no portion of it, you thought to escape with safe credit, and make game of us, inasmuch as the Epistle to Charles the Son, or that to the Reader, or the set of Iambic verses, is not the Regii Sanguinis Clamor. Take now this in brief, therefore, that you may not be able so to wheel about or prevaricate in future, or hope for any escape or concealment, and that all may know how far from mendacious, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... clung to the measures most approved in French poetry, especially to Alexandrines and Iambic tetrameters, and to their irregular association in a sort of ballad metre, which in England has been best handled by Robert Browning in his fine ballad ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... 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 most powerfully. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... you can't tell anything about," said Patty. "They're as likely as not to ask you to write a heroic poem in iambic pentameters, if you know what they are. You have to depend on inspiration; you ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... Terpander, Kallinus, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, &c. I ground this supposition on the change then operated in the character and tendencies of Grecian poetry and music—the elegiac and the iambic measures having been introduced as rivals to the primitive hexameter, and poetical compositions having been transferred from the epical past to the affairs of present and real life. Such a change was important at a time when poetry was the only known mode of publication (to use a modern phrase ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... The iambic kind of numbers in which this ode is conceived seems as well calculated for tender and plaintive subjects, as for those where strength or rapidity is required.—This, perhaps, is owing to the repetition of the strain in the same stanza; for ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... of those holy pastors to whose zeal, learning, and labors it has always professed itself much indebted. He died in 646, in the twentieth year of his episcopacy. He has left us two letters to St. Isidore, an eulogium of that saint, and a catalogue of his works; also a hymn in Iambic verse in honor of St. Emilian, and the life of that servant of God, who, after living long a hermit, was called to serve a parish in the diocese of Tarragon, where a famous monastery now bears ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... English dramatic Iambic pentameter, a [macron] and hypera-catalectic, [sic] the arsis strengthened by the emphasis (in which our blank verse differs from the Greek Prosody, which acknowledges no influence from emphasis) and assisted by the following caesura, permits ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters—the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Verse. This is 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
... there is scarcely any fixed law. The meters may be timed as the minstrel chooses—fast or slow—and the iambic current checked in reverted eddy, as the words chance ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to the Spenserian stanza which is composed of nine lines, eight of which are iambic pentameters, and the ninth a hexameter or Alexandrine. The name Alexandrine is said to have been derived from an old French poem on Alexander the Great, written about the twelfth or thirteenth century, and composed entirely of hexameter verses. See note ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... versifier, sonneteer; rhymer, rhymist[obs3], rhymester; ballad monger, runer[obs3]; poetaster; genus irritabile vatum [Latin]. V. poetize, sing, versify, make verses, rhyme, scan. Adj. poetic, poetical; lyric, lyrical, tuneful, epic, dithyrambic &c. n.; metrical; a catalectin[obs3]; elegiac, iambic, trochaic, anapestic[obs3]; amoebaeic, Melibean, skaldic[obs3]; Ionic, Sapphic, Alcaic[obs3], Pindaric. Phr. "a poem round and perfect as a star" [Alex. Smith]; Dichtung und Wahrheit [Ger]; furor poeticus[Lat]; "his virtues formed the magic of his song" [Hayley]; "I do but ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... issue, is an exquisite piece of sentiment couched in faultless verse. The odd measure of the poem is one peculiarly suited to the author's delicate type of genius; an iambic line of only three feet. The other lyric, "Heart, Do Not Wake", is likewise of excellent quality, though the succession of "again" and "pain" in the first line might suggest to some ears ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... but can they be considered other than a cento? Swarms of English schoolboys, at this day, would not feel very proud to adopt them. In fact, we remember (at a period say twelve years later than this) some iambic verses, which were really composed by a boy, viz. son of Dr Prettyman, (afterwards Tomline,) bishop of Winchester, and, in earlier times, private tutor to Mr Pitt; they were published by Middleton, first bishop of Calcutta, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various |
