"Alliteration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style. The first taste we had of it was in this play of Arms and the Man; but even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the play than that. Among other ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Alliteration is a splendid source of failure in this sort of poetry, and adjectives like lissom, filmy, weary, weird, strange, make, or ought to make, the rejection of your manuscript a certainty. The poem should, as a rule, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the existence of a type of ornamented prose, which has had a marked historical influence upon the development of English style. This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Medieval Latin took over all of these devices from Classical ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... and nothing else, the thoroughfare up through Cagnes is a street that can be called straight and steep and stiff, the adjectives coming to you without your seeking for alliteration, just as instinctively as you take off your hat ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... and Hymns and the lyrical productions, in general, of Dr. Watts; and long after I had grown up, he pointed out to me a verse in one of those Hymns, remarking upon a point which I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that it presented the finest specimen of alliteration in ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... work reveals him, a man of aristocratic breeding, of religious and secular education, of a deeply emotional and spiritual nature, gifted with imagination and perception of beauty. He shows a liking for technique that leads him to adopt elaborate devices of rhyme, while retaining the alliteration characteristic of Northern Middle English verse. He wrote as was the fashion of his time, allegory, homily, lament, chivalric romance, but the distinction of his poetry is that of ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... know no phrase better fitted to describe his tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It—Oh, alliteration is useless. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... alliteration (ANOMINATIONE) in preference to all other ornaments of rhetoric, and that particular kind which joins by consonancy the first letters or syllables of words. So much do the English and Welsh nations employ this ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... confess, was my dominant emotion on reading your letter. Marriage and Maria had never associated themselves in my mind, fond as I am of alliteration. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stresses or heavy accents. It diverts into an order of words different from the order normal in prose. Sometimes it is elliptic, sometimes it contains particles unnecessary to the meaning—both signs of an attempt at metre. Though almost constantly unrhymed, it carries alliteration and assonance to a degree beyond what is usual in prose, and prefers forms of words more sonorous than the ordinary. But these many and distinct passages of poetry issue from and run into contexts of prose unmistakable. For two reasons we are not always able to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or bodily perfection of the result, since in both these ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... aware of the large share which the mere sound of the words contributes to its beauty. This is true even when we abstract from rhythm, which we shall neglect for the time being, and think only of euphony, alliteration, assonance, and rime. There is a joy truly surprising in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants. For myself, I find a pleasure in the mere repetition of vowels and consonants all out of proportion to what, a priori, I should be led to ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... upon the development of his literary style. He had previously affected the florid, or Asiatic, style of oratory then current in Rome. The chief faults of this were excess of ornament, antithesis, alliteration and assonance, monotony of rhythm, and the insertion of words purely for rhythmical effect. Molo, he says, rebuked his youthful extravagance and he came back ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... save by those who enjoy it as an intellectual performance or who are making a critical study of its author.' The observation, if not profound, is at least sensible, and it illustrates very well the Bibliotaph's love of alliteration and antithesis. But it is easier to remember and to report his ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... dangerous consequences to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K- to ask no questions in his dealings with the trade. 'They bring the body, and we pay the price,' he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration - 'QUID PRO QUO.' And, again, and somewhat profanely, 'Ask no questions,' he would tell his assistants, 'for conscience' sake.' There was no understanding that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea been broached ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by which we are prone to judge all others, but by which they must not be judged. We have no more right to weigh these compositions in the scales of our art motifs than we have to weigh Greek rhythm of quantity or Saxon of alliteration against our weights by which we measure rhythm of rhyme and stress. In fact it is impossible for us even to judge concerning the true harmonic effect of these other measures, and it may well be doubted whether the very soul itself of our ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... away, there run alliterative lines, 'Stupendous Scientific Sensation,' 'Veritable Visitor Void' and finally 'Marvelous Man-l—Monster.' Only one trade is irretrievably committed to and indubitably hall-marked by alliteration, the circus trade. You'll recall that Farley insensibly fell into the habit even in his advertisement; 'lost lad,' 'retained for ransom' and 'Mortimer Morley.' Therefore I had the combination circus poster, an alleged meteor which burned a ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... due sequence is subject to strict rules of euphony. The dotted o; (equivalent to the French eu) of the first syllable must be followed by an e or an i. The Finnish, like all Ugrian tongues, admits rhyme, but with reluctance, and prefers alliteration. Their alphabet consists of but nineteen letters, and of these, b, c, d, f, g, are found only in a few foreign words, and many others are never ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... decade or contained identical final figures. No word was used in more than one couplet. Their vowels, and initial and final consonants were so varied within a single series as to eliminate phonetic aids, viz., alliteration, rhyme, and assonance. The kind of assonance avoided was identity of final sounded consonants in successive words, ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... have thanked you for your Books and Compliments sooner, but have been waiting for a revise to be sent, which does not come, tho' I returned the proof on the receit of your letter. I have read Warner with great pleasure. What an elaborate piece of alliteration and antithesis! why it must have been a labour far above the most difficult versification. There is a fine simile of or picture of Semiramis arming to repel a siege. I do not mean to keep the Book, for I suspect you are forming a curious collection, and I do ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... glow of goodness gladdened (those go all together and are called alliteration) our hearts when we saw our own tramp coming down the road. The dogs did not growl at him as they had at the boys or the beer-man. (I did not say before that we had the dogs with us, but of course we had, because we had promised never ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... P.) I've been telling my cousin I've been organising a little water-party for this evening—moonlight, mandolins, Menaggio. If you find that alliteration has any attractions, I hope you and your brother will ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... made an exception of you at first. I don't know what this - jolly old - Jaundiced Jail,' Tom had paused to find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of this one, 'would ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... certainly be sure to find, all sorts of variations from the regular forms here given. Indeed, regularity, as has been clearly pointed out, is the exception and not the rule; for few single lines, and, in a still more marked degree, almost no songs, adhere to one measure throughout. Precisely as "apt alliteration's artful aid" may be used or not used as may suit his purpose best, so the song-writer makes regularity of measure subservient to the ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... "Polymetres" in the manner of Arno Holz and Walt Whitman, with lines alternately very long and very short, in which stops, double and triple stops, dashes, silences, commas, italics and italics, played a great part. And so did alliteration and repetition—of a word—of a line—of a whole phrase. He interpolated words of every language. He wanted—(no one has ever known why)—to render the Cezanne into verse. In truth, he was poetic enough and had a distinguished taste for stale things. He was sentimental and dry, naive ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... verses, my dear sir—equal to Dryden. 'On purple pinions borne,' sounds well. The alliteration is pleasing. Note the effect, also, in the phrase 'Manhood's morn,' and the last ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... of their corselets. 2: Instead of ltere, for the sake of the alliteration. 3: The translator here assumes (unnecessarily) that there is a gap in the text, with loss of a speech by Hildebrand. 4: 'Friendless,' i.e. separated from his kin. Hadubrand is giving reasons for thinking that his father is dead. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas |
