"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that was placed on the right side the following iambic verse was curiously engraven ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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 ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... between virtue and vice. All men indeed received from nature the starting-points for virtue, but until perfection had been attained they rested under the condemnation of vice. It was, to employ an illustration of the poet-philosopher Cleanthes, as though Nature had begun an iambic line and left men to finish it. Until that was done they were to wear the fool's cap. The Peripatetics, on the other hand, recognized an intermediate state between virtue and vice, to which they gave the name of progress and proficience. Yet so entirely had ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... were introduced, the Saturnian rhythm seems to have received a different explanation. It was considered as a compound of the iambic and trochaic systems. It might be described as an iambic hepthemimer followed by a trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic. The latter portion was preserved with something like regularity, but the former admitted many ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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
... Semi-sentimental theories as to the relations of the sexes, the dangers of indiscriminate education, the corruptions of wretchedness and poverty in large towns, the neglect of literature and classical learning, and the grievances of scholarly refinement in a world in which Greek iambic and Latin hexameter count for nothing,—such form the staple of his theses and tirades! His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... in Marlowe that does. In the passage quoted, however, (and there are many more like it,) we have the rhymeless ten-syllable iambic verse as the basis; but this is continually diversified, so as to relieve the ear and keep it awake, by occasional spondees, dibrachs, anapests, and amphibrachs, and by the frequent use of trochees ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... tesselation from genuine Greek sources, pass fluently over the tongue; 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, in the preface to his work ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 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 grouping ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... literally, to 'flay.' 'Satire,' again, has an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... iambics; a choliambic (a lame, halting iambic) differs from the iambic Senarius in always having a spondee or trichee for its last foot; the fifth foot, to avoid shortness of meter, being generally an iambic. See Fables of Babrias, translated by Rev. James Davies. ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... simpleton, 'knowing many things, but knowing them all badly'. It is unfortunately impossible to trace the plan of the poem, which presumably detailed the adventures of this unheroic character: the metre used was a curious mixture of hexametric and iambic lines. The date of such a work cannot be high: Croiset thinks it may belong to the period of Archilochus (c. 650 B.C.), but it ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... 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 ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... A prey to brutal passion, I regret to say that my feet ran away In swift Iambic fashion. You were no poet; soldier born, You stayed, nor did you wince then. Mercury came To my help, which same Has frequently saved me ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... while music that has them strongly marked and regularly introduced belongs to people of fully-matured energies. Only in the Jodlers and Landlers of the Tyrolese, Austrian and Swiss mountains is the original Teutonic iambic preserved in its purity. In all other German music every kind of rhythm is met with, no kind being predominant. For the musical language of Germany embraces not only the few octaves of passion, but the whole keyboard of existence. It has preludes, symphonies and sonatas for every phase of life. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapaests, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though—in ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... 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 ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... into a few moments; and the glow departed from the maiden's thoughts and words, and her soul found itself at the narrow window of the present, from which she could behold but a dreary country.—From the street came the iambic cry of the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... quantity, 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
... 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 sing because I ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... two-syllable foot accented on the last syllable. Verse made of this kind of feet is called iambic. It is the most common form found in ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... stag at eve had drunk his fill. The metre of the poem proper is iambic, that is, with the accent on the even syllables, and octosyllabic, or eight syllables to ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... higher developments of music, which, compared with the simple tunes of the street, are as apparently lawless and unlicensed as is prose compared to verse. And as it is not poets who follow laws, but precede them—as trochee and iambic, alcaic and hexameter, are the inventions of grammarians following on the trail of genius—so it behoves the Aristotle who would discover the laws of the rhythm of prose to study the masters of the art, masters by instinct and a faultless ear and the grace of God, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... "Athens," 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 voice of ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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 brachycatalectic, you had better ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... 'tis a part of a splendid religious celebration. It is involved in the solemn pomp of a festival. Therefore it dons its own solemn festival robes. The musical form is our key to the spirit. And in that varying musical form there are three degrees—first, the Iambic, nearest real speech—second, the Lyrical dialogue, farther off—third, the full Chorus—utmost removal. Pray, do not talk to us of the naturalness of the language. You never heard the like spoken in all your days. Natural it was on that stage—and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... that "comedy" came to signify abuse and vilification. As the taste for music and rhythm became general in that sunny clime, even these rioters adopted a kind of verse, by which rustic genius could give additional point to scurrility. Thus arose the Iambic measure used at the festivals of Ceres and Bacchus, and afterwards fabled to have been invented by Iambe, the daughter of the King of Eleusis. Hence, also, came the jesting used in celebrating the rites of Ceres in Sicily, and the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... or what he suffered. In comedy, therefore, this is now become evident. For comic poets having composed a fable through things of a probable nature, they thus give whatever names they please to their characters, and do not, like iambic poets, write poems about particular persons. But in tragedy they cling to real names. The cause, however, of this is, that the possible is credible. Things therefore which have not yet been done, we do not yet believe ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... seventy-six lines in the Menaechmi, to eighty-two in the Rudens, and to one hundred and fifty-two in the Amphitruo. In this way it becomes a short realistic story of every-day people, involving frequently a love intrigue, and told in the iambic senarius, the simplest form of verse. Following it is the more extended narrative of the comedy itself, with its incidents and dialogue. This combination of the condensed narrative in the story form, presented usually as a monologue in simple verse, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... I 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 ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... nothing yet to these precise questions. By merely disowning the 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, how veritable on the contrary, or at least ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of this unbroken succession of feminine verses is slightly monotonous, though the poet shifts his pauses skilfully. The rhythm of the lines is marked, the effect upon the ear being quite like that of English iambic pentameters hypercatalectic. The absence of rhyme is the more noteworthy in that rhyme offers little difficulty in Provencal. Doubtless the poet was pleased to show an additional claim to superiority for his speech over the French as a vehicle for poetic thought; for while ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the style of the lesser English poet is an exact counterpart of the style of the lesser Greek; there is the same comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse, the same excess of short unemphatic syllables, the same solution of the graver iambic into soft overflow of lighter and longer feet which relaxes and dilutes the solid harmony of tragic metre with notes of a more facile and feminine strain. But in King Henry VIII. it should be remarked that though we not unfrequently find the same preponderance ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was engaged in 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 corpulent man with strongly-marked features and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such poem by any of the pre-Homeric poets, though there were probably many such writers among them; instances, however, may be found from Homer downwards, e.g. his Margites, and the similar poems of others. In this poetry of invective its natural fitness brought an iambic metre into use; hence our present term 'iambic', because it was the metre of their 'iambs' or invectives against one another. The result was that the old poets became some of them writers of heroic and others of iambic verse. Homer's position, however, is peculiar: just ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Physiology, and Hygiene. 'In presenting a new system of Calisthenics and Gymnastics, a series of illustrations from original designs is indispensable.' These are remarkably well drawn and executed. Accent, quantity, with Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic, and Dactylic Rhythms, are practically given in the work, which, should the student have poetic talent, would be of great use to him in making his own verses, while to the reader of poetry a knowledge of ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... 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) |
