"Iambic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into England blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian versi sciolti, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm for English versification in which our greatest ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... mind, and by using every exertion got the maid. Cato, who was greatly irritated and stung, made preparation to prosecute the matter in legal form, but on his friends preventing him, in his passion and youthful fervour he betook himself to iambic verses and vented much injurious language upon Scipio, employing the bitterness of Archilochus,[667] but dropping his ungoverned licence and childish manner. He married Atilia,[668] the daughter of Soranus, and this was the first woman with whom he came together, but ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... years had been phantasmagorically compressed 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 fool, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... excepted—we have no monument of French in accomplished profane 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 and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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
... the Jesuits college at Paris. "One of the most precious pieces, and which alone would have been sufficient to give value to this manuscript, is the entire translation of Euripides's piece, entitled Supplicantes, added at the end of the volume by way of desert: the whole is in excellent Iambic verses: we would cite some part, if we had not already trespassed too far on the complaisance ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... speech of people just awakening, 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, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the grass of tarrying grow Beneath thy feet iambic. Southward go O'er Thamesis his stream, nor halt until Thou reach the summit of a suburb hill To lettered fame not unfamiliar: there Crave rest and shelter of a scholiast fair, Who dwelleth in a world of old ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... accent is relative—the supposedly unaccented syllable is often very highly accented, more highly in fact than some of the so-called accented ones. Consider, for example, the line, "From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate," where the word "sings," which in accordance with the conventional iambic scansion would be an unaccented syllable, is really strongly accented, more strongly, indeed, than "earth" which has an accent. As for the division of the line into feet, that is a pure artifice: who, in the actual reading ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... accretions. Apart from them there are only four non- elegiac pieces among the three hundred and eight amatory epigrams. The three hundred and fifty-eight dedicatory epigrams include sixteen in hexameter and iambic, and one in hendecasyllabic; and among the seven hundred and fifty sepulchral epigrams are forty-two in hexameter, iambic, and other mixed metres. The Epideictic section, as one would expect from the more miscellaneous nature of its contents, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... presides as judge, nor can have a run over and over again represented in the theatres. You, O Fundanius, of all men breathing are the most capable of prattling tales in a comic vein, how an artful courtesan and a Davus impose upon an old Chremes. Pollio sings the actions of kings in iambic measure; the sublime Varias composes the manly epic, in a manner that no one can equal: to Virgil the Muses, delighting in rural scenes, have granted the delicate and the elegant. It was this kind [of satiric writing], the Aticinian Varro and some others having attempted it without ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... extract from the Iphigenia in Aulis. In metrical effects 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 ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... since that Science on our eyes hath laid The wondrous clay from her own spittle made, We see the widening ripples pass beyond, The pond becomes the world, the world a pond, All ether trembles when the pebble falls, And a light word may ring in starry halls. When first on earth the swift iambic ran Men here and there were found but nowhere Man. From whencesoe'er their origin they drew, Each on its separate soil the species grew, And by selection, natural or not, Evolved a fond belief in one small spot. The Greek himself, with all his wisdom, ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... and concealed him behind that very same door. Then 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 |
