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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and the life of Christ becomes, in the Laureate's phraseology? The sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue. The works of both poets abound in these ingenious periphrases. No two poets have so completely triumphed over what Horace tells us is the most difficult of all arts?the art of expressing commonplaces with originality. Their poems are store-houses of every figure in the vocabulary of rhetoricians. There is scarcely a page in Virgil which is not loaded with Hellenisms and with allusions to the literature of Greece, often of such a kind as to make them unintelligible except to those who know where to turn for a commentary. Mr. Tennyson's diction teems with similar peculiarities. He is not only continually imitating the Greek and Roman writers, but he is continually transplanting their idioms and their phrases into our tongue. An unlearned reader must indeed be often at a loss when confronted with turns like these: This way and that dividing the swift mind; laughed with alien lips; f, nished to the finger nail; sneezed out a full God-bless-you left and right; he stood four square; cooked his spleen; and the like. Where Virgil particularly excels is where he is improving in detail upon Homer, upon Hesiod, upon Apollonius, or upon Ennius; in his descriptive passages, and pre-eminently in his similes. His masterpieces are the fourth and the sixth JEneids, In the first he follows the third and fourth books of the Argonautica. In the second he is following the eleventh Odyssey. Many of his phrases, his turns, his cadences, his epithets?the disjecta membra of his diction, are still to be found scattered up and down the Greek poets, and the remains of the older Roman masters, his obligations to which have been pointed out by more than one o...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217329477 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217329470 |
| Weight | 2.22 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.53 In |
| List Price | $44.26 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 696 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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