"Alliteration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... efforts to his theory that a poem should be short. He maintained that the phrase "'a long poem' is simply a flat contradiction in terms." His strong artistic sense gave him a firm mastery over form. He constantly uses alliteration, assonance, repetition, and refrain. These artifices form an essential part of The Raven, Lenore, and The Bells. In his poems, as in his tales, Poe was less anxious to set forth an experience or a truth than to make an impression. His poetry aims at beauty in a purely ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... Benson, who in a pamphlet of his writing, has treated Dryden's translation of Virgil with great contempt, was yet charmed with that by Mr. Pitt, and found in it some beauties, of which he was fond even to a degree of enthusiasm. Alliteration is one of those beauties Mr. Benson so much admired, and in praise of which he has a long dissertation in his letters on translated verse. He once took an opportunity, in conversation with Mr. Pitt, to magnify ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... as far as possible to preserve in my translations both the character of these poems and their metrical form. But the latter attempt can be only a mere approximation owing to the strict rules of early Irish verse both as regards alliteration and vowel consonance. Still the use of the "inlaid rhyme" and other assonantal devices have, it is to be hoped, brought my renderings nearer in vocal effect to the originals than the use of more familiar English verse methods ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... of alliteration, i.e. having several words in a line beginning with the same letter, is another device frequently employed by Spenser for musical ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... so large a part of his poetic activity. As already stated, the Alcaic measure was of all the Greek verse-forms Hoelderlin's favorite, and the one most frequently and successfully employed by him. He is very fond of introducing Germanic alliteration into these unrhymed stanzas, as the ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... interesting discussion on the value of consonants in the German language and on the characteristic difference between the expression of the consonant and that of the vowel, arriving at the conclusion that alliteration is better suited for the German musical drama than the imported rime. Further, he shows—rather convincingly, I think—that the true subject for the drama is mythical. But not long after this he wrote Tristan und Isolde, in which alliteration ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... into a laugh. "What apt alliteration! And do they like being studied? I should think the sylvan ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... continuous picnic performance going on all over the house only to learn there was nothing doing in brother's retreat. At meal time the exasperating brown bread was invariably offered for my delectation, and that I regarded as a personal affront. Resorting to alliteration's artful aid, it may be said I seemed bound to be bothered by Boston brown bread. I brooded morning, noon and night over the one idea that when my father came, I would beseech him ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the beginning of certain syllables. "Each long verse has four accented syllables, while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent, and is divided by the caesura into two short verses, bound together by alliteration: two accented syllables in the first short line and one in the second, beginning with any vowel or the same consonant"[40] (or consonants ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... version. It is, perhaps, the finest thing in the poem; but I hardly know any ballad finer as a piece of dramatic narrative; and the resonant verse, strongly rhymed (in the Gaelic assonances), and copiously stressed with alliteration, bears out the theme. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... off, to be read even occasionally 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 ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... you? Work out the rhyme scheme in the first and second stanzas. Are they alike? Does this rhyme scheme help to produce the effect of the poem? Have you noticed a similar use of "more" in any other poem? Point out striking examples of repetition, of alliteration. Are there ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... of 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 ornament of words ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... there ain't a housekeeper, no nor a lodger in our street, don't know that I lost money by that man, and by his guzzlings and his muzzlings'—Mrs MacStinger used the last word for the joint sake of alliteration and aggravation, rather than for the expression of any idea—'and when they cried out one and all, shame upon him for putting upon an industrious woman, up early and late for the good of her young family, and keeping her poor place so clean that a individual might ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Alliteration could no more; his mother-tongue itself seemed poverty-stricken, his native wit inadequate. With decent meekness he owned himself unfit for the task to which ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... result of study and imitation of Greek literature. But the old vernacular Latin was a homely and simple speech, much more like any modern language in its ways and movements than would be supposed by those who only know classical Latin. The old Latin poetry was rhythmical, and fond of alliteration. Such was the native song of the Italian Camen, unlike the sthetic poetry of the classical age, with its metres borrowed from the Greek Muses. The old Latin poetry was like the Saxon, in so far as it was rhythmical and not metrical; but unlike it in this, that the Latin alliteration ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Franks were descended from the ancient Trojans. "Troja" was then further corrupted to "Tronje" and "Tronege". Hagen was therefore originally a Frank and had no connection with the Burgundian kings, as the lack of alliteration also goes to show. Boer thinks that not Siegfried but Hagen originally lived at Xanten (see note 3 to Adventure II), as this was often called Troja Francorum. When the Hagen story was connected with the Burgundians and Hagen ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... and Grieve, upon whose names the happy alliteration is made, are supposed to be celebrated English scene painters. But although the scenery meets with disparagement in the prologue, yet it was very superior; and the interior of the old schoolhouse, with the names of the boys cut into the oaken pannels of the ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... a rhythm which resembles that found in the poems of the Syrians and Arabs, but there are many instances of its inconsistent use in several parts of the text. Both rhyme and alliteration appear to be ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... race. If leisure from other and more important avocations be granted, I will handle the matter more at large in an appendix to the present volume. In this place I will barely remark, that I have sometimes noticed in the unlanguaged prattlings of infants a fondness for alliteration, assonance, and even rhyme, in which natural predisposition we may trace the three degrees through which our Anglo-Saxon verse rose to its culmination in the poetry of Pope. I would not be understood as questioning in these remarks that pious theory which supposes ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... voice. "Catfish and coffee!"—"Rice cakes for breakfast"—"All in my eye, Betty Martin"—"Yarns and Yankees"—"Shad and shin-plasters"—"Yams and yaller boys," and so on, in a string of the most irrelevant alliteration and folly, that, like much other nonsense, evoked peals of laughter, by its unexpected utterance, and which at last mollified and brought out Major Favraud himself, from ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... in Finnish, and their 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 ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans. |
