"Versifier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a Roman poet, a native of Gaul, born in Bordeaux; tutor to the Emperor Gratian, who, on coming to the throne, made him prefect of Latium and of Gaul, and consul of Rome. He was a good versifier and stylist, but no ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... you must, pray, understand that what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to the tiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods—and they hardly—can cure a versifier of ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the second, the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh lines to rhyme together; and that the sixth, eighth and ninth lines must, also, rhyme together. To make the stanza correct, with these complicated embarrassments of rhyme, must not only cause great trouble, sometimes, to the easiest versifier, but to succeed in doing so, critically, he must often sacrifice a happy expression, a striking phrase, or a beautiful line. "Words are things," says Mirabeau; and, to the poet, they are things of potency. They are at once tools and materials ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... around him. This was Thomas Gordon, the author of 'How we Beat the Favourite,' and several other short pieces of verse of rare merit, and redolent of the Australian air. George Brunton Stephens is another versifier, who at times showed signs of genius; and it is not long since a Mr. Horace Kendall died, who ran off sheets of graceful verses with considerable talent and no little ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... logical texture is a crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new illustration of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Italian, Spanish, and what Dr. Knapp calls "the broken jargon" then current in England as gypsy. From a misshapen Welsh groom this queer lawyer's clerk learned Welsh pronunciation, and to the consternation of his employer, "turned Sir Edward from the door," and gladly admitted the petty versifier Parkerson who sold his sheets to the highest bidder in the streets; worse even than this was his audacity in contending against a wealthy archdeacon that Ab Gwilym was the superior of Ovid. This gentleman was probably ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... the author of this book has chanted John Brown and King Solomon for the last two years for many audiences. It took but a minute to teach the people the responses. As a rule they had no advance notice they were going to sing. The versifier sang the parts of the King and Queen in turn, and found each audience perfectly willing to be the oxen, the sweethearts, the swans, the sons, the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... later sale we may notice the witty Esprit Flechier, who bought several of the lighter Latin poets, being a fashionable versifier himself and a dilettante in matters of binding and typography. In his account of the High Commission in Auvergne, appointed to examine into charges of feudal tyranny, the Abbe tells us how his reputation as a bibliophile was spread by a certain Pere Raphael at all the watering-places, ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... he loves his Boccaccio quite as much as I do mine, and being somewhat of a versifier he has made a little poem on the subject, a copy of which I have secured surreptitiously and do now ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... priest of Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in "Joan ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... paid for his labors, and lived in a beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and satirical, irritable, parsimonious, and vain. As a versifier, he has never been equalled. He died in 1744, in the Romish faith, beloved but by few, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... his parishioners, on the death of the individual who had succeeded him after his deposition. On hearing the narrative, Lockhart retired to his apartment and drew up the plan of his tale, which was ready for the press within the short space of three weeks. In 1823, he became known as an elegant versifier, by the publication of his translations from the "Spanish Ballads." He subsequently published a "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," in "Murray's Family Library;" and produced a "Life of Robert Burns," for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a man of genius, but a person of excellent common sense, of admirable judgement, of rare virtues! He had no genius, it seems. O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches; or some versifier, whose muse can hail Columbia; but not of the man who supported States on his arm, and carried America in his brain. What is genius? Is it worth anything? Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wisdom its base and summit?—that which it recedes from, or tends toward? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... character. He was well acquainted with all the petty vanities and affectations of the poetaster, but was not aware that these foibles were united with all the talents and vices which lead to success in active life, and that the unlucky versifier who pestered him with reams of middling Alexandrines was the most vigilant, suspicious, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... appears, from an elegy by Moschus, that Bion migrated from Asia Minor to Sicily, where he was poisoned. He wrote harmonious verses with a good deal of pathos and tenderness, but he is as inferior to Theocritus as he is superior to Moschus, whose artificial style characterizes him rather as a learned versifier than a ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta |
