Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
The first series of Poems and Ballads, it must be admitted, owed its success for many years to other things besides the music. It broke in upon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like a defiance. It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of every green-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banished from the world in the name of goodness.
Both, Goethe as well as Moltke, are clever and artistic in handling pencil and brush as well as their descriptive pen. And now the style, in the narrower sense. It is natural, limpid, free from all rhetorical flourishes and wordiness, placing the right word in the right place. Xenophon, Caesar, Goethe, come to mind in reading Moltke's descriptions, historical expositions, reflections.
The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences the fault of wordiness.
I do hope then that the study, and still more the practice of versification, may produce in you the same good effects which they do in young men; that they may give you a habit of portioning out your thoughts distinctly and authentically in a more simple, condensed, and expressive style; that they may teach you what elevation of language, what class of sounds, what flow of words may best suit your tone of thought and feeling, that they may prevent in you that tendency to monotonous repetition, and vain wordiness, which is the bosom sin of most uneducated prose writers, not only of the ladies of the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts one sadly in mind of what is too truly called "young ladies' English."
Browning's minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness, and an easy acceptation of somewhat cheap finish. There is nothing here of that compression which is the note of a really sovereign style.
But if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from those potent fountains, it may easily be conceived what chance Mr. Wordsworth had of escaping their enchantment, with his natural propensities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing pathos with vulgarity.
Dyck had been drinking, or he would not have spoken so; and when he was drunk daring was strong in him. He hated profoundly this man-so self- satisfied and satanic. He kept a perfect coolness, however. Leonard Mallow should not see that he was upset. His wanton wordiness came to his rescue, and until the end of the game he played with sang-froid, daring, and skill.
The Introduction to the Thesaurus, by the way, though deserving of study, is a dull and cumbrous piece of work and not necessary to the usefulness of the book. The sin of using trite expressions is equally common among men and women. There are others which chiefly beset women: Undue insistence. Wordiness.
Some of the Russian's contrapuntal objections to the "Heroic Symphony" are well answered; but, as we are satisfied with the poetic explanation of the work by neither, we must confess, that, after the crystalline clearness of Oulibichef, the muddy wordiness of Marx is not to edification.
Let the empty wordiness of his factious subjects, their intemperate harangues, their violent "resolutions," their hectorings against an absent enemy, and their pusillanimity on his approach, teach us to distrust and despise those clamorous patriots whose courage dwells but in the tongue.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking