Word: metaphors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Long before this, however, it has been apparent that the story is less important than the telling, and the characters less than the narrator, who is one Ayres, an accomplished diplomat. He wants the reader ("dear lady") to get everything straight, and makes delectable use of metaphor, hyperbole, quotation and epigram to facilitate comprehension. The narration itself forms a lacy fabric composed of a series of narrative loops, deftly thrown into the past and winding up where they started. Each loop fills a tiny chapter, and 121 chapters make a calculated pattern that is as satisfying (and sometimes as claustrophobic...
...family, to continue the metaphor, is an unhappy bunch. Jane Addams is Mother in her youth, struggling to forge a synthesis of culture and politics-elements that for another generation were efficiently joined in religion. Her father's ghost keeps advocating piety without religious belief, so Jane, while touring Europe, throws up culture as not worth the price and conceives Hull House, the exemplary instance of human relations saturated with politics. Randolph Bourne is a lamentably deformed younger son who seeks to regain his identity at the neighbors' soirees in Greenwich village, but "to his dismay, he discovered that...
...portent was fulfilled in a blaze of genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet's descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him "the most universal of poets in the modern languages," and added: "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth...
...orbit (dizzying). Said Emmett Dedmon, executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, at George Williams College: "May the explosions of your generation cut as clean as those which freed the capsule of Gemini IV from the booster engines." Whatever his fellow editors might think of that particular metaphor, Dedmon stated the dominant theme of the 1965 commmencement speeches: the "explosions" of the younger generation...
...defeats the metaphor...