Word: priapus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only he were indeed from nowhere?a sort of Priapus ex machina?his dazzle would be unshadowed. But beyond the flaring headlines of the past year, few are aware of who Richard Burton really is, what he has done, and what he is throwing away by gulping down his past and then smashing the glass...
Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...
Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods has long been a puzzle as well as a masterpiece. The gods look more drunk than divine. Vesta, protector of virgins, lies dozing in one corner of the picture while Priapus fiddles with her skirt. A blowsy Ceres helps Apollo hoist cup to lip. Neptune is paired off with Gaea, who holds a quince -the symbol of marriage. Bacchus appears as a child, and his foster father Silenus looks more like a slender ascetic than a roly-poly satyr. Generations of art scholars have wondered...
...Island of Samothrace, the Argonauts were initiated into the sacred mysteries. The Goddess of All Being mated with the Serpent Priapus, and was delivered of a bull. Then the sacred nymphs leapt on the Argonauts and scratched and bit them until even Hercules passed out. Thereafter, the Argonauts glowed with "a faint nimbus of light...
...intention is not so much to arouse an emotion, or to persuade of a reality, as to employ such emotion or sense of reality (tangentially struck) with the same cool detachment with which a composer employs notes or chords." Other books: Punch, the Immortal Liar, Pilgrimage of Festus, Priapus and the Pool and Other Poems, John Deth and Other Poems, Blue Voyage (a novel), Bring! Bring! (short stories...