Showing posts with label verb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label verb. Show all posts
6.15.2021
12.19.2008
parts of speech
A noun is not a word; it’s an image forming out of an alphabetic mist. A verb is a blurred noun. An adjective is a noun’s coat of paint. An adverb is a verb’s extravagant flourish. And the other parts of speech just don’t matter.
11.12.2008
verb verve
About adjectives: all fine prose is based on verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like:
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.
is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement—the limping, trembling, and freezing is going on before your own eyes.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (in a letter to his daughter, Frances, quoted in The Crack-Up.)
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.
is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement—the limping, trembling, and freezing is going on before your own eyes.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (in a letter to his daughter, Frances, quoted in The Crack-Up.)
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