Style
No critic has ever claimed that Brome was a great dramatic poet or a truly distinctive literary stylist; his verse and prose are generally nothing more than functional, and certainly lack the vivid eloquence of Shakespeare and the intellectual knottiness of his idol Jonson. In The Antipodes, however, the richness of Brome's material appears to inspire him to an imaginative quality that he rarely achieves elsewhere — as in this passage from Act I scene vi, on Sir John Mandeville and the talking trees of the Antipodes:
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- But he had reach'd
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- To this place here — yes here — this wilderness,
- And seen the trees of the Sun and Moon, that speak,
- And told King Alexander of his death; he then
- Had left a passage ope for travellers,
- That now is kept and guarded by wild beasts,
- Dragons, and serpents, elephants white and blue
- Unicorns, and lions of many colours,
- And monsters more as numberless as nameless.
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Read more about this topic: The Antipodes
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)