"He had first to free English speech from its weight of serious meaning. He had to win for prose, for measured sentence and paragraph, the license that his contemporaries would concede only to verse: the freedom to delight instantly, in virtue of form alone, and the right to forestall reflection by an explosion of felicity in phrasing. He used the epigram, as a literary form, very much as a ballet-master uses exercises at the bar."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Stuart Hampshire "Adventurer", The New York Review of Books (21 August 1969)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
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Oscar Wilde
1854 – 1900
irischer Schriftsteller
578 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Oscar Wilde →
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