Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to the Latin poet Ovid; resembling the style of Ovid.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Ovid +‎ -ian

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Examples

  • In the words of the Ovidian motto that Clarendon placed above his castle door: Bene vixit, qui bene latuit .

    Pens at the Ready Mark Archer 2011

  • But it is the Ovidian scenes to which one returns.

    Diana and Other Delights Willard Spiegelman 2010

  • Her Ovidian fascinations did make me think sometimes that when she did fall in love it would be dramatic and intense and that she would embrace the role.

    The Legacy Kirsten Tranter 2010

  • At the same time she was capable of remarkably beautiful work like her Topiary pieces, wonderland trees of steel blossoming with blue beads and supported on a trunk which is a little girl in a real shift, like Degas's little dancers: an Ovidian metamorphosis of power and charm combined.

    Louise Bourgeois obituary 2010

  • It's there in her classic Ovidian tales of metamorphosis ( "Thetis", in which the slippery goddess feels "the surge of other shapes beneath my skin"; a poem on transmutation that opens, blandly, "Dusk, deserted road, and suddenly/I was a goat"), as well as in a fascination with borders: between countries; between poets (her 2002 collection, Tender Taxes, is a book-length engagement with Rilke); between the self and the world.

    Jo Shapcott: I'm not someone chasing her own ambulance 2010

  • He would, for instance, on Tuesday give us a passage of any author from Milton to Wordsworth, and on the following Tuesday take up our versions of them, done into whatever meter you deemed appropriate—hexameters for Milton, Ovidian or Tibullan elegiacs for Wordsworth.

    The Chicago Blog: Honors Classics at Trinity College 2007

  • Trelawny, who goes searching for him in a forest one day and stumbles upon an old man who guides him to an ominously Ovidian scene: By-and-by the old fellow pointed with his stick to a hat, books, and loose papers lying about, and then to a deep pool of dark glimmering water, saying 'Eccolo!'

    Shelley's Pod People 2005

  • He would, for instance, on Tuesday give us a passage of any author from Milton to Wordsworth, and on the following Tuesday take up our versions of them, done into whatever meter you deemed appropriate—hexameters for Milton, Ovidian or Tibullan elegiacs for Wordsworth.

    The Chicago Blog: January 2007 Archives 2007

  • The lovers arrange a secret meeting in the Ovidian story of Pyramus and Thisbe that Shakespeare parodied so deliriously in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

    Shakespeare Bevington, David 2002

  • The monolithic pretensions of Augustan Rome may likewise have influenced the strongly allegorical cast of Vergi lian and Ovidian poetry, so different from Homer.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas ANGUS FLETCHER 1968

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