orphic

• “In connection with one of his legends, the myth of Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doctrine, taught by what were known as the orphic sects, very curiously opposed, one would have said, to the general trend of Greek conceptions.”

  The Greek View of Life

• “During that same time in art history, however, you had the impressionists, the post-impressionists, the cubists, the orphic (abstract) cubists, the abstract branch of the surrealists, the abstract expressionists, the color-field painters, the minimalists and the beginnings of the postminimalists and conceptual art.”

  Newsweek: The 'Greatest' Cliche

• “The analogy of the corpse thus depicts the resistance to understanding — the backwardness — of the orphic measure and of things prior to the”

  Darkness Audible: Negative Capability and Mark Doty’s 'Nocturne in Black and Gold'

• “Greek lyric poetry lost much of its orphic electricity as Hellenic civilization evolved, and not simply for want of fresh Sapphos.”

  Poetry Pages - 98.06.10

• “The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat stiffly on the steps leading into the monument.”

  An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

• “In many ways it besot him like orphic sound to a musician, or the tenebrisms of artists (Carvaggios like himself); but nonetheless he continued to project blame at the bearded anathema beneath him, and he still glanced down periodically at the floor hoping to find the putative agents of the odor, evidence to bolster his bilious conclusions, being in full denial of himself.”

  An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

• “He wanted to introduce if not explain something so ineffable and orphic to which a mortal could only awkwardly utter that inadequate word,”

  Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

• “Amber failed to educe from him any satisfactory explanation of this orphic utterance.”

  The Bronze Bell

• “Here, in the tenets of these orphic sects, we have the doctrine of "original sin," the conception of life as a struggle between two opposing principles, and the promise of an ultimate redemption by the help of the divine power.”

  The Greek View of Life

• “These are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man's most stubborn will.”

  Emerson and Other Essays

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