Definitions

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A rhapsodist.

Wiktionary

  1. n. One who performs the poetry of a poet for an audience; not a writer of poetry: Socrates: And do the Epidaurians have contests of rhapsodes at the festival? (Plato's Ion)
  2. n. The interpreter of a poem: Socrates: Then you rhapsodists are the interpreters of the poets? (Plato's Ion)
  3. n. A rhapsodist.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. A rhapsodist.

Examples

  • “I do have some sympathy with the romance of Longinus's heroic ideal though, his notion of the rhapsode as raptor.”

    On the Sublime

  • “Socrates discusses with the title character the question of whether the rhapsode, a professional performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession.”

    Archive 2009-03-01

  • “At the Venice Biennale he encounters "jet-lagged, hectic miens," while El Greco is called "a pictorial rhapsode of militant piety.”

    An Eye on the Tremors

  • “We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulæ and verses traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together about the age of Pericles.”

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

  • “Homer analogously draws poetic power from his Muse and attracts a rhapsode by means of borrowed power.”

    Plato's Aesthetics

  • “As a rhapsode Ion travels from one Greek city to another reciting and explicating episodes from Homer.”

    Plato's Aesthetics

  • “In Ion's case Socrates specifies that the expertise for a rhapsode includes the ability to interpret poetry (530c).”

    Plato's Aesthetics

  • “But the Xenophanes who speaks to us in the surviving fragments is a combination of rhapsode, social critic, religious teacher, and keen student of nature. Euripides ”

    Xenophanes

  • “He was a travelling rhapsode who criticised the stories about the gods told by the poets, and he defended a novel conception of the divine nature.”

    Xenophanes

  • “In Socrates 'unforgettable simile, the relationship of the god to poet to rhapsode to audience is like a magnetized sequence of links in a chain, each ring of which sticks to the next thanks to the power of the divine magnet at the start”

    Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry

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  • fbharjo rap-sode - a stitcher rhaptein Greek:to sew or stitch Apr 6, 2011

‘rhapsode’ has been looked up 554 times, added to 5 lists, commented on 1 time, and has a Scrabble score of 14.