Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. The quality or state of being prosaic; a prosaic manner or style.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. The quality or state of being prosaic; a prosaic manner or style.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A prosaic style or quality.
Etymologies
Examples
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There can be no doubt that Levine offers readers of American poetry a singular vision, one whose temperate, almost holy prosaicism paradoxically offers a stunningly expansive view of what's possible in the English language.
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And a new fact for me in this theatre of the religions is the proximity, the banality, the prosaicism of God.
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"Figurative figures," she said, regaining prosaicism.
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So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand rolling organ-harmonies of life.
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Between a low moral prosaicism and a generous moral ideal was it possible for him to hesitate?
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His ideal itself is endangered; the atmosphere he would inhale is filled with poison; a desolating moral prosaicism springs up to justify a great social ugliness, and spreads in the air where his young hopes would try their wings; and in the imperfect strength of youth he has so much of dependence upon actual surroundings, that he must either war with their evil or succumb to it.
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But it should also be remembered that hymns, in this respect, are subject to the common penalty, the inferiority in art, inherent in all didactic verse; although with a more pressing and powerful excuse than didactic verse can offer for its inevitable prosaicism.
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And it is curious to note how wholly different is the effect between the picture of the knight given us in Calidore, (with all its immaturity in writing), and that given in the stanzas before us: how, in place of the chivalric melody and colours of Spenser, we have something not far removed from melodramatic tinsel, nor free from descent into simple prosaicism.
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He seems to owe to him a rather frequent and unpleasing mannerism in the use of the word luxury: and the Rimini and Hero and Leander exhibit sudden lapses into prosaicism, words used with an abrupt or even coarse directness, strange momentary failures in good taste, from which Keats, also, is not always free.
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