"Introduction: Theorizing Copiousness
." Renaissance Studies 28.2:168-82.
Moreover, the copiousness
of pastoral texts, underlined above, is also found in tongue treatises of the early modern period.
(87) Among other things, it serves to relate the logical argument of distribution to the poetic preoccupation with exploring the relations between a whole and its parts, a usual procedure in relation to rhetorical amplification and copiousness
. Fraunce first illustrates the controlling relation of the subject (Elisa) to its particular adjuncts, and conversely the subject's composite nature made of 'her adjunct colours':
This implies the copiousness
of workers to meet the factors' limited demand.
The book itself--a reference manual for those faced with the job of writing the countless periodic assessments that, like Picasso's portrait of Stein, replace the biological person and become the reality of a sailor's career in the Navy--is, most fundamentally, a working out of what Stein discovered in writing what she invariably referred to (as if to impress by its sheer copiousness
) as her "thousand-page book," The Making of Americans.
Words are powerful, words are influential; and, yes, it's true that "copiousness
and facility of expression bear abundant fruit," but only "if controlled by proper knowledge and a strict discipline of the mind" (Cicero).
I believe that this insistence upon repetition and mundane copiousness
illustrates a shift to highly individualized and often narcissistic attitudes that are becoming common in mobiliterates.
The image shows straightness along the longitudinal axis, the level of perfection, and the copiousness
in quantity that we could routinely achieve using this synthetic approach.
(14) At that first meeting they argued amicably about whether it was better to be meagre and 'costive', as Davin called it, with one's writing, or to be for copiousness
and fluency, as he believed he was himself.
The deliberateness with which Ashbery dutifully "turn[s]" his "gaze / Back to the instruction manual" in the poem's closing lines suggests that the career never lets him go, and the copiousness
of the description of Guadalajara may itself be read as the result of a professional imperative to produce writing that follows him even into his dreams.
The extensive copiousness
is meant to delight as well as to teach.
Although in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither copiousness
of ideas, nor fluency of words.
Yet before plunging into the book, I highly recommend that you leaf through it and have a look at the pictorial supplements, whose uniqueness, copiousness
and, in many cases, sheer novelty make them truly exceptional.
Both are demanding poets, not least for an exactness they pursue in almost opposite ways: Cole through a stripping away of things to their essence, the arrangement of words like stones in a Zen garden, and Phillips through a kind of copiousness
, an attempt to come at a dilemma from all sides at once, his constant, minute shivers of revision building in a way reminiscent of a fractal design.
plesand playis." (16) While these three terms chosen by Lyndsay may be primarily a collective trope of rhetorical copiousness
, they can also be understood as carrying certain distinctions, although to understand them we need to recognize both contemporary usage and the misleading resonances of modern definitions.