Literary notes about Epithet (AI summary)
In literature, epithets function as concise descriptors that capture essential qualities, histories, or attitudes towards a character or object. They may be used both laudatorily and critically: authors sometimes bestow an honorific to underline noble traits, as with the ancient epithets in heroic verse ([1], [2]), while others employ them to inject irony or critique, like when a supposedly respectful term becomes a marker of contempt or satire ([3], [4]). This technique enables writers to encapsulate a complex series of attributes in a single phrase—for instance, evoking mythic legacy or the subtleties of a character’s persona with minimal verbiage ([5], [6], [7]).
- return Footnote 3: The epithet many-fountain'd is Homer's stock epithet for Ida.
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson - Mars, or Mavors, according to his Thracian epithet.
— from The Iliad by Homer - Besides, the press is not free, and the censor would not let the epithet I give to my hero pass.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova - He was essentially a “theorist”—that word now of so much sanctity, formerly an epithet of contempt.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition by Edgar Allan Poe - Aurora conferred upon him immortality without youth, hence the epithet "aged."
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser - The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge - It often expresses in an epithet what might be expanded into a detailed picture, or calls up in a single phrase a whole scene or a whole position.
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson
