Literary notes about abhor (AI summary)
In literature, abhor is employed as a powerful term to express an intense, often visceral, repugnance or moral disapproval. Poets and novelists alike use it to underscore personal revulsion as well as broader societal condemnation. For instance, it deepens the emotional conflict in Byron’s verse where what was once detested is still abhorred [1], while Horace Walpole and Jane Austen invoke it to articulate both individual loathing and the rejection of societal norms [2, 3]. Religious texts also harness the term to denote an unequivocal censure of evil or wrongful acts [4, 5]. Even in modern narratives, characters express abhor as a means to confront personal guilt or the atrocities imposed by the world around them [6, 7]. This layered use of abhor thus captures not only a deep-seated dislike but also an ethical stance against what is perceived as reprehensible.
- My mind could relish what it might have sought, If free to choose, I cannot now restore Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.
— from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Baron George Gordon Byron Byron - I loathe him, I abhor him: divine and human laws forbid—and my friend, my dearest Matilda!
— from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole - I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap at a man,' or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all.
— from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - The innocent and just person thou shalt not put to death: because I abhor the wicked.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - Thou shalt not abhor the Edomite, because he is thy brother: nor the Egyptian, because thou wast a stranger in his land.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing?
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
