idealising

False "idealising," on the other hand, means that, instead of trusting to this naked manifestation, we add to it some graces of our invention, some touches by which we think to improve it; that we "paint the lily," in short.

Poetry Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

If our modern education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.

Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1 Walter Pater 1866

Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers -- that the disasters of great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of mankind -- that, as the height is, so will be the fall -- or not for that reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have more delicate ears for its harmonies.

Poetry Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

"idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's _Duchess of

Poetry Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903

In the Hymns Sophie doesn't actually feature much at all, and when she does she's dissolved into an idealising generality: through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved.

Love in literature 2011

Which doesn't sound like the same thing at all: it seems to suggest a fraught earthly terrain where love and power and possession interact, rather than an idealising dream.

Love in literature 2011

Hatherley grew up there, and quickly disarms anyone who suspects he is some sort of slumming middle-class aesthete, naively idealising council estates, by telling us that as a teenager he lived on one himself.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review Andy Beckett 2010

In fact it's never quite clear whose love-longings they are that seem to May so problematically idealising, at the end of a European 20th century when our scepticism has gone through idealisms pretty thoroughly, at least in serious writing – the story is different perhaps in film and pop music.

Love in literature 2011

There have been, of course, idealising portraits of the male beloved, but it's difficult to imagine any male ideal, whether adored by a woman or by another man, offering to the adorer's gaze quite the same unchanging stillness, the same rich eloquence of non-response as female love objects did, once upon a time.

Love in literature 2011

Somehow his idealising language manages to also be gritty and surprising, rich with contradictions.

Love in literature 2011