Sterne published it in nine successive volumes during almost as many years, and he made a point of almost complete formlessness and every sort of whimsicality.
In his later poetry, also, the deeper force of the Greek spirit led him from his early Romantic formlessnessto the achievement of the most exquisite classical perfection of form and finish.
The dangers of the Classical are coldness and formality; of the Romantic, over-luxuriance, formlessness and excess of emotion.
The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of Walt Whitman is the formlessness or alleged formlessness of "Leaves of Grass.
I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness was really better than formality.
Something, it seems to me, may be contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything spills and wastes away.
Approaching of soul's rejection of form, proves formlessness of the Supreme, vi.
The cult of form during the Renaissance had produced a reaction against the formlessnessand invertebrate character of mediaeval literature.
It is evident that Trissino conceives of the unity of time as an artistic principle which has helped to save dramatic poetry from the formlessness and chaotic condition of the mediaeval drama.
Waging war, as he is, against the crude formlessness of the national drama, perfect construction assumes for him a very high importance.
His admiration of Shakespeare's Pericles and Winter's Tale and Calderon's lyrical and musical interludes betrayed him into a lyric-epic formlessness unequalled in the history of literature.
In the unrestricted metres, formlessness and prosiness reach a climax.
But terza rima, ottava rima, and sonnets are an insufficient disguise for the formlessness of their matter.
Wherefore then may I not conceive the formlessness of matter (which Thou hadst created without beauty, whereof to make this beautiful world) to be suitably intimated unto men, by the name of earth invisible and without form.
It is true, that that formlessness which is almost nothing, cannot be subject to the alteration of times.
Yea, neither is this very formlessnessof the earth, invisible, and without form, numbered among the days.
We know that what they really do who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one.
One of the most characteristic of Dostoevski's novels, characteristic in its occasional passages of wonderful beauty and pathos, characteristic in its utter formlessness and long stretches of uninspired dulness, is "Downtrodden and Oppressed.
Even apart from its unfinished shape, it is characterised by that formlessness so distinctive of the great Russian novelists the sole exception being Turgenev.
Not that this formlessness preceded formation, in time, but only in origin; nor yet that one formation preceded another in duration, but merely in the order of nature.
Under the first head there are four points of inquiry: (1) Whether formlessness of created matter preceded in time its formation?
Now it seems to be required, for two reasons, that the formlessness of darkness should be removed first of all by the production of light.
Nature produces effect in act from being in potentiality; and consequently in the operations of nature potentiality must precede act in time, and formlessness precede form.
And although these opinions seem mutually contradictory, in reality they differ but little; for Augustine takes the formlessness of matter in a different sense from the others.
In his sense it means the absence of all form, and if we thus understand it we cannot say that the formlessness of matter was prior in time either to its formation or to its distinction.
Objection 1: It would seem that formlessness of matter preceded in time its formation.
This production, however, belongs to the work of creation, at least, according to those who hold that formlessness of matter preceded in time its formation, since the first form received by matter is the elemental.
But in the working of nature formlessness precedes form in time.
A propitious formlessnessin matter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious formlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter has already assumed.
Art needs to find a material relatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial formlessness in matter is essential to art's existence.
This liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removed thereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible, keeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone.
Matter cannot exist without some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may proclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or infinitude.
The nebulousness of their political ideology fully corresponded with theformlessness of the revolutionary consciousness of the masses.
Its formlessness or nothingness is manifest from these two states, for it has been said that which did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future cannot be regarded as existing in the present.
Formlessness is for the creator of beauty the unpardonable sin.
Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness and inarticulate ecstacies.
The formal formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Formlessness in art is always censurable and in music can never win pardon by a programme or by 'what the composer was thinking.
