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Hyperbole

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hyperbole (hīpûr`bəlē), a figure of speech in which exceptional exaggeration is deliberately used for emphasis rather than deception. Andrew Marvell employed hyperbole throughout "To His Coy Mistress":
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest …

Hyperbole 

a stylistic figure or artistic device based on exaggeration. In hyperbole a phenomenon is endowed with a particular attribute to a degree that it does not really possess (for example, N. V. Gogol’s “trousers as wide as the Black Sea”). Thus, hyperbole is an artistic convention and is employed with expressive intentions. It is characteristic of the poetics of epic folklore, romantic poetry, and satirical works (Gogol and V. V. Mayakovsky). The opposite stylistic figure is litotes.



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It is a strange thing, to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature, and value of things, by this; that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole, is comely in nothing but in love.
We ought not, therefore, to condemn the maid of the inn for her hyperbole, who, when she descended, after having lighted the fire, declared, and ratified it with an oath, that if ever there was an angel upon earth, she was now above-stairs.
and these things being its "chief" delights-and then the pre-eminent beauty and naturalness of the concluding lines, whose very hyperbole only renders them more true to nature when we consider the innocence, the artlessness, the enthusiasm, the passionate girl, and more passionate admiration of the bereaved child--
 
 
 
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