epistle

a literary work in letter form, esp a dedicatory verse letter of a type originated by Horace

Epistle

1. New Testament any of the apostolic letters of Saints Paul, Peter, James, Jude, or John

2. a reading from one of the Epistles, forming part of the Eucharistic service in many Christian Churches

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Epistle

letter in verse, a literary genre.

The epistle was first used in European poetry by Horace in the first century B.C. It continued to thrive in Latin poetry and in the new languages of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and flourished in the age of classicism with Boileau, Voltaire, Pope, J. Gottsched, A. P. Sumarokov, and D. I. Fonvizin. In the romantic period, the epistle went out of style, although some were still written, such as “My Penates” by K. N. Batiushkov and “Letter to the Censor” by A. S. Pushkin. By the mid-19th century, the epistle as a genre ceased to exist.

Traditionally, the content of an epistle is predominantly moral-philosophical and didactic, but there were also numerous narrative, panegyric, satirical, and amorous epistles. The only element shared in common by epistles is an address to a specific person and, accordingly, themes such as petitions and good wishes. The term “epistle” is sometimes applied to open letters in prose with a particularly important publicistic, didactic, religious, or official content, including the Epistles of the New Testament, the epistle of Archpriest Avvakum, the epistles of Prince A. Kurbskii to Ivan the Terrible, and a presidential epistle, or letter, such as one addressed to the Congress in the USA.

M. L. GASPAROV

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References in periodicals archive

No record exists of his attitude toward Pope before 1740, but we do know that in 1742 and 1743 he blamed Pope for "stooping to the Drudgery" of editing Shakespeare and for wasting his "Time, and his admirable Genius" in "exposing insects of a Day."(1) In later years Richardson's comments grew more harsh as he condemned the poet's penchant for lashing the individual rather than the vice (Carroll 24-25).(2) While it cannot be proven conclusively that Richardson read "An Epistle to Dr.

Popean echoes in 'Pamela': the Lady Davers scene

Epistle 20 confirms this suspicion as Horace casts the now complete volume of Epistles in the figure of a pretty slave raised in his household but anxious to run away and publish itself.

Horace, the liar persona and the poetry of dissimulatio: the case of Epistles 1

The only way to stop being slaves to the past and the daily political interests is the forgiveness and reconciliation and we invite all the nations to join in with which we once lived in one state,' it is said in the Christmas epistle of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Christmas Liturgy held at Orthodox Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Sarajevo

As an addendum to this discussion of the genre of the 'verse letter', there has been a trend of late towards referring to the Ars poetica as a 'literary epistle', alongside the letters to Augustus and Floras: 'the recent tendency to consider Horace's poem on poetics as a 'literary epistle' points to the way in which it can be imagined in an original context: as a poem in the oeuvre of a major Augustan writer, who refined and built on a longstanding tradition of Aristotelian and later Hellenistic poetic theory' (Laird 2007:132-133).

Shattering tradition: a rejection of analysis by genre in Horace's Ars poetica

Without telephone or Internet, the early church relied on hand-held letters, primarily epistles, to remain integrated.

You've got mail: word got around in the early church, thanks largely to letter writing. But who wrote the letters, and to whom, is still debated thousands of years later

Virtually everybody is able to quote or sing one or two lines or even stanzas from his songs although it is more than 220 years since his two main collections--Fredman's Epistles (1790) and Fredman's Songs (1791)--were published.

Carl Michael Bellman: poet and singer-song-writer of the 18th century

Vanhoye is a professor of the Biblical Institute in Columbia and a specialist in the epistle under consideration here, having published extensively on it over the decades of his work.

A Different Priest, The Epistle to the Hebrews

You'll find the process of setting up Epistle to be strikingly similar to setting up SimpleText, since Epistle's creator, Matteo, admits that he modeled the app off of SimpleText but since SimpleText isn't available for Android, Epistle is your best bet.

Use DropBox to edit text on mobile devices

One feature that the epistle shares with other medieval encyclopaedias and especially with later cosmographies is that they examine the wonders of the animal realm with emphasis on the purposeful nature of creation: each species follows the form and has the faculties that suit it best.

The Brethren of Purity: The Case of Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 22