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verbal excess

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The use of abundant, ornate, or heightened language beyond functional necessity

Detailed Definition
Verbal excess describes poetic language that deliberately overflows with ornate diction, cascading imagery, or syntactic proliferation to convey overwhelming emotion, baroque sensibility, or resistance to restraint; it may critique minimalism or embody ecstatic or traumatic states.
Example
Example in poetry:
In John Milton’s “Lycidas,” elaborate pastoral imagery exemplifies verbal excess; In Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” cascading metaphors create verbal excess; In Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” “God’s lioness” and “suicidal” drive verbal intensity; In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” piles alliteration and assonance.
Additional Notes
Verbal excess uses abundant, ornate, or overflowing language to convey intensity, chaos, or ecstasy; balance with moments of restraint to avoid fatigue—common in baroque or surrealist poetry.
Also Known As
Ornate diction florid language rhetorical abundance linguistic overflow grandiloquence Pleonasm
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