Definition:
A visually powerful description that vividly recreates something or someone in words.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "visible, palpable, manifest"Examples and Observations:
- "Mornings, a transparent pane of ice lies over the meltwater. I peer through and see some kind of waterbug-perhaps a leech-paddling like a sea turtle between green ladders of lakeweed. Cattails and sweetgrass from the previous summer are bone dry, marked with black mold spots, and bend like elbows into the ice. They are swords that cut away the hard tenancy of winter. At the wide end a mat of dead waterplants has rolled back into a thick, impregnable breakwater. Near it, bubbles trapped under the ice are lenses focused straight up to catch the coming season."
(Gretel Ehrlich, "Spring") - "George Puttenham [in The Arte of English Poesie] explains enargia as the 'glorious lustre and light' uniting the 'outward shew' and the 'inward working' of figurative language . . ., whereas Torquanto Tasso [in Discourses on the Art of Poetry] emphasizes the visibility implied by enargia."
(Roy T. Eriksen, The Building in the Text, Penn State Press, 2001) - "In our kitchen, he would bolt his orange juice (squeezed on one of those ribbed glass sombreros and then poured off through a strainer) and grab a bite of toast (the toaster a simple tin box, a kind of little hut with slit and slanted sides, that rested over a gas burner and browned one side of the bread, in stripes, at a time), and then he would dash, so hurriedly that his necktie flew back over his shoulder, down through our yard, past the grapevines hung with buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, to the yellow brick building, with its tall smokestack and wide playing fields, where he taught."
(John Updike, "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace," in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 2000)
Pronunciation: en-AR-gee-a
Also Known As: enargeia, evidentia, hypotyposis
