overtakelessness
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From overtakeless + -ness.
Noun[edit]
overtakelessness (uncountable)
- (poetic, rare) The quality of being overtakeless (impossible to overtake or surpass).
- a. 1887 (date written), Emily Dickinson, “[Part 5: The Single Hound] XC”, in Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, editors, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, centenary edition, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Company, published November 1930, →OCLC, page 254:
- The overtakelessness of those / Who have accomplished Death, / Majestic is to me beyond / The majesties of Earth.
- 1984, Susan Strayer Deal, The Dark Is a Door, Boise, I.D.: Ahsahta Press, →ISBN, page iii:
- But more often than not she trusts that rare sensitivity of hers to take her slimly down, letting it intuitively choose her way and hunch her toward encounters. And it is only in those moments of overtakelessness, after she has gone through a world of as ifs, that we rest with her at the ends of her poems.
Usage notes[edit]
- Primarily associated with the work of American poet Emily Dickinson (see quotation above).
Further reading[edit]
- “Definition for Overtakelessness”, in Emily Dickinson Lexicon[1], 2024 May 9, archived from the original on 2024-04-22