dithyramb

Definitions

1. A raucous and ardent choral hymn sung in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus.
2. A poem or oration in the same style.
3. An impassioned speech; a rant.

Equivalents

Examples

“While those who drown⟳ a truth’s empiric part In dithyramb or dogma turn⟳ frenetic; — Than whom no writer could be less poetic He left this lesson for all verse, all art.”

“During the seven decades that have⟳ elapsed since that distracted wife, mother, and blindly impassioned mistress threw herself beneath the wheels of the train⟳ - thus terminating, with a gesture symbolic of what already had happened to her soul, her tragedy of disorientation - a tumultuous and unremitting dithyramb of romances, news reports, and unrecorded cries of anguish has been going up to the honor of the bull-demon of the labyrinth: the wrathful, destructive, maddening aspect of the same god who, when benign, is the vivifying principle of the world.”

CEFR level