Crossword clues for dulness
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dullness \Dull"ness\, n. The state of being dull; slowness; stupidity; heaviness; drowsiness; bluntness; obtuseness; dimness; want of luster; want of vividness, or of brightness. [Written also dulness.]
And gentle dullness ever loves a joke.
--Pope.
Wiktionary
n. (obsolete spelling of dullness English)
WordNet
n. the quality of being slow to understand [syn: dullness, obtuseness]
the quality of lacking interestingness [syn: dullness]
a lack of visual brightness [syn: dullness] [ant: brightness]
without sharpness of edge or point [syn: dullness, bluntness] [ant: asperity, sharpness]
Wikipedia
Dulness is the goddess who presides over Alexander Pope's The Dunciad. She is the central character, introduced at the start of the work.
Dulness is the daughter of Nox and Chaos, and her mission is to convert all the world to stupidity. Her triumph is part of the translatio stultitia (the inverse of the translatio studii). As "enlightenment" moves ever westward, darkness follows behind. In Pope's poem, she already has control of all political writing and seeks to extend her reign to drama. Hence, she chooses as a champion Lewis Theobald (Dunciad A) and Colley Cibber (Dunciad B).
Pope presents the power of Dulness as inexorable and irresistible, and in Book IV of the Dunciad B he asks only that she pause a moment to let him write his poem before she takes "the singer and the song" into her oblivion. She is not motivated by any particular malice, and she even shows mercy at one point, if being reduced to insensibility is mercy, for, when a deflowered nun comes before her, she drops her cloak of shamelessness over the ruined woman. Instead, she has an essential antipathy toward learning and independent thinking, and, for Pope, loss of the ability to discern, to think, and to appreciate is a living death and the license of all evil.
For Pope, who was a Roman Catholic, absolute monarchy, foreign language opera, flattery, the replacement of sound architecture for politically well placed hacks, the redesign of good (classically ordered) buildings, the money grubbing of what would now be called tabloid press are all signs of the triumph of Dulness over reason and light. Each of these things represents choosing the less thoughtful over the more rational choice, each requires credulity and acceptance over curiosity and independence, and therefore Pope blames, at least as much as any agent of Dulness, an indifferent and uneducated public.
Usage examples of "dulness".
Even his narrative must be full of epigrams to avoid the one deadly sin of dulness, and his language must be decorous even at the price of being sometimes emasculated.
He now appeared for the first time as a formal satirist, and the Dunciad, in which he came forward as the champion of Wit, taken in its broad sense, against its natural antithesis, Dulness, is in some respect his masterpiece.
The Dunciad is modelled upon the Mac Flecknoe, in which Dryden celebrates the appointment of Elkanah Shadwell to succeed Flecknoe as monarch of the realms of Dulness, and describes the coronation ceremonies.
At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy.
But I diagnosed my dulness in the train just now and found it was largely his fault.
In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity.
But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment.
The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons.
This vast and intolerable medium of dulness, which penetrates our lives like a thick, dark mist, allowing us only to see the object in range of our immediate vision, hostile to all originality, crushingly respectable, that dictates our hours, our occupations, our amusements, our emotions, our religion, is the most ruthless and tyrannical thing in the world.
For Dulness and for the dunces forward movement is inescapably circular, but the poem itself is linear.
In Book 1 Dulness and Cibber both contemplate the works of the dunces, who conclude the book by hailing Cibber as their king.
Settle, echoing the prophecy of Anchises, celebrate the achievement of the empire of Dulness through her subversion of all forms of culture.
Cibber appropriately sleeps in the lap of Dulness, as she sits on her throne before the thronging dunces and acknowledges the contributions made to her power by education, collecting, science, politics, and religion.
The movement of Dulness is necessarily meaningless, and hence her hero is necessarily inactive.
Dulness has been unable to prevent her triumph, though it is ultimately the poet rather than Dulness who triumphs.