Literary notes about unsightly (AI summary)
In literature, "unsightly" is frequently employed as a descriptor to evoke vivid images of physical or moral repulsion. In some works, it describes tangible deterioration or deformity, such as in landscapes marred by heaps of earth or decaying architecture ([1], [2], [3], [4]), while in others it characterizes human features or conditions that undermine dignity, as seen in wounded bodies or disfigured countenances ([5], [6], [7], [8]). Moreover, the term can carry a metaphorical weight, signaling moral or aesthetic degradation, which authors use to offer social commentary or heighten dramatic tension ([9], [10], [11]). Overall, "unsightly" functions as a versatile, evocative term that bridges the physical and the symbolic in literary language.
- It has been rebuilt in somewhat better taste, and much as one wishes it away, it is not now so very unsightly.
— from The Prose Works of William Wordsworth For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes. by William Wordsworth - Along the main gulch are the mines,—huge piles of earth turned up in unsightly heaps.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various - The result was that there were long strips of smooth velvet turf where once had been unsightly undergrowth or brush.
— from Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery - St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain - Do thou, however, grant that my body, thus wounded, may not be unsightly!’
— from The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 - In that monastery was a youth whose eyelid was disfigured by an unsightly tumour, which growing daily greater, threatened the loss of the eye.
— from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England by Saint the Venerable Bede - I believe I should not have dared to look at any one with such an unsightly countenance.
— from White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly countenance.
— from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Can thus Th' Image of God in man created once So goodly and erect, though faultie since, To such unsightly sufferings be debas't Under inhuman pains?
— from The Poetical Works of John Milton by John Milton - Can thus Th’ Image of God in man created once So goodly and erect, though faultie since, To such unsightly sufferings be debas’t Under inhuman pains?
— from Paradise Lost by John Milton - " But Ragnar was seized with great shame for his unsightly attire, which he thought was the only possible device to disguise his birth.
— from The Danish History, Books I-IX by Grammaticus Saxo
