: a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing; also : extreme egocentrism

— so·lip·sist noun
— so·lip·sis·tic adjective
— so·lip·sis·ti·cal·ly adverb

Origin of SOLIPSISM

Latin solus alone + ipse self
First Known Use: 1874

: a prolonged lamentation or complaint; also : a cautionary or angry harangue

Examples of JEREMIAD

by Tamara Madison

You spat it out like venom
at your playground enemy
and it felt so good to say
Drop dead! Late in life

it becomes a sweet mercy
to imagine: one minute
you’re treading the earth
as ever, the next you’re gone!

No hospitals, MRIs, CAT scans,
surgery, no loved ones
standing around wondering
if you’re still breathing

and what to do with you
in case you are. And though
I’ll never be ready for you to go,
as long as it is your wish

to leave this way, it is mine.
And may it happen on a day
when you are singing with friends,
laughing at a joke, dancing

in your living room.
May it come to you before
you know it and you’ll find
yourself flying, a balloon

cut loose, taking one last glance
at this fond world that you have loved.
Though it will feel so cold to us,
this world without you, still

with all my heart here is my wish
for you dear friend, mother,
kindred soul: when the time comes,
Drop dead!

by Anne Porter

Our poems
Are like the wart-hogs
In the zoo
It’s hard to say
Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them
As sometimes happens
Our poems
Turn into living things
And there’s no arguing
With living things
They are
The way they are

Our poems
May be rough
Or delicate
Little
Or great

But always
They have inside them
A confluence of cries
And secret languages

And always
They are improvident
And free
They keep
A kind of Sabbath

by William Carlos Williams

Whether the rain comes down
or there be sunny days
the sleets of January or the haze
of autumn afternoons, when
we dream of our youth our gaze
grows mellow, wise man or fool,
we were young, the future
beckoned us.

Now we grow old and grey
and all we knew is forgotten
there comes alive in
the ash of today, memory! a god
who revives us! the apple trees
we climbed as a boy
the caress on our necks of
a summer breeze.

Come back and give us
those days when passion drove us
to break every rule.
We weren’t bad, but good!
May our preachers find us
the courage still to sin so
and win so! and win so!
a life everlasting.

- John Ashbery

A Pyrrhic victory ( /ˈpɪrɪk/) is a victory with devastating cost to the victor; it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately cause defeat.

The phrase is named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:

-The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.-
—Plutarch, [1]

In both of Pyrrhus’s victories, the Romans suffered greater casualties than Pyrrhus did. However, the Romans had a much larger supply of men from which to draw soldiers, so their casualties did less damage to their war effort than Pyrrhus’s casualties did to his.

The report is often quoted as “Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone,”[2] or “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”[3]

Although it is most closely associated with a military battle, the term is used by analogy in fields such as business, politics, law, literature, and sports to describe any similar struggle which is ruinous for the victor. For example, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing of the need for coercion in the course of justice, warned, “Moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph.”[4] Further, in Beauharnais v. Illinois, a United States Supreme Court decision involving a charge under an Illinois statute proscribing group libel, Justice Black, in his dissent, warned that “[i]f minority groups hail this holding as their victory, they might consider the possible relevancy of this ancient remark: ‘Another such victory and I am undone.’”

by William Blake

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit;
And there is a smile of smiles,
In which these two smiles meet.

(And there is a frown of hate,
And there is a frown of disdain;
And there is a frown of frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain,

For it sticks in the heart’s deep core,
And it sticks in the deep backbone.)
And no smile that ever was smiled,
But only one smile alone—

That betwixt the cradle and grave
It only once smiled can be.
But when it once is smiled
There’s an end to all misery.

-and-

“You don’t choose to become something like a poet. You write and you write, and the years go by, and you are a poet.”