Oracles were individuals committed to and capable of vatic practice.

They share his vatic soul without too much of his high seriousness.

Perhaps it was the cowl that lent his voice a deep, vatic tone.

He smiled at her with his vatic calm.

Despite a vatic tone, I could tell he meant this in a technological as well as a spiritual sense.

Well, then, try imitating my vatic tone, then listen as the green reacts!

But his simple speech hid vatic power.

It's a diverting, chewy read, its tone simultaneously chatty, professorial and even vatic.

Mr. Pritchard complains of "portentousness" and "vatic profundity" and finds some poems "simply not powerful or interesting enough."

Janis Joplin invents primal screaming and Jimi Hendrix a kind of vatic solipsism.

Its prose, often breezy and sometimes disturbingly vatic, is a late reflection of Malory and Bunyan, and commonly more vigorous than refined.

Sometimes population decline had reversed in this or that locality, sometimes nations heeded the vatic utterances of prophets and strove to turn history backward-for a while, a while.

"I found it harder than I had expected to find a voice for telling the myth that was not vatic, or chaunting, or admonitory in the wrong way," Byatt writes.

That, on the contrary, is elaborate and fastidious and slightly dictionary-drunk, so that the words rendering all this scarcity are "vatic"' and "pinchbeck", "scends" and "chevon".

Impressed by the archive's vatic tone, Sara pondered how its parabolic language resembled the Sacred Scrolls that devout folks read aloud on shobb holidays, back home on Jijo.

Maurice Richardson wrote a rhapsodic review in The Observers issue of 5 November 1939 which began, "No wonder Agatha Christie's latest has sent her publishers into a vatic trance."

Quite noticeable ones, I should imagine she hasn't found it necessary up to now to make any special record of the other small vatic events - gasps, hesitations, groans, sighs - that the conversation must have involved.

Hughes mostly spurns all that, caught up in the vatic marriage of heaven and hell. Path's marriages and relationships, on the other hand, carry with them all the earthly impedimenta of role-playing and social duty.

Lots of the characters here, even minor ones appearing just the once, speak pure McCarthyese, delivering vatic generalisations about fate, editorialising as it were, regardless of the situation, in terms a Greek chorus might envy.

Her vatic remarks may have nothing to do with telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but there are elegantly embroidered lies that come closer to the truth than many straight-on recitations of the facts.

James Wood has described Bloom as "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own-a kind of campiness, in fact-Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant."

The marriage of exaltation and debasement, the synesthesia, and the mounting astonishment make this hundred-line poem the fulfillment of Rimbaud's youthful poetic theory that the poet becomes a seer, a vatic being, through the disordering of the senses.

You might like to know that Patti Smith is in the house: she’s the vatic crooner on the discursive final track “Blue,” in which Mr. Stipe performs a stream-of-consciousness poem, voicing the concerns of a certain time of one’s life.

To judge by this new anthology, the coming of modernism didn't change things all that much: one encounters plenty of vatic pronouncements in the pages devoted to, among others, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, H. D. and Olson.

Mr. Taylor, vigorous as ever, has built the art of his pianism on technique and stamina in equal measure; his music avoids the narrative of song in favor of a vatic musical free verse full of clustered chords and flashing figures.