alembicated

When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art.

But it is not a convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our quotidian life and environment: save when it presents a heightened and alembicated image of human experience.

We are thrown back on the written "portraits," in the alembicated style of the middle of the century, which adorn a host of novels and poems.

The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard."

This forced, violent, alembicated style is most abhorrent to me; it can’t be helped; the note was struck years ago on the Janet Nicoll, and has to be maintained 305 somehow; and I can only hope the intrinsic horror and pathos, and a kind of fierce glow of colour there is to it, and the surely remarkable wealth of striking incident, may guide our little shallop into port.