A sea-voyage lays bare many secrets and shows up human nature at its starkest.
"Jan and Her Job"
L. Allen Harker
He flung away his walking-stick, for he realized very clearly now that this was not going to be, as he had anticipated, a mere case of the administration of a deserved punishment, but rather the starkest, fiercest fight that ever he had known.
"The Bittermeads Mystery"
E. R. Punshon
But so it is, even in the briefest and starkest rendering of these epigrams from the Greek the humanism and dignity of the original transfer themselves, making something, if less than verse, yet more than prose; as Byron said of Sheridan's speeches, neither poetry nor oratory, but better than either.
"Toward the Gulf"
Edgar Lee Masters