Is "as (adjective) as (adjective)" acceptable usage?

Question

For idiosyncratic reasons of euphony and metre, I want to write (something like) "She wore round her neck many gems, as beautiful as rare." I feel in my bones that this formulation, "... as (adjective) as (adjective)," is acceptable (if decidedly dated, poetic, or literary), but cannot find any corroboration in, for example, the OED. (I gazed glassily at the large entry for "as, adv. and conj.", for a while yesterday.) I did find some support by googling a few sample phrases, which garnered a very few hits, such as: "Yes, but where / True nature links a friendly pair, / The blessing is as rich as rare." "It is an extremely beautiful plant, and as rare as beautiful, being only found in the best collections." "Animals are given voices, inanimate objects legs, and the world is peopled with beings as strange as rare." I know that the more idiomatic forms of these would be "as rich as it is rare," "as rare as it is beautiful," "as strange as they are rare." So a corollary to my question is: Is the form "as (adjective) as (adjective)" implying or eliding the fuller "as (adjective) as [it is/they are/etc.] (adjective)"? My main concern, always, is not to give the reader miscues. When one reads "as beautiful as," one probably expects a noun or noun phrase to follow: "as beautiful as a sunset," e.g. This is so common, that I worry that a reader might even assume that "rare," in my sentence, is the first part of such a noun phrase, e.g., "[gems] as beautiful as rare flowers." But, because the period immediately follows "rare," indeed is probably grouped by the eye with it, any stumbling or cognitive dissonance should probably be minimal. p.s. If you know any examples of "as (adjective) as (adjective)" in canonical literature, I'd sure like to hear them.

Answer 1

Having your own style of writing a poem is certainly no crime, and because poetry is constantly shifting and changing, and new styles are used, you could very well make this a part of your style. Poetry is not as much about what is an "acceptable" style as it is about what style you feel best depicts the image that is compelling you to write. So if your sentence is, "She wore round her neck many gems, as beautiful as rare," that is something you can write, because even without writing, "as beautiful as they are rare,", a reader will probably register the description as meaning that her gems are both beautiful and rare. Or if I wrote something like, "She put on her raincoat, her eyes as blue as sad," a reader will probably associate "blue" and "sad" together as part of the description. In short, go for it! Using your own style for poetry is a practice that is almost as old as written history itself.