Poetry Terms
Relating to the Keats Lectures
ENGL 170
by Dr. Johnson Johnson
Allegory: A piece of writing (especially writing which tells a story) with a more
general meaning in addition to the literal. Example: The story of Adam and Eve’s
fall in Genesis when read as a general story of temptation, human weakness, and sin.
Alliteration: Repetition of initial sounds of nearby words for musical effect.
Example: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” from Keats’ “To Autumn.”
Enjambment: The breaking of a line where there is no punctuation. Example: The
first two lines of Keats’ “This Living Hand, now warm and capable”:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
Epic: Also known as “Heroic Poetry.” A long narrative (that is, story-telling) poem,
typically told in heightened language and meant to be spoken aloud. The central
character or characters are often known from history or culture and the actions of
that character or those characters impact a larger group of people. Example:
Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. [Epic is the other primary poetic mode besides lyric.]
Figurative Language: Any language that conveys meaning beyond just the literal
definition of the words. Example: The speaker’s hand that would “haunt thy days
and chill thy dreaming nights” in “This Living Hand, now warm and capable.”
Free Verse: Poetry without any measured, formal pattern.
Lyric: Originally, poetry written to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre (a
stringed instrument). Has come to mean a shorter (than epic) poem with musical
qualities. While in epic poems the subject is generally of a public nature (the gods,
great figures from history, common myths), in lyric poems, the life and emotions of
the poet are the more frequent subjects. Lyric poems sometimes name specific
names of people in the speaker’s life. Often such poems describe physical qualities
of emotion, directly address a listener, are written with an intimate voice and use
relatively common langue. Example: Keats’ odes and countless song lyrics from
contemporary rock music.
Metaphor: A kind of figurative language in which a deeper sense of something is
conveyed by comparing it with something else. Example: Keats referring to the
world as a “vale of Soul-making” in his “Letter to George and Georgiana Keats,
April 1819.”
Meter: The measurement of syllables in lines poetry. Typically in English, regular
numbers of more emphasized (stressed) and less emphasized (unstressed) syllables
are used to form patterns. Example: The ten syllables (alternating between
emphasized and less emphasized) of the last line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Ode: A poem of a serious tone and elevated language on a subject of significance.
Traditionally, odes often addressed deities and were used as songs for dances.
Pathetic Fallacy: The false or unfitting granting of human characteristics to nonhuman elements or things in the world, especially in such a way as to suggest that
the world is in sympathy with the human. Example: The blues rock song “The Sky
is Crying” by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Personification: Assigning human qualities to things, ideas, or emotions. Example:
Autumn depicted as “sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the
winnowing wind” in Keats’ “To Autumn.”
Simile: Like “metaphor,” a kind of figurative language in which a deeper sense of
something is conveyed by comparing it with something else, but using “like” or “as”
to make the comparison explicit. Example: From Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”:
“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”