A
Accent: The prominence or emphasis given to a syllable or word.
Example:
In the word poetry, the accent (or stress) falls on the first syllable
*Sidelight: Two degrees of accent are natural to many multi-syllabic English words,
designated as primary and secondary.
*Sidelight: When a syllable is accented, it tends to be raised in pitch and lengthened.
Any or a combination of stress/pitch/length can be a metrical accent.
*Sidelight: A semantic shift in accent can alter meaning. In the statement, "give me the
book," for example, the meaning can be altered depending on whether the word "me" or
the word "book," receives the more prominent stress. In metrical verse, the meter might
help determine the poet's intent, but not always.
*Sidelight: In English, when the full accent falls on a vowel, as in PO-tion, that vowel is
called a long vowel; when it falls on an articulation or consonant, as in POR-tion, the
preceding vowel is a short vowel. In the classical Greek and Latin quantitive verse,
however, long and short vowels referred to duration, i.e., how long they were held in
utterance.
Accentual verse: Accentual verse is that in which the metrical system is based on the
count or pattern of accented syllables, which establish the rhythm. The accents must be
normal speech stresses rather than those suggested by the metrical pattern. The total
number of syllables may vary.
Example:
Star Light, Star bright,
The first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
*Sidelight: Most modern English poetry is a combination of accentual and syllabic
verse.
Acephaly: The omission of a syllable at the beginning of a line of verse. Such a line is
described as acephalous.
Acrostic poem: An acrostic poem is one in which certain letters of the lines, usually the
first letters, form a word or message relating to the subject.
Example:
A Peace Sign
People need love care and friendship.
Every word that we let slip.
All the prayers that come from our heart
Could be the sign for peace to start
Everyone must play their part.
(By Paul McCann)
*Sidelight: Strictly speaking, an acrostic uses the initial letters of the lines to form the
word or message, as in the argument to Jonson's Volpone. If the medial letters are used,
it is a mesostich; if the final letters, a telestich. The term acrostic, however, is
commonly used for all three. When both the initial and final letters are used, it is called
a double acrostic.
Adonic: An adonic verse consists of a dactylfollowed by a spondee or trochee.
*Sidelight: The festival of Adonia was celebrated by women, who spent two days
alternating between lamentations and feasting.
Adynation: A type of hyperbole in which the exaggeration is magnified so greatly that
it refers to impossibility.
Example:
"I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles."
*Sidelight: An adynaton can also be expressed negatively: "Not all the water in Lake
Superior could satisfy his thirst."
Aeolic: see Horatian ode. The Greek Horatian ode form is called Aeolic.
Afflatus: A creative inspiration, as that of a poet; a divine imparting of knowledge, thus
it is often called divine afflatus.
Alba: see Aubade.
Alcaic: the greater Alcaic consists of a spondee or iamb followed by an iamb plus a
long syllable and two dactyls. The lesser Alcaic, also in tetrameter, consists of two
dactylic feet followed by two iambic feet.
*Sidelight: Though seldom appearing in English poetry, Alcaic verse was used by
Tennyson in his ode, Milton.
Alexandrine: An iambic line of twelve syllables, or six feet, usually with a caesura
after the sixth syllable.
Example:
A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
*Sidelight: The Alexandrine probably received its name from an old French romance,
Alexandre le Grand, written about 1180, in which the measure was first used.
*Sidelight: The last line of the Spenserian stanza is an Alexandrine.
Allegory: A figurative illustration of truths or generalizations about human conduct or
experience in a narrative or description by the use of symbolic fictional figures and
actions which resemble the subject's properties and circumstances.
*Sidelight: Though similar to both a series of symbols and an extended metaphor, the
meaning of an allegory is more direct and less subject to ambiguity than a symbol; it is
distinguishable from an extended metaphor in that the literal equivalent of an allegory's
figurative comparison is not usually expressed.
*Sidelight: Probably the best known allegory in English literature is Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
Alliteration:Also called head rhyme or initial rhyme, the repetition of the initial sounds
(usually consonants) of stressed syllables in neighboring words or at short intervals
within a line or passage, usually at word beginnings.
Example:
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
*Sidelight: Alliteration has a gratifying effect on the sound, gives a reinforcement to
stresses, and can also serve as a subtle connection or emphasis of key words in the line,
but alliterated words should not "call attention" to themselves by strained usage.
Alliterative verse: is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring
device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. In alliterative
verse, the first half-line is united with the second half by alliterating stressed syllables;
in the first half-line generally two (but sometimes three) syllables alliterate, while in the
second half usually only one. Sometimes one alliterating sound is carried through
successive lines.
Example:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Allusion: is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, a place,
event, literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication
Altar poem: is any type of poetry where the characters, words, and lines have been
written in such a way that when looked at as a whole, the poem forms an outline that is
easily recognizable to the reader. The object that is outlined must be related to the
poetry and usually gives more meaning to the poem itself.
Ambiguity: Applied to words and expressions, the state of being doubtful or indistinct
in meaning or capable of being understood in more than one way.
Amphimacer: is a metrical foot containing three syllables: long, short, long. (as in
THIR-ty-NINE)
Anachronism: The placement of an event, person, or thing out of its proper
chronological relationship, sometimes unintentional, but often deliberate as an exercise
of poetic license.
Anaclasis: is the reversal of the order of its elements. In English Accentual-syllabic
verse the most common anaclasis by far is the reversal of the first iamb in a line of
verse, thus resulting in a trochee.
Example:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'
Here, that is emphasized rather than is, which would be an unnatural accent. The first
syllable of Whether is also stressed, making it a trochaic beginning.
Anacreontic: Verse in a meter used by the Greek poet Anacreon in his poems dealing
with love and wine. His later Greek imitators took up the same themes and used the
Anacreontic meter. In modern poetry, Anacreontics are short lyrical pieces that keep the
Anacreontic subject matter but not the meter.
Anacrusis: One or more unaccented syllables at the beginning of a line of verse that are
regarded as preliminary to and not part of the metrical pattern.
Anadiplosis:Also called epanadiplosis, the repetition of a prominent (usually the final)
word of a phrase, clause, line, or stanza at the beginning of the next, often with extended
or altered meaning, as in: "His hands were folded -- folded in prayer,"
Anagoge o anagogy: The spiritual or mystical interpretation of a word or passage
beyond the literal, allegoricalor moral sense.
Analects o analecta: Miscellaneous extracts collected from the works of authors.
Analogy: An agreement or similarity in some particulars between things otherwise
different; sleep and death, for example, are analogous in that they both share a lack of
animation and a recumbent posture.
Anapest, anapestic: A metrical foot composed of two short syllables followed by one
long one
Example:
I am MON | -arch of ALL | I sur-VEY
Anaphora: The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several
successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs for rhetorical or poetic effect.
Example:
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!
Anastrophe: A type of hyperbaton involving the inversion of the normal syntactic
order of words.
Example:
"Hillocks green" for "green hillocks" or "high triumphs hold" for "hold high triumphs"
Anisometric: is a type of poetic verse which does not have any corresponding poetic
meter. A stanza of this sort is mostly lines of unequal numbers of matching length in
terms of how many meters, which can also be termed as mixed stanzas. It may mix
multiple styles or alternative between several meters
Example:
Though this verse is witty and clever
And writing it took no time
It's all anisometric, using meters much as you would a lever
Even if I did make it all rhyme.
Antithesis: A figure of speech in which a thought is balanced with a contrasting
thought in parallel arrangements of words and phrases
Example:
"He promised wealth and provided poverty,"
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . ."
Antonomasia: the substitution of a title or epithet for a proper name, as Bard for
Shakespeare.
Antonym: one of two or more words that have opposite meanings. (good / bad)
Apheresis: a type of elision in which a letter or syllable is omitted at the beginning of a
word, as 'twas for it was.
Apocope: a type of elision in which a letter or syllable is omitted at the end of a word,
as in morn for morning.
Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which an address is made to an absent person or a
personified thing rhetorically.
Example:
O solitude! Where are the charms
that sages have seen in thy face?
Arcadia: a region or scene characterized by idyllic quiet and simplicity, often chosen as
a setting for pastoral poetry, from Arcadia, a picturesque region in ancient Greece.
Arsis: the accented or long part of a metrical foot, especially in accentual verse.
Note: In classical prosody the arsis was the shorter or unaccented part of a metrical foot,
especially in quantitative verse.
Assonance:the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in stressed
syllables, with changes in the intervening consonants, as in the phrase tilting at
windmills.
Asyndeton: the omission of conjunctions from constructions in which they would
normally be used
Example:
"Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,/Shrunk to this little measure?"
(Shakespeare).
B
Bacchius: in ancient poetry, a metrical footconsisting of a short syllable followed by
two long syllables.
Note: Compare Dactyl.
Ballad: a short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain.
The story of a ballad can originate from a wide range of subject matter but most
frequently deals with folk-lore or popular legends. They are written in straight-forward
verse, seldom with detail, but always with graphic simplicity and force. Most ballads
are suitable for singing and, while sometimes varied in practice, are generally written in
ballad meter, i.e., alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the last
words of the second and fourth lines rhyming.
Ballade: frequently represented in French poetry, a fixed form consisting of three seven
or eight-line stanzas using no more than three recurrent rhymes with an identical
refrainafter each stanza and a closing envoirepeating the rhymes of the last four lines of
the stanza. A variation containing six stanzas is called a double ballade.
Bard: an ancient composer, singer or declaimer of epic verse, celebrating the deeds of
gods and heroes. (William Shakespeare is called The Bard of Avon)
Baroque: an elaborate, extravagantly complex, sometimes grotesque, style of artistic
expression prevalent in the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. The baroque
influence on poetry was expressed by Euphuismin England, Marinism in Italy, and
Gongorism in Spain.
Bathos: a sudden ludicrous descent from exalted to ordinary matters or style in speech
or writing
Beast fable or beast epic: a long, usually allegorical verse narrative in which the
characters are animals with human feelings and motives.
Binary meter:a meter which has two syllables per foot, as in iambic, trochaic, pyrrhic,
and spondaic meters. Binary meters are sometimes referred to as duple or double
meters.
Blank verse: poetry written without rhymes, but which retains a set metrical pattern,
usually iambic pentameter (or five iambic feet per line) in English verse. Since it is a
very flexible form, the writer not being hampered in the expression of thought or
syntactic structure by the need to rhyme, it is used extensively in narrative and dramatic
poetry. In lyric poetry, blank verse is adaptable to lengthy descriptive and meditative
poems.
Example:
The qua | lity | of mer | cy is | not strain'd,
It drop | peth as | the gen | tle rain | from heaven
Upon | the place | beneath; | it is | twice blessed:
It bles | seth him | that gives | and him | that takes;
Note: Blank verse and free verseare often misunderstood or confused. A good way to
remember the difference is to think of the word blank as meaning that the ends of the
lines where rhymes would normally appear are "blank," i.e., devoid of rhyme; the free
in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of traditional versification.
Broken rhyme:also called Split rhyme, is a form of rhyme. It is produced by dividing a
word at the line break of a poem to make a rhyme with the end word of another line.
More commonly, the device is used in comic or playful poetry
Example:
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
…
In Hopkins' "The Windhover," for example, he divided kingdom at the end of the first
line to rhyme with the word wing ending the fourth line.
C
Cacophony: Discordant sounds in the jarring juxtaposition of harsh letters or syllables,
sometimes inadvertent, but often deliberately used in poetry for effect.
Example:
He clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Sidelight: Sound devices are important to poetry. To create sounds appropriate to the
content, the poet may sometimes prefer to achieve a cacophonous effect instead of the
more commonly sought-for euphony. The use of words with the consonants b, k and p,
to cite one example, produce harsher sounds than the soft f and v or the liquid l, m and
n.
Cadence: the recurrent rhythmical pattern in lines of verse; also, the natural tone or
modulation of the voice determined by the alternation of accented or unaccented
syllables.
*Sidelight: Cadence differs from meter in that it is not necessarily regular, but rather a
more flexible concept of rhythm such as is characteristic of free verse and prose poetry.
Caesura: a complete stop in a line of poetry. There are two types of caesurae:
masculine and feminine. A masculine caesura is a pause that follows a stressed syllable;
a feminine caesura follows an unstressed syllable. Another distinction is by the position
of the caesura in a line. An initial caesura describes a break close to the beginning of a
line, a medial denotes a pause in the middle and a terminal occurs at the very end. Initial
and terminal caesurae were rare in formal, Romance, and Neoclassical verse, which
preferred medial caesurae. In scansion, the "double pipe" sign ("||") is used to denote the
position of a caesura in a line.
*Sidelight: As a grammatical, rhythmic, and dramatic device, as well as an effective
means of avoiding monotony, the caesura is a subtle but effective weapon in the skilled
poet's arsenal.
*Sidelight: Since caesura and pause are often used interchangeably, it is better to use
metrical pause for the type of "rest" which compensates for the omission of a syllable.
*Sidelight: A caesura occurring at the end of a line is not marked in the scanning
process.
*Sidelight: The classical caesura was a break caused by the ending of a word within a
foot.
Canon: in a literary sense, the authoritative works of a particular writer; also, an
accepted list of works perceived to represent a cultural, ideological, historical, or
biblical grouping.
*Sidelight: Other literary groupings or collections include sonnet sequences, lyric
sequences, cycles, companion poems, and anthologies.
Canto: is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word
comes from Italian, from the Latin canto, meaning "I sing". Famous examples of epic
poetry which employ the canto division are Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki's The
Ramayana (500 cantos), Dante's The Divine Comedy(100 cantos), and Ezra Pound's The
Cantos (120 cantos).
Canzone: An Italian lyric poem of varying stanzaic length, usually written in a mixture
of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables with a concluding short stanza or envoi.
*Sidelight: The word "canzone" is derived from the Latin cantio (a song) and normally
embraced subjects like love, heroic courage, or moral virtue. Milton's pastoral elegy,
Lycidas, is an example in English poetry of a structure similar to the canzone.
Carmina figuratta: is a term used in literary criticism to describe poems that have a
certain shape or pattern formed either by all the words they contain or just by certain
ones therein
Carpe diem: latin for "seize the day," a common motif in lyric verse throughout the
history of poetry, with the emphasis on making the most of current pleasures because
life is short and time is flying
Catachresis:is "misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor”. Another
meaning is to use an existing word to denote something that has no name in the current
language. Catachresis is a very common habit, and can have both positive and negative
effects on language: on the one hand, it helps a language evolve and overcome poverty
of expression; on the other, it can lead to miscommunications or make the language of
one era incompatible with that of another. Catachresis is more a linguistic phenomenon
than a figure of speech.
Catalectic, catalexis: A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking
a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot. One form of catalexis is
headlessness, where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line.
*Sidelight: In versification, poets sometimes use catalexis in lines of trochaicand
dactylic verse to achieve a final accented syllable for a strong close or a rhyme.
Example:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Catalog verse: A poem comprised of a list of persons, places, things, or abstract ideas
which share a common denominator. An ancient form, it was originally a type of
didactic poetry.
Cataphora:The use of a grammatical substitute (like a pronoun) which has the same
reference as the next word or phrase, as in, "Before him John saw a sea of smiling
faces."
Caudate rhyme: also called, Tail rhyme. a verse form in which rhyming lines, usually
a couplet or triplet, are followed by a tail, a line of shorter length with a different rhyme;
in a tail-rhyme stanza, the tails rhyme with each other
Cento: a poetical work made up of verses or passages taken from other authors; only
disposed in a new form or order. Centos have been composed out of works by Homer,
"Euripides, Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Emily Dickinson"
Chain rhyme:s the linking together of stanzas by carrying a rhyme over from one
stanza to the next.
A number of verse forms use chain rhyme as an integral part of their structures. One
example is terza rima, which is written in tercets with a rhyming pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, cd-c. Another is the virelai ancien, which rhymes a-a-b-a-a-b, b-b-c-b-b-c, c-c-d-c-c-d.
Other verse forms may also use chain rhyme. For instance, quatrains can be written to
the following pattern: a-a-b-a, b-b-c-b, c-c-d-c.
Chain verse: Similar to chain rhyme, but links words, phrases, or lines (instead of
rhyme) by repeating them in succeeding stanzas, as in the pantoum, but there are many
variations.
Chanson de geste: epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest
known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a
hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères (troubadours)
and the earliest verse romances. The French chanson gave rise to the Old Spanish
tradition of the cantar de gesta.
An example of Chanson de Geste is the Chanson the Roland, believed to be written by
Turold.
Chant royal: is a variation of the ballad form and consists of five eleven-line stanzas
with a rhyme schemea-b-a-b-c-c-d-d-e-d-E and a five-line envoirhyming d-d-e-d-E or a
seven-line envoi c-c-d-d-e-d-E. To add to the complexity, no rhyming word was used
twice. It was introduced into French poetry in the 14th century by Christine de Pizan and
Charles d'Orléans and was introduced into England towards the end of the 19th century
as part of a general revival of interest in French poetic forms. The complexity of the
form caused William Caswell Jones to describe it as "impractical" for common use. The
Chant Royal was the most complicated form of poetry in Northern France during the
14th century, though not as complex as the sestina, which was more popular in Southern
France. The form was often used for stately, or heroic subjects.
Chaucerian stanza: is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced into English
poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in
iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can
be constructed either as a terza rima and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and
a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c).
Chiasmus: the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each
other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the
clauses display inverted parallelism. “His time a moment, and a point his space."
Alexander Pope Essay on Man, Epistle I. (possessive phrases with nouns; also note that
this is an example of chiasmus of inverted meaning "time and space", "moment and
point")
Choree: is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed one. Trochaic meter is also seen among the works of William
Shakespeare:
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Choriamb: In the prosody of English and other modern European languages,
"choriamb" is sometimes used to describe four-syllable sequence of the pattern
stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed (again, a trochee followed by an iamb): for
example, "over the hill", "under the bridge", and "what a mistake!".
Cinquain: A five-line stanza of syllabic verse, the successive lines containing two,
four, six, eight and two syllables. The cinquain is based on the Japanese haiku.
Classicism: refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting
standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. It was particularly expressed in
the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason. In conclusion, Classicism is the adherence
to the traditional standards that are universally valid and enduring.
Consonance: The close repetition of the same end consonants of stressed syllables
with differing vowel sounds, such as boat and night, or the words drunk and milk in the
final line of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."
Courtly love: Was a medieval European conception of nobly and
chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and
between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between
husband and wife. Courtly love was born in the lyric, first appearing with Provençal
poets in the 11th century, including itinerant and courtly minstrels such as the French
troubadours and trouvères.
Cross rhyme: The rhyme scheme of abab, also called alternate rhyme, in which the
end words of alternating lines rhyme with each other, i.e., the rhymes cross
intervening lines. Cross rhyming derives from long-line verse such as hexameter in
which two lines have caesural words rhymed together and end words rhymed together.
D
Dactyl, dactylic: A metrical foot of three syllables, the first of which is long or
accented and the next two short or unaccented.
Dadaism: is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World
War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. It is based on deliberate irrationality and the
negation of traditional artistic values. Dadaism was not confined to the visual and
literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music.
Decameter: A line of verse consisting of ten metrical feet.
Decasyllable: is a poetic meter of ten syllables used in poetic traditions of syllabic
verse. It has been used as the basic structure for several poetic forms in the English
language including the Decasyllabic quatrain as well as in many English sonnets.
Denotation: The literal dictionary meaning(s) of a word as distinct from an
associated idea or connotation. Many words have more than one denotation, such as the
multiple meanings of fair or spring. In ordinary language, we strive for a single precise
meaning of words to avoid ambiguity, but poets often take advantage of words with
more than one meaning to suggest more than one idea with the same word.
Diaeresis or dieresis: The pronunciation of two adjacent vowels within a word as
separate sounds rather than as a diphthong, as in coordinate; also, the mark
indicating the separate pronunciation, as in naïve.
Dibrach: is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. It consists of two unaccented,
short syllables. It is also known as a pyrrhic.
Diction: to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of
expression in a poem or story. Poetic diction refers to words, phrasing, and figures
not usually used in ordinary speech and often utilizes archaisms, neologisms,
epithets, kennings, periphrases, connotations, and hyperbaton. Poets often adapt diction
to the form or genre of a poem, for example, elevated for odes, or folksy for ballads.
Didactic poetry: Poetry which is clearly intended for the purpose of instruction -- to
impart theoretical, moral, or practical knowledge, or to explain the principles of some
art or science. Although the instructional purpose is its primary aim, didactic poetry
often contains vivid descriptive passages, digressions, and thoughtful reflections
bearing on the subject matter.
Dimeter: In poetry, a dimeter is a metrical line of verse with two feet, or of two
dipodies.
Dipody, dipodic verse: A double foot; a unit of two feet. Sometimes heavy and light
stresses alternate in the accented syllables of verse. When such alternations are
frequent enough to establish a discernable pattern, the meter is scanned in units of two
feet instead of one and termed dipodic verse.
Dissonance: A mingling or union of harsh, inharmonious sounds, often used
deliberately for effect. The term, dissonance, can also refer to any elements of a
poem which are discordant in the context of their use. Although often considered
synonymous with cacophony, the term dissonance more strongly implies a deliberate
choice.
Disyllable: A word of two syllables.
Disyllabic rhyme: A rhyme in which two final syllables of words have the same
sound, as in fender and bender or beguile and revile.
Dodecasyllable: is a line of verse with twelve syllables.
Duple meter: A meter which has two syllables per foot, as in iambic, trochaic,
pyrrhic, and spondaic meters. Binary meters are sometimes referred to as duple or
double meters. It is also known as binary meter.
Dysphemism: The substitution of a disagreeable, offensive or disparaging expression
to replace an agreeable or inoffensive one. Is the opposite of euphemism.
E
Echo: The repetition of particular sounds, syllables, words or lines in poetry.
Echo verse: A form of poem in which a word or two at the end of a line appears as
an echo constituting the entire following line. The echo, either the same word or
syllable or a homophone, often changes the meaning in a flippant, cynical or punning
response.
Eclogue: Is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the
genre are sometimes also called bucolics. Usually contains dialogue between
shepherds.
Edda: applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were
written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain
material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age. The books are
the main sources of medieval skaldic tradition in Iceland and Norse mythology. The
first collection contains the mythology of the people; the second, selections from the
poetry of the Skalds.
Eidillon or eidyllion: A pastoral poem, usually brief, stressing the picturesque
aspects of country life, or a longer narrative poem generally descriptive of pastoral
scenes and written in a highly finished style. Idyll is the anglicized version of the Greek
Eidillion.
Ekprhasis or Ecphrasis: is the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work
of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of anything, person, or experience.
The general term for the effective quality of sense impressions or mental images and
the resulting arousal of emotion is enargia.
Elegiac: refers either to those compositions that are like elegies or to a specific
poetic meter used in Classical elegies. The Classical elegiac meter has two lines,
making it a couplet: a line of dactylic hexameter, followed by a line of dactylic
pentameter. Because the hexameter line is in the same meter as epic poetry, and because
the elegiac form was always considered lower style than epic, elegists frequently wrote
with epic in mind and positioned themselves in relation to epic. The first examples of
elegiac poetry in writing come from classical Greece.
Elegiac stanza: are a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes
usually of smaller scale than those of epic poetry. Elegiac couplets consist of
alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter: two dactyls followed by a long
syllable, a caesura, then two more dactyls followed by a long syllable. It is known as
Heroic Quatrain.
Elegy: In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially
a funeral song or a lament for the dead. The pastoral elegy became conventional in
the Renaissance and continued into the 19th century. Traditionally, pastoral elegies
included an invocation, a lament in which all nature joined, praise, sympathy, and a
closing consolation.
Elision: Is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a
whole syllable) in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker
to pronounce. Sometimes, sounds may be elided for euphonic effect. Elision is
normally unintentional, but it may be deliberate. The result may be impressionistically
described as "slurred" or "muted." The opposite of elision is hiatus: the slight break in
articulation caused by the occurrence of contiguous vowels, or in the final and
beginning vowels of successive words.
Ellipsis or Ellipses: is a mark or series of marks that usually indicate an intentional
omission of a word in the original text. Other terms involving omissions in
grammatical construction include: asyndeton, which omits conjunctions; zeugma and
syllepsis, which use one word to serve for two; and aposiopesis, which omits a word or
phrase at the end of a clause or sentence for effect.
Empathy: The feeling or capacity for awareness, understanding, and sensitivity one
experiences when hearing or reading of some event or activity of others, thus
imagining the same sensations as that of those actually experiencing them.
Emphasis: A deliberate stress of articulation on a word or phrase so as to give an
impression of particular significance to it by the more marked pronunciation. In
writing, emphasis is indicated by the use of italics or underlining.
Enargia: Is the general term for the effective quality of sense impressions or mental
images and the resulting arousal of emotion.
Encomium: A speech or composition in high praise of a person, object, or event.
Related to this general meaning, "encomium" also identifies several distinct aspects of
rhetoric.
End rhyme: rhyme occurring in the terminating word or syllable of one line of
poetry with that of another line, as opposed to internal rhyme.
End-stopped: Denoting a line of verse in which a logical or rhetorical pause occurs
at the end of the line, usually marked with a period, comma, or semicolon. While
correctly used to refer to a single line, the term is most frequently used in reference
to the couplet, especially the closed or heroic couplet.
Enjambment: is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by
the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where
each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic
unit ends mid-line. This run-on device, contrasted with end-stopped, can be very
effective in creating a sense of forward motion, fine-tuning the rhythm, and reinforcing
the mood, as well as a variation to avoid monotony, but should not be used as a mere
mannerism.
Envelope: A poetic device in which a line, phrase, or stanza is repeated so as to
enclose other material. The term can apply to rhyme as well. The rhyme scheme abba in
a quatrain is termed an envelope rhyme since the rhymes of the first and last
lines enclose the other lines.
Epanadiplosis: the repetition of a prominent (usually the final) word of a phrase,
clause, line, or stanza at the beginning of the next, often with extended or altered
meaning. It is also called Anadiplosis.
Epanalepsis: Is a figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word (or
words) of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence. The
beginning and the end are the two positions of stronger emphasis in a sentence; so, by
having the same phrase in both places, the speaker calls special attention to it. Nested
double-epanalepses form another figure of speech, which is called an antimetabole.
Epanaphora: the repetition of the same word or expression at the beginning of
successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or lines for rhetorical or poetic effect. It is
also called Anaphora.
Epic: a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing
details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Classical epics
began with an argument and an invocation to a guiding spirit, then started the
narrative in medias res. In modern use, the term, "epic," is generally applied to all
lengthy works on matters of great importance.
Equivoke or Equivoque: An ambiguous word or phrase capable more than one
interpretation, thus susceptible to use for puns.
Eulogy: is a speech or writing in praise of a person or thing, especially one recently
deceased or retired. should not be confused with elegies, which are poems written in
tribute to the dead; nor with obituaries, which are published biographies recounting
the lives of those who have recently died; nor with obsequies, which refer generally to
the rituals surrounding funerals.
Euphemism: is a substitution for an expression that may offend or suggest
something unpleasant to the receiver, using instead an agreeable or less offensive
expression. Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others are created to
mislead.
F
Fable: is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical
creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized
(given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at
the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim. Fables in which animals speak and act
as humans are sometimes called beast fables. Beast Epics are longer narratives,
often satirical, written in mock-epic form.
Fabliau: The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse,
between 300 and 400 lines long, its content often comic or satiric. In France, it
flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries; in England, it was popular in the 14th century.
Fabliau is often compared to the later short story; Douglas Bush, long-time professor
at Harvard University, called it "a short story broader than it is long."
The closest literary genre is the fable as found in Aesop "and its eastern origins or
parallels," but it is less moral and less didactic than the fable. In its lack of explicit
moralism it is much closer to the novel than to the parable: "the story is the first thing,
the moral the second, and the latter is never suffered to interfere with the former."
Typical fabliaux contain a vast array of characters, including cuckolded husbands,
rapacious clergy, and foolish peasants, as well as beggars, connivers, thieves, and
whores. Two groups are often singled out for criticism: the clergy and women. The
status of peasants appears to vary, based on the audience for which the fabliau was
being written. Poems that were presumably written for the nobility portray peasants
(villains in French) as stupid and vile, whereas those written for the lower classes often
tell of peasants getting the better of the clergy.
The subject matter is often sexual: fabliau is concerned with the elements of love left
out by poets who wrote in the more elevated genres.
Fabliaux derive a lot of their force from puns and other verbal figures; indeed, "fabliaux
. . . are obsessed with wordplay." Especially important are paronomasia and catachresis,
tropes which disrupt ordinary signification and displace ordinary meanings--by
similarity of sound, for instance, one can have both "con" and "conte" ("cunt" and
"tale") in the same word, a common pun in fabliaux.
The standard form of the fabliau is that of Medieval French literature in general,
the octosyllable rhymed couplet, the most common verse form used in
verse chronicles, romances (theromans), lais, and dits. They are generally short, a few
hundred lines.
(See Jongleur)
Fatal flaw: In literature, the tragic hero's error of judgment or inherent defect of
character, usually less literally translated as a Hamartia. This, combined with essential
elements of chance and other external forces, brings about a catastrophe. Often the
error or flaw results from nothing more than personal traits like probity, pride, and
overconfidence, but can arise from any failure of the protagonist's action or
knowledge ranging from a simple unwitting act to a moral deficiency.
Feminine ending: An extra unaccented syllable at the end of an iambic or anapestic
line of poetry, often used in blank verse.
Feminine rhyme: is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end
of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables is unstressed.
Fescennine verses: (Fescennina carmina), one of the earliest kinds of Italian poetry,
subsequently developed into satire and Roman comic drama.
Originally sung at village harvest-home rejoicing, they made their way into the towns,
and became the fashion at religious festivals and private gatherings especially weddings,
to which in later times they were practically restricted. They were usually in
the Saturnine metre and took the form of a dialogue consisting of an interchange of
extemporaneous raillery. Those who took part in them wore masks made of the bark of
trees. At first harmless and good-humored, if somewhat coarse, these songs gradually
outstripped the bounds of decency; malicious attacks were made upon both gods and
men, and the matter became so serious that the law intervened and scurrilous
personalities were forbidden by the Twelve Tables.
Figurative language: The use of words, phrases, symbols, and ideas in such as way
as to evoke mental images and sense impressions. Figurative language is often
characterized by the use of figures of speech, elaborate expressions, sound devices,
and syntactic departures from the usual order of literal language.
Foot: The basic unit in their description of the underlying rhythm of a poem. Both
the quantitative meter of classical poetry and the accentual-syllabic meter of most
poetry in English use the foot as the fundamental building block. A foot consists of a
certain number of syllables forming part of a line of verse. A foot is described by the
character and number of syllables it contains: in English, feet are named for the
combination of accented and unaccented syllables; in other languages such
as Latin and Greek, the duration of the syllable (long or short) is measured.
When scanning a line of verse, a poet looks at feet as the basic rhythmic unit rather than
words. A foot can consist of multiple words and a single word can contain many feet;
furthermore, a foot can, and often does, bridge multiple words, containing, for example,
the last two syllables of one word and the first of the next. To scan for feet, one should
focus on the stream of sound alone and set aside the actual meaning of the words.
The most common in English verse are the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, and
the anapest.
*Sidelight: A line of verse may or may not be written in identical feet; variations within
a line are common. Consequently, the classification of verse as iambic, anapestic,
trochaic, etc., is determined by the foot which is dominant in the line.
Sidelight: To help his young son remember them, Coleridge wrote the poem, "Metrical
Feet."
(See Dipody)
(See also Scan, Scansion)
Free verse: A form of poetry that refrains from meter patterns, rhyme, or any other
musical pattern.
Some poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, must still display some
elements of form. Most free verse, for example, self-evidently continues to observe a
convention of the poetic line in some sense, at least in written representations, thus
retaining a potential degree of linkage, however nebulous, with more traditional forms.
Although free verse requires no meter, rhyme, or other traditional poetic techniques, a
poet can still utilize them to create some sense of structure. A clear example of this can
be found in Walt Whitman's poems, where he repeats certain phrases and uses commas
to create both a rhythm and structure.
*Sidelight: Although as ancient as Anglo-Saxon verse, free verse was first employed
"officially" by French poets of the Symbolist movement and became the prevailing
poetic form at the climax of Romanticism. In the 20th century it was the chosen
medium of the Imagists and was widely adopted by American and English poets.
*Sidelight: One of the characteristics that distinguish free verse from
rhythmical prose is that free verse has line breaks which divide the content into uneven
rhythmical units. The liberation from metrical regularity allows the poet to select line
breaks appropriate to the intended sense of the text, as well as to shape the white space
on the page for visual effect.
*Sidelight: Free verse enjoys a greater potential for visual arrangement than is possible
in metrical verse. Free verse poets can structure the relationships between white space
and textual elements to indicate pause, distance, silence, emotion, and other effects.
*Sidelight: Poorly written free verse can be viewed simply as prose with arbitrary line
breaks. Well-written free verse can approach a proximity to the representation of living
experience.
G
Galliambus: In classical poetry, a lyric meter consisting of four iambic dipodies, the
last of which is catalectic, dropping the final accent, or a line of four lesser Ionic feet
catalectic, varied by anaclasis.
Genre: the term for any category of literature as well as various other forms of art
or Culture. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres
are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple
genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.
Georgic: A poem dealing with a rural or agricultural topic, but differing
from pastoral poetry in that the primary intention of a georgic is
didactic. Virgil's Georgics exemplifies the form.
Gongorism: A Spanish verse style invented by the 17th-century poet Luis de Góngora
y Argote, characterized by a studied obscurity, an emphasis on Latin terms and syntax,
allusions to classical myths, and lavish use of metaphors, hyperbole, paradoxes,
neologisms, and antitheses. Also called cultismo or culteranismo.
(See also Baroque, Euphuism, Melic Verse)
Grammatical rhyme: See Polyptoton
H
Haiku: A form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three phrases of 5,
7, and 5 moras respectively. Although haiku are often stated to have 17 syllables, this is
inaccurate as syllables and moras are not the same. Haiku typically contain
a kigo (seasonal reference), and a kireji (cutting word). In Japanese, haiku are
traditionally printed in a single vertical line and tend to take aspects of the natural world
as their subject matter, while haiku in English often appear in three lines to parallel the
three phrases of Japanese haiku and may deal with any subject matter. Previously
called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at
the end of the 19th century.
*Sidelight: Haiku derived from the hokku, which was the opening part of the renga, a
lengthy Japanese poem usually composed by several poets writing alternating stanzas.
*Sidelight: After World War II, haiku attracted an increasing interest among American
poets and is now written in many other languages as well, often with experimental
changes in the form. The original Japanese haiku was written in a one-line format
(See alsoTanka, Cinquain)
Half rhyme: Half rhyme or slant rhyme, sometimes called sprung, near rhyme, oblique
rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme, is consonance on the final consonants of the
words involved. Many half/slant rhymes are also eye rhymes. Half/slant rhymes are
widely used in Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Icelandic verse. An example is ill and shell.
Half/slant rhyme has been found in English-language poetry as early as Henry Vaughan,
but it was not until the works of W. B. Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins that it found
wide use among English-language poets. In the 20th century half/slant rhyme has been
used widely by English poets. Often, as in most of Yeats's poems, it is mixed with other
devices such as regular rhymes,assonance, and para-rhymes.
Hamartia: Hamartia is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics. The term can
simply be seen as a character’s flaw or error.
While the modern popular rendering of hamartia as "tragic flaw" (or "fatal flaw") is
broadly imprecise and often misleading, it cannot be ruled out that the term as Aristotle
understood it could sometimes at least partially connote a failure of morals or character:
Whether Aristotle regards the “flaw” as intellectual or moral has been hotly discussed. It
may cover both senses. The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it
by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgement, which may well involve some
imperfection of character but not such as to make us regard him as “morally
responsible” for the disasters although they are nevertheless the consequences of the
flaw in him, and his wrong decision at a crisis is the inevitable outcome of his
character to import the notion of Hamartia as "tragic flaw" into the act of doing literary
analysis locks the critic into a kind of endless blame game, an attitude of superiority,
and a process of speculation about what the character could or (worse) should have done
differently. Tragedy often works precisely because the protagonist in choosing well,
chooses something that will lead to unhappiness. This is certainly the case with Oedipus
and, arguably, the case with Hamlet.
*Sidelight: The tragic hero is usually of high estate and neither entirely virtuous nor
bad. Hamartia, rather than villainy, is the significant factor leading to his suffering. He
evokes our pity because, not being an evil person, his misfortune is a
greater tragedy than he deserves and is disproportionate to the "flaw." We are also
moved to fear, as we recognize the possibilities of similar errors or defects in ourselves.
Head rhyme: Consonantal alliteration at the beginning of words. Also called beginning
rhyme.
Hemistich: A hemistich is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that
makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Classical poetry, the hemistich is
generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue
to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs (in hemistichomythia).
In neo-classicism, the hemistich was frowned upon,but Germanic poetry employed the
hemistich as a basic component of verse. In Old English and Old Norsepoetry, each line
of alliterative verse was divided into an "a-verse" and "b-verse" hemistich with a strong
caesura between. In Beowulf, there are only five basic types of hemistich, with some
used only as initial hemistichs and some only as secondary hemistichs.
Furthermore, Middle English poetry also employed the hemistich as a coherent unit of
verse, with both the Pearl Poet and Layamon using a regularized set of principles for
which metrical (as well as alliterative) forms were allowed in which hemistich position.
*Sidelight: Alliterative verse was composed with two hemistichs on a single line,
divided by a caesura.
Hendecasyllable: A verse of eleven syllables, used in Ancient
Greek and Latin quantitative verse as well as in medieval and modern European poetry.
It is sometimes used in English poetry to describe a line of iambic pentameter with an
extra short syllable at the end.
(See also Decasyllable, Heptasyllable, Octosyllable)
Hendiadys: A figure of speech used for emphasis — "The substitution of a conjunction
for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by a conjunction to
express a single complex idea.
The typical result of a hendiadys is to transform a noun-plus-adjective into two nouns
joined by a conjunction. For example, "sound and fury"
eems to offer a more striking image than "furious sound". In this example, as typically,
the subordinate idea originally present in the adjective is transformed into a noun in and
of itself. Another example is Dieu et mon droit, present in the coat of arms of the United
Kingdom. In fact, hendiadys is most effective in English when the adjective and noun
form of the word are identical. Thus "the cold wind went down the hall" becomes "the
cold and the wind went down the hall."
*Sidelight: Shakespeare's works contain many examples of hendiadys, such as "sound
and fury" (furious sound) in Macbeth, and "heat and flame" (hot flame) inHamlet.
(Compare Zeugma)
Heptameter: One or more lines of verse containing seven metrical feet (usually
fourteen or twenty-one syllables).
*Sidelight: A heptameter is called a fourteener when it is iambic.
(See Meter)
Heptasyllable: A word or line of verse of seven syllables.
(See also Decasyllable, Hendecasyllable, Octosyllable)
Heroic couplet: A traditional form for English poetry, commonly used
for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming
pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine. Use of the heroic
couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and
the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is also widely credited with first extensive use of iambic
pentameter.
*Sidelight: Poems written in heroic couplets, such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock, are
especially subject to the danger of metrical monotony, which poets avoid by variations
in their placement of caesuras.
Heroic quatrain or Heroic verse: Consists of the rhymed iambic line or heroic
couplet. The term is used in English exclusively.
In ancient literature, heroic verse was synonymous with the dactylic hexameter. It was
in this measure that those typically heroic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey and
the Aeneid were written. In English, however, it was not enough to designate a single
iambic line of five beats as heroic verse, because it was necessary to distinguish blank
verse from the distich, which was formed by the heroic couplet.
It is important to insist that it is the couplet, not the single line, which constitutes heroic
verse.
In the earlier half of the 17th century, heroic verse was often put to somewhat unheroic
purposes, mainly in prologues and epilogues, or other short poems of occasion.
Since the middle of the 17th century, when heroic verse became the typical and for a
while almost the solitary form in which serious English poetry was written, its history
has known many vicissitudes.
*Sidelight: The English form of the heroic quatrain is also called the elegiac stanza for
its frequent use in elegiac verse, as in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."
The form has also been used by other poets without elegiac intent, as in
Shakespeare's sonnets.
(See also Chanson de Geste, Quatrain)
(Compare Ballad, Narrative, Tragedy)
Heterometric: A heterometric poem or stanza is composed of lines of varying lengths
and metrical structures. The opposite is an isometric stanza, which is a stanza composed
of lines of equal length and metrical structure. In traditional poetry, there are a few
types of heterometric stanzas, including the Sapphic and the Spenserian stanza. In
poetry written since the early 20th century, heterometric stanzas are very common.
Heteronym: It refers to one or more imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write
in different styles. Heteronyms differ from noms de plume (or pseudonyms, from the
Greek "False Name") in that the latter are just false names, while the former are
characters having their own supposed physiques, biographies and writing styles.
(See under Homonym)
Hexameter: A metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic
metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in
other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by the god Hermes.
The hexameter has never enjoyed a similar popularity in English, where the standard
metre is iambic pentameter; however, various English poems have been written in
hexameter over the centuries. There are numerous examples of iambic hexameter from
the 16th century and a few from the 17th.
A hexameeter consists of six feet, as mentioned above, which can be two longer syllable
(– –) called dactyle, or a longer and two shorter syllabe called sponteus (– υ υ). the first
four feet can contain any one of them, but the fifth has to be a sponteus and last one has
to be a dactyle. A short syllable (υ) is syllables with a short wovel and one consonant at
the end, a long syllable (-) is a syllable that either has a long wovel, two or more
consonant at the end (or long consonant), or both. However, spaces between wors don't
matter, so for instance "hat" is a short but if it's "hat throw" it's long, because there's the
"th" in the next word.
Even though the rules seem simple, it's hard to use hexameter in English, because
English leaves vowels and consonants out from words, while hexameter relies on
phonetics and sounds always having fixed positions.
In the 17th century the iambic hexameter, or alexandrine, was used as a substitution in
the heroic couplet.
*Sidelight: A hexameter is called an Alexandrine when it is iambic or trochaic in its
English version.
(See Meter)
Homonym: One of two or more words which are identical in pronunciation and
spelling, but different in meaning, as the noun bear and the verb bear.
*Sidelight: Although often called homonyms in popular usage (indeed, in some
dictionaries as well), homophones are words which are identical in pronunciation but
different in meaning or derivation or spelling, as rite, write,
right, and wright, or rain and reign. Heteronyms are words which are identical in
spelling but different in meaning and pronunciation, as sow, to scatter seed, and sow, a
female hog. Homographs are words which are identical in spelling but different in
meaning and derivation or pronunciation, as pine, to yearn for, and pine, a tree, or
the bow of a ship and a bow and arrow.
(Contrast Sight Rhyme)
Hyperbaton: A figure of speech in which words that naturally belong together are
separated from each other for emphasis or effect. This kind of unnatural
or rhetorical separation is possible to a much greater degree in
highly inflected languages, where sentence meaning does not depend closely on word
order. In Latin and Ancient Greek, the effect of hyperbaton is usually to emphasize the
first word. It has been called "perhaps the most distinctively alien feature of Latin word
order."
There are five species: hysterologia, anastrophe (for which the term hyperbaton is
sometimes used loosely as a synonym), parenthesis, tmesis,
and synchysis. Apposition might also be included.
*Sidelight: The poetic use of hyperbaton is the principal difference
in diction between poetry and prose. Poets utilize it to meet the needs of meter or
rhyme, for emphasis or rhetorical effect, and to temper the flow of narrative.
Hyperbole: The use of exaggeration as arhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be
used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be
taken literally.
Hyperboles are exaggerations to create emphasis or effect. As a literary device,
hyperbole is often used in poetry, and is frequently encountered in casual speech. An
example of hyperbole is: "The bag weighed a ton". Hyperbole helps to make the point
that the bag was very heavy although it is not probable that it would actually weigh a
ton.
In rhetoric, some opposites of hyperbole are meiosis, litotes, understatement,
and bathos (the 'letdown' after a hyperbole in a phrase).
*Sidelight: A type of hyperbole in which the exaggeration magnified so greatly that it
refers to an impossibility is called an adynaton.
(Contrast Litotes, Meiosis)
I
Ictus: Rhythmical or metrical stress.
Corn goes on to state that the most common approach adopted for marking fine
gradations of stress has been to add the symbol \ for 'intermediate stress'.
Turco's version of this is to use a dot (·) to indicate the middle syllable in a string of
three unstressed syllables has been 'promoted' to a secondary or weaker stress.
Baldwin (1979) regards the use of the ictus (or slash) and x notation as "normal," and
argues for its benefits. By avoiding the macron and breve traditionally associated with
the quantity (length) of syllables, ictus and x notation avoids possible confusions; it also
has the advantage of being easily typed.
(See also Cadence, Rhythm)
Idealism: The artistic theory or practice that affirms the preeminent values of ideas and
imagination, as compared with the faithful portrayal of nature in realism.
Idealism means seeing the underlying goodness, beauty or promise in the world and
then allowing this to shape our moods and actions. It is a deliberate choice to focus on
the possible and to trust that these possibilities can become the dominant reality.
When we cultivate idealism, we focus on what is lovely and loveable in other people.
Their imperfections and rough edges remind us simply that their lives are works in
progress. Our idealism helps them to see their good qualities and to grow them.
When idealism guides our lives, it melts away cynicism and despair, replacing them
with light and hope.
(Compare Classicism, Impressionism, Metaphysical, Objectivism,
Romanticism, Symbolism)
Identical rhyme: See Perfect Rhyme
Imagery, Image: The elements in a literary work used to evoke mental images, not
only of the visual sense, but of sensation and emotion as well. While most commonly
used in reference to figurative language, imagery is a variable term which can apply to
any and all components of a poem that evoke sensory experience and emotional
response, whether figurative or literal, and also applies to the concrete things so imaged.
*Sidelight: Imaginative diction transfers the poet's impressions of sight, sound, smell,
taste and touch to the careful reader, as in "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver
Wendell Holmes, or "The Cloud," by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
*Sidelight: In addition to its more tangible initial impact, effective imagery has the
potential to tap the inner wisdom of the reader to arouse meditative and inspirational
responses.
*Sidelight: Related images are often clustered or scattered throughout a work, thus
serving to create a particular tone. Images of disease, corruption, and death, for
example, are recurrent patterns shaping the tonality of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Imagery
can also emphasize a theme, as do the suggestions of dissolution, depression, and
mortality in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."
(See also Ekphrasis)
Imitation: See Mimesis
Imperfect rhyme: See Near rhyme
Impressionism: As applied to poetry, a late 19th century movement
embracing imagism and symbolism, which sought to portray the effects (or poet's
impressions), rather than the objective characteristics of life and events.
(Compare Classicism, Idealism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism, Romanticism)
Incremental repetition: The repetition in each stanza (of a ballad, for example) of part
of the preceding stanza, usually with a slight change in wording for effect.
(Compare Anadiplosis, Anaphora, Echo, Parallelism, Polysyndeton, Refrain)
In media res: The literary device of beginning a narrative, such as an epic poem, at a
crucial point in the middle of a series of events. The intent is to create an immediate
interest from which the author can then move backward in time to narrate the story.
*Sidelight: In contrast, ab ovo (from the egg) refers to starting at the chronological
beginning of a narrative.
(Compare Anachronism)
Interlocking rhyme: See Chain rhyme
Internal rhyme:
Also called middle rhyme, a rhyme occurring within the line. The rhyme may be with
words within the line but not at the line end, or with a word within the line and a word
at the end of the line.
(See also Leonine Verse)
Irony: Verbal irony is a figure of speech in the form of an expression in which the use
of words is the opposite of the thought in the speaker's mind, thus conveying a meaning
that contradicts the literal definition, as when a doctor might say to his patient, "
the bad news is that the operation was successful." Dramatic orsituational irony is a
literary or theatrical device of having a character utter words which the reader or
audience understands to have a different meaning, but of which the character himself is
unaware. Irony of fate is when a situation occurs which is quite the reverse of what one
might have expected.
*Sidelight: The use of irony can be very effective, providing it is reasonably obvious
and not likely to be taken so literally that the reader is left with the opposite of what was
meant to convey. It should also be noted that irony, of itself, is not bitter or cruel, but
may become so when used as a vehicle for satire or sarcasm.
(Compare Parody)
Italian sonnet: See Petrarchan sonnet
J
Jingle: A short poem marked by catchy repetition.
(Compare Nursery Rhyme)
Jongleur: A public entertainer in the Middle Ages who recited or sang
chansons de geste, fabliaux, and other poems, sometimes of their own composition, but
more often those written by the trouveres.
*Sidelight: Prior to the 10th century, the term jongleur was applied to actors, acrobats,
jugglers, and entertainers in general.
K
Kenning: A type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of
a compound (usually two words, often hyphenated) that employs figurative language in
place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old
Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry. For example, Old Norse poets might
replace sverð, the regular word for “sword”, with a more abstract compound such as
“wound-hoe”, r a genitivephrase such as randa íss “ice of shields” . The term kenning
has been applied by modern scholars to similar figures of speech in other languages too,
especially Old English.
*Sidelight: Beowulf, the oldest known epic poem in English, contains numerous
examples of kennings. Milton used the kenning, day-star, for sun, in Lycidas.
King´s English: The standard, pure or correct English speech or usage, also called
"Queen's English."
*Sidelight: The origin of the term is uncertain, but it appeared in Wilson's Arte of
Rhetoricke, in 1553 and in Act 1, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of
Windsor, in about 1597:
Mistress Quickly:
What, John Rugby! I pray thee, go to the casement,
and see if you can see my master, Master Doctor
Caius, coming. If he do, i' faith, and find any
body in the house, here will be an old abusing of
God's patience and the king's English.
(Contrast Solecism)
L
Lai: A lyrical, narrative poem written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales
of adventure and romance. Lais often have great metrical variety and are designed to be
sung to a popular melody.
A lai was a song form composed in northern Europe, mainly France and Germany, from
the 13th to the late 14th century.
he poetic form of the lai usually has several stanzas, none of which have the same form.
As a result, the accompanying music consists of sections which do not repeat. This
distinguishes the lai from other common types of musically important verse of the
period (for example, the rondeau and the ballade). Towards the end of its development
in the 14th century, some lais repeat stanzas, but usually only in the longer examples.
(See also Lay)
Lament: Or lamentation, is a song, poem, or piece of music expressing grief, regret,
or mourning.
(See also Elegy)
Lampoon: A bitter, abusive satire in prose or verse attacking an individual. Motivated
by malice, it is intended solely to reproach and distress.
(See alsoParody, Pasquinade)
Lay: Originally the Anglicized term for the French lai, it later came to be used by
English poets as a synonym for song or for narrative poetry of moderate length.
(See also Tragedy)
Leonine verse: Named for a 12th century poet, Leonius, who first composed such
verse, it consists of hexameters or of hexameters and pentameters in which the final
syllable rhymes with one preceding the caesura, in the middle of the line.
*Sidelight: Since internal rhyme is the most significant feature of Leonine verse, the
two terms are often used synonymously.
Light verse: A loose, catch-all term describing poetry written with a relaxed attitude
and ordinary tone on trivial, mundane, or frivolous themes. It is intended to amuse and
entertain and is frequently distinguished by sophistication, wit, word-play, elegance,
and technical competence. Among the numerous forms of light verse
are clerihews, double dactyls, epigrams, limericks, nonsense poetry, occasional
poetry, parodies, society verse, and verse with puns or riddles.
Line: A unit in the structure of a poem consisting of one or more metrical feet arranged
as a rhythmical entity.
*Sidelight: The line is fundamental to the perception of poetry, since it is an important
factor in the distinction between prose and verse.
*Sidelight: In metrical verse, line lengths are usually determined
by genre or convention, as well as by meter. But otherwise, and especially in free verse,
a poet can give emphasis to a word or phrase by isolating it in a short line.
*Sidelight: In recitation aloud (performance), the line-end is a signal for a slight, nonmetrical pause.
*Sidelight: The traditional practice of capitalizing the initial line-letters contributes to
the visual perception of the line as a unit; this practice is often not observed in
modern free verse.
Lyric verse: One of the three main groups of poetry, the others
being narrative and dramatic. By far the most frequently used form in modern poetic
literature, the termlyric includes all poems in which the speaker's ardent expression of a
(usually single) emotional element predominates. Ranging from complex thoughts to
the simplicity of playful wit, the power and personality of lyric verse is of far greater
importance than the subject treated. Often brief, but sometimes extended in a
long elegy or a meditative ode, the melodic imagery of skillfully written lyric poetry
evokes in the reader's mind the recall of similar emotional experiences.
*Sidelight: Lyric is derived from the Greek word for lyre and originally referred to
poetry sung to musical accompaniment.
*Sidelight: A lyric sequence is a group of poems, mostly lyric verse, that interact as a
structural whole, differing from a long poem by the inclusion of unlike forms and
diverse areas of focus.
(See Canzone, Melic Verse, Society Verse)
(See also Canon)
M
Macaronic verse: Originally, poetry in which words of different languages were mixed
together or, more strictly, words in the poet's vernacular were given the inflectional
endings of another language, usually for humorous or satiric effect. In modern times,
however, in recognition of the multilingual relationships of sound and sense between
different languages, it is used most often with serious intent, thus transformed from a
species of comic or nonsense verse into poetry characterized by scholarly techniques of
composition, allusion, and structure.
Madrigal: A short medieval lyric or pastoral poem expressing a simple delicate
thought.
Malapropism: A type of solecism, the mistaken substitution of one word for another
that sounds similar, generally with humorous effect, as in "arduous romance" for
"ardent romance." The term is named for the character, Mrs. Malaprop, in Richard
Sheridan's play, The Rivals, who made frequent misapplications of words.
*Sidelight: The name of Sheridan's character, Mrs. Malaprop, was taken from the
French expression for "inappropriate" or "out of place," mal à propos.
(See also Catachresis, Metaphor, Oxymoron, Paradox, Solecism, Synesthesia)
Masculine rhyme: A rhyme occurring in words of one syllable or in an accented final
syllable, such as light and sight or arise and surprise.
(Contrast Feminine Rhyme)
Measure: Poetic rhythm or cadence as determined by the syllables in a line of poetry
with respect to quantity and accent; also, meter; also, a metrical foot.
*Sidelight: While the two terms are usually used synonymously, meter suggests a
predictable regularity, so measure is more aptly used in reference to the irregular
rhythm of free verse.
(See Accentual Verse, Quantitive Verse, Syllabic Verse)
(See also Common Measure)
Meistersingers: Members of various German trade guilds formed in the 15th and 16th
centuries by merchants and craftsmen for the cultivation of poetry and music,
succeeding the Minnesingers.
(See alsoJongleur)
Melic verse: An ornate form of Greek poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries BC which was
written to be sung, either by a single voice or a chorus, to the accompaniment of
musical instruments.
*Sidelight: Melic verse was the forerunner of lyric verse.
(Compare Canzone, Ode, Society Verse)
(See also Gongorism)
Mesostich: See under Acrostic Poem
Metaphor: A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one object
or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them.
*Sidelight: While most metaphors are nouns, verbs can be used as well.
*Sidelight: The poetic metaphor can be thought of as having two basic components: (1)
what is meant, and (2) what is said. The thing meant is called the tenor, while the thing
said, which embodies the analogy brought to the subject, is called the vehicle.
*Sidelight: Both metaphors and similes are comparisons between things which are
unlike, but a simile expresses the comparison directly, while a metaphor is an implied
comparison that gains emphatic force by its connotative value.
*Sidelight: A word or expression like "the leg of the table," which originally was a
metaphor but which has now been assimilated into common usage, has lost its figurative
value; thus, it is called a dead metaphor.
*Sidelight: Frequently, the term metaphor, as opposed to a metaphor, is used to include
all figures of speech, so the expression, "metaphorically speaking," refers to speaking
figuratively rather than literally.
(See also Allegory, Kenning, Personification)
(Compare Analogy, Metonymy, Synecdoche)
Metaphysical: Of or relating to a group of 17th century poets whose verse was
distinguished by an intellectual and philosophical style, with extended metaphors or
conceits comparing very dissimilar things.
(Compare Classicism, Idealism, Impressionism, Objectivism, Realism,
Romanticism, Symbolism)
Meter or Metre: A measure of rhythmic quantity; the organized succession of groups
of syllables at basically regular intervals in a line of poetry, according to definite
metrical patterns. In classic Greek and Latin versification, meter depended on the way
long and short syllables were arranged to succeed one another, but in English the
distinction is between accented and unaccented syllables. The unit of meter is the foot.
Metrical lines are named for the constituent foot and for the number of feet in the
line: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter
(6), heptameter (7), and octameter (8); thus, a line containing five iambic feet, for
example, would be called iambic pentameter. Rarely does a metrical line exceed six
feet.
The metrical element of sound makes a valuable contribution to the mood and total
effect of a poem.
*Sidelight: In the composition of verse, poets sometimes make deviations from the
systematic metrical patterns. This is often desirable because (1) variations will avoid the
mechanical "te-dum, te-dum" monotony of a too-regular rhythm and (2) changes in the
metrical pattern are an effective way to emphasize or reinforce meaning in thecontent.
These variations are introduced by substituting different feet at places within a line.
(Poets can also employ a caesura, use run-on lines and vary the degrees ofaccent by
skillful word selection to modify the rhythmic pattern, a process called modulation.
Accents heightened by semantic emphasis also provide diversity.) A proficient writer of
poetry, therefore, is not a slave to the dictates of metrics, but neither should the poet
stray so far from the meter as to lose the musical value or emotional potential of
rhythmical repetition. Of course, in modern free verse, meter has become either
irregular or non-existent.
*Sidelight: Generally speaking, it is advisable for poets to delay the introduction of
metrical variations until the ear of the reader has had time to become accustomed to the
basic rhythmic pattern.
*Sidelight: In music, the term, rubato, refers to rhythmic variations from the written
score applied in the performance.
(See Scan, Scansion)
(See also Accentual Verse, Quantitive Verse)
Metonymy: A figure of speech involving the substitution of one noun for another of
which it is an attribute or which is closely associated with it, e.g., "the kettle boils" or
"he drank the cup." Metonymy is very similar to synecdoche.
*Sidelight: Some metonymic expressions, like paleface for white man or salt for sailor,
have become so much a part of everyday language that they can no longer be considered
as figurative in a poetic sense.
(Compare Antonomasia, Cataphora)
Metre: See Meter
Metrical foot: See Foot
Metrical pause: A "rest" or "hold" that has a temporal value, usually to compensate
for the omission of an unstressed syllable in a foot. Neither a metrical pause itself nor
its length can be scanned, but scansion will show the omission of the unstressed
syllable(s) it replaces. A pause that is non-metrical and expressed only in the
performance is called a caesura.
Metrics: The branch of prosody concerned with meter.
Metrist: A writer of verse.
Middle rhyme: See Internal Rhyme
Monometer: A line of verse consisting of a single metrical foot or dipody, as in Robert
Herrick's "Upon His Departure Hence."
(See Meter)
Monorhyme: A poem in which all the lines have the same end rhyme.
N
Narrative: exposition of a collection of real or imaginary events that take place in a
certain space and time. The narrative may begin ab ovo (from the beginning to the
conclusion) or in medias res (in the middle of the action, thus the author recounts earlier
events using the character’s dialogue, memories or flashbacks).
Near rhyme: in this rhyme, the sounds are very similar but they aren’t identical. In
most of these cases, the vowel segments are different and the consonants are exact or
vice versa. Near rhymes are very used in Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Icelandic verse. This
kind of rhyme may be also called approximate rhyme, slant rhyme, half rhyme, off
rhyme, pararhyme, near rhyme, analysed rhyme or suspended rhyme.
Nonsense poetry: usually for children, it has a whimsical and humorous tone. It tends
to employ fanciful phrases and invented words without meaning. This poetry usually is
written in a catchy meter with strong rhymes. Limericks may be considered the best
known form of nonsense verse.
Nursery rhyme : poems written for children based on folklore.
O
Objectivism: type of poetry written during the 20th century.In objectivist poetry objects
were represented with their real value without the use of symbols or metaphors.Objects
only had their real value.
Octameter: a line of verse consisting of eight metrical feet.
Octave: it is a stanza of eight lines. Octaves are common in the first eight lines of an
Italian or Petrarchan sonets.
Octet: see octave.
Octosyllable: lines that have eight metric syllables. It is often used in French, Italian,
Spanish and Portuguese poetry, in romances and in a lot of proverbs.
Ode:poetic composition of lyrical genre. Its tone is high, it treats very different matters
and it has different forms. It may be religious, heroic, philosophical or love, depending
of the subject. It is divided frequently in equal verses.
Off rhyme:see near rhyme.
Onomatopoeia: use of a word or a group of words whose pronunciation imitates the
sound of something (e.g.: “boom”, “bang”, “pow”. Some onomatopoeias are used to
describe visual figures (e.g.: “zigzag”).
Oxymoron:harmonization of two opposing concepts in one expression. Its literal
meaning is absurd, which forces the reader to search a metaphorical meaning. It is used
frequently in mythic poetry and love poetry. Examples de oxymorons are “new classic”,
“virtual reality” or “noisy silence”.
P
Paean: a song or lyric poem that express triumph or thanksgiving. In classical antiquity,
it was usually performed by a chorus, although it might be performed by an individual
voice.
Paeon: in classical poetry, it was a foot formed by four syllables, one long and three
short. The long syllable can be put in four different places. Therefore, the foot can be
called a primus, secundus, tertius or quartus paeon.
Palindrome:a word, phrase, number or other sequence of units which can be read the
same way from the left to the right that from the right to the left. It’s important know
that the adjustment of punctuation and spaces between words is generally permitted. An
example of palindrome is “a man, a plan, a canal: Panama”.
Palinode:a poem, song or section of a poem or song in which the author retracts
something that he expressed in a previous poem. Authors like Chaucer or Odgen wrote
palinodes, as well as medieval writers such as Augustine and others.
Panegyric:speech or sermon used to praise somebody. In ancient Greek and Roman
rhetoric, it constituted a branch of public speaking.
Paradox:strange or irrational idea which opposes common sense and general opinion. It
is at first sight true but it entails a logical contradiction. An example of paradox is
“cowards die many times before their deaths” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).
Parallelism:repetition, with minimal variations, of a same sentence, phrase or word in a
text. The repetitive structure lends emphasis to the meanings of the separate clauses. For
example, “King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise and equitable”. If there are
two parallel structures, the result is an isocolon parallelism and if there are three parallel
structures, we are talking of a tricolon parallelism.
Parnassianism: poetic movement developed in France between 1866-1876. It emerged
like a reaction against the Romanticism and it was characterized by the importance
given to the formal perfection of a literary work. The word has a Greek origin and it
refers to the summit of the mount Parnassus, where the muses were.
Parody:imitation of the style and characteristic features of a literary work in order to
make fun of those same features. It is obtained exaggerating certain traits that are
present in the work, like its style and its content. The humour depends on the reader’s
familiarity with the original work.
Paronomasia:literary device that entails using paronyms (see the definition below). It
suggests two or more meanings using words with similar sounds or with multiple
meanings. In this way, the author can obtain a humorous and rhetorical effect.
Paronym:two or more words that have to each other a relation or similarity because of
their sound, but they have different meanings. If their pronunciation is the same, the
words are homophones.
Pasquinade:a lampoon or satirical writing. The term comes from a statue where were
put
Pastiche:literary device that consists in the imitation of different texts, styles or authors
in a same work
.
Pastoral elegy: kind of elegy that has a lament in which all nature join.
Pastoral poetry: kind of poetry that idealizes the live of the shepherds and country
folks. This term is often used to refer to any poem with rural aspects.
Pastourelle: French lyric form of the 12th and 13th centuries that is about the romance
of a shepherdess with the poet, who embodies a knight. The poet meets the shepherdess
and they have a wit battle where the shepherdess wins. The poet usually has sexual
relations with her and there is subsequently a departure.
Pathetic fallacy: also called anthropomorphic fallacy, it is a kind of personification
where the author gives human feelings, sensations or thoughts to an inanimate object or
non-human phenomenon of the natural world. This is a special case of the fallacy of
reification. In this term, the word “pathetic” is understood like “empathy”, so it has not
a pejorative sense. This term was coined by John Ruskin in his work Modern Painters.
Pattern poetry: kind of poetry where the writer makes a recognizable outline with the
words of the poem. This form has a relation with the subject of the poem. In this poems,
the visual and special elements have the same importance that the rhyme and the rhythm
in the lyric poetry. This poetry started in the 50s.
Pause: see caesura and metrical pause.
Pentameter: kind of line that has five feet.
Perfect rhyme: it can be called full rhyme, exact rhyme or true rhyme too. In this
rhyme, the phonemes of the last words are the same from the stressed vowel. In order to
be a perfect rhyme, a rhyme has to meet these requirements:
1. The sound of the final phoneme must be identical in the words that are rhyming, both
in vowel and in consonant sounds.
2. The consonant sounds that precede the vowel have to be different from the final of
the word.
3. The rhyming syllable or syllables must have similar accent.
Periphrasis: literary device that consists in name in an indirect way a simple concept
through a collection of its characteristics, using a big amount of words to describe it.
This resort may be used as a euphemism, as an embellishment or for a humorous effect
too.
Persona: external representation of oneself in a literary work. It might accurately reflect
the feelings of oneself but it isn’t necessary. It might be an external representation of
oneself too which might be largely accurate, although exaggerating some characteristics
and minimizing others.
Personification: kind of metaphor in which abstractions, animals, ideas and inanimate
objects receive human character, traits, abilities or reactions. Personification is
commonly used in allegory.
Petrarchan sonnet: kind of sonnet that has an octave followed by a sestet. The octave
has two quatrains with the scheme abba abba. The first quatrain has the theme of the
poem, the second develops the theme. In the sestet, the first three lines are about the
theme again. These lines reflect on the theme or exemplify the theme. Finally, the last
three lines show a unified end. The sestet may be arranged cdecde, cdcdcd or cdecde.
Phonetic symbolism: also called sound symbolism, it is an association of particular
words and sounds with common areas of meaning. In this way, words with similar
sounds have related meanings. For example, the words that begin with “gl-“ are relating
to light or vision.
Pindaric verse: in Greek literature, poem of various meters which has a lofty style,
moulded after the odes of the Greek poet, Pindar. The metrics of his poems change from
one poem to another and his verse often consists of a structure with strophe and
antistrophe, followed by an epode with different length and structure. His style is unique
and highly individualised.
Pitch: quality of the sounds, dependent on their frequency, which permits arrange them
from low to high-pitched. The pitch, the intensity and the length are the three tonal
qualities of sound. In some languages, it is used to distinguish meaning.
Play on words: see Paranomasia.
Pleiad or pleiade: group of French Renaissance poets who wanted to restore the level
of French poetry, which had declined in the Middle Age, to classical standards. They
sought the enhancement of French language too. The principal members of this group
were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The name of the
group refers to the Alexandrian Pledian, another literary group from the 3rd century B.C.
Pleonasm: use of one or more unnecessary words in the same sentence in order to
obtain a complete sense. The use of those unnecessary words adds expressiveness to the
sentence. For example, we can find a pleonasm in the sentence “I see it with my own
eyes”.
Polysillable: word which has several syllables. It is most often applied to words of
more than three syllables.
Polysindeton: use of more conjunctions than the necessaries in close succession. This
causes an effect of slowness, calm and reflection or an overwhelming effect in the
sentence. It is the opposite of asyndeton.
Prosopopoeia: kind of personification in which an inanimate object that can’t speak
gains this ability.
Q
Quantitive verse: kind of verse that gives less importance to the stressed or lightly
stressed syllables and gives more importance to the long and short syllables, in other
words, if it takes more or less time for the human mouth to pronounce the syllable.
Quantitive verse has never worked properly in Germanic languages, but it was common
in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Arabic poetry. The unit of measure in the quantitative
verse is the mora.
Quatorzain:poem which has fourteen lines. Historically, this term has often been used
in order to refer to the term sonnet. Nowadays, this is seldom used and, when it is used,
it is to differentiate between quatorzains and sonnets.
Quatrain: stanza of four lines that often has a rhyme scheme in abab, although it may
have other patterns, like aabb, aaaa or aaxa. This kind of stanza appears in poems from
ancient civilizations, such as Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and in poems from the
21st century.
Queen´s English: see King’s English.
Quintet or quintain: a poem or stanza which has five lines of verse.
R
Realism: way of represent things as they are, without easing them or exaggerating
them. In this way, the imagination and the idealization aren’t used in these
representations. Typically, realism involves careful descriptions of everyday life. In
some cases, these descriptions involve the lives of middle and lower class characters
(socialist realism).
Refrain: line or set of lines that is repeated several times in a poem, usually at regular
intervals and most often at the end of a stanza. Sometimes, this part of the poem may
have some minor changes in wording. A refrain might be a nonsense word, a single
word or an entire separate stanza which is repeated alternating with each stanza in the
poem. If the refrain was thought to be sung by the auditors, it is often called a chorus.
Repetiton: basic literary device that consists in the repetition of sounds, syllables,
words, syntactic elements, lines, stanza forms or metrical patterns. It is usually used in
poetry in different ways.
Resonance: the quality of richness or variety of sound in poetic texture.
Rhapsody: recitation of a short or long epic poem. If the poem is long, it is abridged in
order to can be recited.
Rhyme: kind of echoing that is based in the complete or partial equality between
sounds of two or more words from the last stressed syllable. Usually rhymes occur at
the ends of lines, but not always.
Rhyme royal: stanza formed by seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter, whose
rhyme scheme is ababbcc. This rhyme was introduced by Chaucer in Troilus and
Criseyde and later it was modified by the Renaissance poets.
Rhyme scheme: pattern of rhyme between the lines of a poem or a song. It is often
schematized by means of letters that are assigned to each rhyming sound at the end of
the different lines of a poem.
Rhymester: an inferior poet.
Rhyming slang: slang with great popularity in Great Britain in the early part of the 20th
century in which a word was replaced with another word or sentence, on condition that
both words rhyme. If the rhyme was a compound word or a part of a phrase, the
rhyming part was often removed.
Rhythm: the varying speed, pitch, loudness, intensity, elevation and expressiveness of
speech, especially in poetry. In prose, the rhythm may be or may not be regular but in
verse, the rhythm is normally regular. The rhythmic quantity is measured using the
meter.
Rich rhyme: also called rime riche, kind of rhyme in which the consonant that precedes
the stressed vowel is the same in the words that rhyme. Thus, both words have an
identical pronunciation but have different spelling and meaning. For example, the words
bear and bare.
Riding rhyme: early form of open couplet. It is named like this because Chaucer used
it in order to narrate the riding episodes of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.
Rime: original term of the word rhyme. Its spelling was changed in order to associate it,
although erroneously, with the Latin word rhythmus. Many purists continue to use the
word rime as the correct spelling of the word.
Rime brisée: verse with long lines in which the words that are in the caesura rhyme to
each other as well as the end words rhyme to each other.
Rime enchainée: kind of chain rhyme in which the last word of one line rhymes with
the first word of the following line.
Rime riche: see rich rhyme.
Romanticism: cultural movement which takes place in Europe during the first third of
the nineteenth century. In opposition to the previous classicism, in this movement
prevail the imagination and the sensitivity over the reason and the critical examination.
The writings of this movement often are set in rural, pastoral or Gothic settings and they
show an obsessive concern with “innocent” characters like children, young lovers or
animals.
S
Sapphic verse: kind of poem which has lines of eleven syllables in five feet. From
these feet, the first, the fourth and the fifth are trochees, the second a spondee and the
third a dactyl. Its name comes from the Greek lyric poet Sappho.
Satire: literary text in which the human vices, follies, abuses or shortcomings are
showed and ridiculed. Its intention is criticize the injustice or the social wrongs. A
satire’s author can write it with witty jocularity or with anger and bitterness.
Scan: to mark out the lines of a poem according to their rhythmic units or feet in order
to provide a visual representation of their metrical structure.
Scansion : A scansion is the division of a verse in different in feets indicating the
accent of the poem and counting it´s syllables.The scansion system permits to analyze
the elements of the poem (meters, rythm...). In classical poetry the feet is based on the
duration or lenght of the vowels, and in English poetry it is based on the different
stresses placed on each syllable.Feets are indicated with different symbols.
Example :
/
/
/
/
My love is as a fever longing still
x
/
x
/
x
/
x
/
x
/
But SOFT! What LIGHT throught YONder WINdow BREAKS?
/ :Stressed, syllable carries the stress.
x:Unstressed, syllable is not stressed
Sense pause : See Caesura
Septenarius : A verse cosisting in seven feet.
Septet : A poem of seven lines.
Example :
Moonlight nights
Stars brightly twinkle
Deafening silenceenfolds still earth
Nocturnal creatures
Roam freely
Serenade : A poem of a lover written for his lady.It´s themes are always
romantic.
Example : Read ``Serenade´´ (Edgar Allan Poe)
Serpentine verses : Verses which start and end with the same word.The
origin of the term alludes to the representation of snakes with their tails
in their mouths.It was a symbol of eternity.
Example : Row us out to Desenzano, to your Sirmione row
Sestet : It´s the name of the second part or the second division of an
Italian sonnet which was used first by Petrarch (see Italian Sonnet).The
sestet is composed by six lines. (Compare sexain).
Example :
So answered thou; but why no rather say:
``Hath man no second life?-Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?
More strictly, then, the inward judge obbey
Was Cristh a man like us? Ah! let us try
If we then,too, can be such a men as he!´´
The better part (Mathews Arnold)
Sestina : Sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line
stanzas (see stanza) followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada),
for a total of thirty-nine lines.The last word of the first stanza is the first
word of the second stanza, following in a successively rotation order.
Example :
First stanza, 1- 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 – 6
Second stanza, 6 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 4 - 3
Third stanza, 3 - 6 - 4 - 1 - 2 - 5
Fourth stanza, 5 - 3 - 2 - 6 - 1 - 4
Fifth stanza, 4 - 5 - 1 - 3 - 6 - 2
Sixth stanza, 2 - 4 - 6 - 5 - 3 - 1
Concluding tercet:
middle of first line - 2, end of first line - 5
middle of second line - 4, end of second line - 3
middle if third line - 6, end of third line - 1
Sexain : A stanza of six lines, as in some fixed forms such a sestina or
in wordsworth´s ``I wandered lonely as a cloud´´
(compare sestet)
Shaped verse : See pattern poetry
Sight rhyme : It´s a sort of false rhyme.Sight rhyme is formed by words
which are similar in spelling but different in pronuntiation.This rhyme
is frequent in ancient poems which have a correspondance with earlier
stages of English.
Examples : Prove and love
Said: laid , paid, raid , maid
Good, stood: blood, food, mood, brood
Clover, rover: cover, hover, lover: mover
Sigmatism : Repetition of the same sound closely spaced in a verse.
Example: She sells sea-shells by the sea shore
Simile : Figure of speech which compares thwo different elements
using the words ``like´´ or ``as´´.
Metaphores and similes are both forms of comparison but the simile
compares the two elements allowing them to remain distinct in spite of
their similarities.
Examples :
The water is like the sun.
Chris was a recording-setting runer and as fast as a speeding bullet.
Skeltonics : Short verses of irregular metre with two or three stresses.
Skeltonics can have falling or rising rhyme.They receive
their name from their inventor, the Tudor poet John
Skelton.
Slack : Syllable non accented
Slant rhyme :Also called half rhyme.It´s a rhyme based on the
consonance on the final consonants of the words involved at the end
of the verse.
Example :
on/moon
bodies/ladies
When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies.
(Yeats, ``Lines written in Dejection´´)
Society verse : Lirical poem with contemporaneal themes written in an
ironical way. It is also called vers de societe.
Solecism : Violation of grammatical or syntax rules.It can be a non
common use of the language.
Examples:
This is just between for you and I for this is just between you
and me. He ain´t going nowhere for he isn´t going anywhere.
Soliloquy : Is a device often used in drama where the character speaks
about his feelings and thouhts.
Examples:
The ``To be or not to be´´ of Hamlet
Macbeth´s ``Tomorrow and tomorrow´´
Sonnet : Form of poetry consisting in fouteen lines.It has a very defined
structure which may change with the diffenrent types of sonnet (Occitan
sonnet, Italian sonnet, Spenserian sonnet and Modern sonnet). In the
English form the lines are gruped in three quatrains (with six alternating
rhymmes) followed by a rhymed couple.The original Italian form is
composed by an octave with the structure : abba abba, and by a sestet of
two aditional rhyme sounds. Both are the most important forms of
sonnet.
Sonneteer : Composer of sonnets.It also means insignificant poet.
Sotadic or sotadean : See palindrome.
Sound simbolism : It refeers to the idea that vocal sounds have
meaning. See phonetic symbolism.
Speaker : See persona. The speaker is the voice of the poem, the
the entity who speaks in the poem.The speaker can also refer to a
pervasive presence behind the fictious voices that speak in a work.
Stanza : Unit formed by a group of lines within a poem.It´s also called
strophe.There are different types of stanza with different longuitudes.
There are stanzas of two lines (couplets), stanzas of three lines (Tercets),
stanzas of four lines (quatrains) etc.a stanza with lines of the same meter
and lether is said to be isometric.The stanzas in tail rhyme and Sapphic
verse, in which the lines are not all of the same lenght and meter are
anisometric or heterometric.
Example:
Our god, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
Hymn (Isaac Watts).
Symbolism : It was a late 19th century art movement iniciated by
Charles Baudelaire with his book ``The flowers of evil´´.It was a
reaction against realism.In symbolism sensations were most important
than descriptions.The free verse and sinesthesia were used by the
symbolist poets.Symbolism show the soul of the poet with symbolic
imagery.The objective of symbolic literature is the evocation of
particular states of mind on the reader.This artistic form tried to be a
refuge from the world and its problems and contradictions.Some of the
most important symbolist authors in English literature are Oscar Wilde
and T.S. Elliot.
Synaeresis : Type of elision where two contiguous vowels are
pronounced together.
Synalepha : In synalepha the last vowel of the a word and the first of
next one are considered part of the same syllable.
Example:
``Apollo´s priest to th´Ar give fleet doing bring´´ (Homer)
Synecdoche : Literary figure which identifies a part for the whole, or
the whole for a part.Types:
-A part for the whole.
-A thing for a part of it.
-A specific class of thing for a general class of thing.
-A general class of thing for a specific class of thing.
-A material for the object made of it.
-A container for its content.
Examples:
A pair of hands ( for a worker)
Steel ( for a sword)
Wheels ( for automobile)
Synesthesia : Identification of two sensations which don´t have a
logical realtion.
Examples:
A loud aroma.
A sweet light.
A dark tought.
T
Tagelied : It´s and adaptation of German language lyric.It´s themes
speak about a rapture of two lovers, often in three verses.It doesn´t have
refrain.Some classics of literature like Shakespeare´s in Romeo and
Juliet were inspired in this poetic form.
Tail rhyme : In tail rhymes couplets or triplets are followed by a tail
(a line with different lenght and different rhyme).Tails rhym with each
other in a tail-rhyme stanza.
Tanka : Is a traditional for of Japanese poetry with five unrhymed lines
of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables to create a concentrated
essence of an image, a mood or a single event.
Example :
Beautiful mountains
Rivers with cold, cold water
White cold snow on rocks
Trees al over the place with frost
White sparkly snow everywhere (anonymous)
Tautology : Unnecessary repetition of the same idea expressed in different
ways and with different sentences.
Examples:
``The room was completely dark and had no illumination´´
``A breeze greeted the dusk and nightfall was heralded by a gentle wind´´
Telestich : It´s a type of acrosstic whose word at the end of the lines for a
word or words when taken in order. See under acrosstic poem.
Tenor : See under metaphore.
Tension : The artistically equilibrium in a poem referred to all the elements
of the poem: the structure, the patterns, the language...even the aesthetic
value of the poem.
Tenson : Genre of the medieval lirycs.Tenson poetry is a critic
between trobadours and jouglars.Its themes are very different: love,
the way of making poetry...
Tercet : It is formed by three verses, it can be part of a stanza or a
complete poem.Tercet doesn´t have a defined rhyme, it can be a a a,
or a b a and b c b in the case of terza rima ( a technique used in Dante
Alighieri´s Divine Comedy for example, see terza rima).
Example:
`` Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night´´(Dylan thomas)
Ternary meter : A meter consisting in three syllables per foot.As in
dactylic or anapestyc meters.
Terza rima :It´s a Stanza formed by tercets. There is no limit of lines
but poems in terza rima have to end with a single line or a couple
repeating the middle rhyme of the last tercet.The structure of terza rima
is: A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D.
Tetrabrach : A metrical foot consisting in of four short syllables.
Tetrameter : A line of four metrical foot.(see meter)
Example :
``And the sheen of their spears was like stars
the sea´´ (Byron, The destruction of
Sennacherib).
``Because I Could not stop for death ´´
Texture : All elements and aspects which permitt to consider a text like
poetic : Technical elements, diction, tone, syntax, patterns of sound and
meaning.
Theme : Main idea of a text. The theme can be a moral idea, or a
message about life, society, human nature or other topics.
Thesis :The unaccented part of a poetic foot.Also the first part of an
antithetical figure of speech.
Tone :The tone is the author´s attitude towards the text and the
readers.The tone have the objective of influence in the reader´s feeling.
There are many types of tone : loving, ironic,solemn....
Tragedy : Poem or tale based on the human suffering.Tragey shows a
conflict between the main character and a superior force : the destiny,
god... which ends in tragedy.The natural form of this genre is the verse.
True Rhyme : See perfect rhymme.
U
Ubi sunt : It is a literary motif which speaks about the brevity of the
life.Ubi sunt is a latin term which means: Where are they?.Ubi sunt
asks where are all the passed glories of the world.Ubi sunt was very
popular on medieval literature.
Understatement : Understatement is a form of speech which express an
intense reality with a setence without strenght in order to emphasize that
intensity.
Example :
The building of the pyramids took a little bit of effort.
V
Vehicle : Second part of a metaphor which embodies the analogy brought to the subject.
Vers de societe : See society verse
Verse : It is a line inside of a poem.
Verse paragraph : Stanzas with an irregular lenght, usually separated by blank lines.
Verset : A short verse, it is common on sacred books.
Versicle : A type of little verse.
Versification : The art of making verses being careful with the meter and the
rhyme.This term can also refers to a metrical structure or style or to an adaptation in
verse of a prose text.
Versifier : A writer of poetry.A poet.
Vers libre : The term free verse is also named with its french name.See free verse.
Visual Poetry : A type of poetry with an elaborated visual appearance which is
relationated with the significance of the poem.
Vowel rhyme : Type of rhyme in which the vowels are used with different consonants
in the stressed syllable in the words of the rhyme.
W
Wedge verse : The wedege verse is a secuence of units.In wedge verse the second unit
is longer than the first, the third is longer than the second... In a verse the second word
would be a syllable longer than the first.In a stanza the second verse would be longer
than the first and the sequence would follow until the end of the poem.
Whimsy : A fantastic creation in writing or art.
Wrenched accent :It is the change of the accent in a word with the purpose of keeping
the rhytm and the metricla pattern.It is very common in folk ballads.
X-Y-Z
Zeugma : A figure of speech which uses the same word for in the same grammatical
and semantic relationship with different words.
Example :
My father wept for woe while for joy
Obligedby hunger, and requests of friends (Pope)