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| adj. (verse) metrically complete; especially having the full number of syllables in the final metrical foot |
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| a poem or other text written in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each verse, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. |
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| a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley as a principle of New Criticism. |
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| from the ancient Greek word meaning contest or challenge, it is a formal debate which takes place between two characters, usually with the chorus acting as the judge. The character who speaks second always wins the agon. In Ancient Greek drama, particularly old comedy (5th century BC) it was the formal convention according to which the struggle between the characters was scripted in order to supply the basis of the action. The meaning of the term has escaped the circumscriptions of its classical origins to signify, more generally, the conflict on which a literary work turns. |
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| Another name for iambic hexameter. The final line of a Spenserian stanza is an alexandrine. |
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| the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words |
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| Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves - with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland. |
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| n. An implied or indirect reference to something not directly stated or assumed to be known. Common allusions are to an historical event or personage, a well-known quotation from literature, or a famous work of art. |
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| an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea. More common in dramatic works, epics, and poetry. "O muse!..." |
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| a poem or song set at sunrise. It usually describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, must separate for fear of being discovered by their respective spouses. Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is a famous example. |
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| the repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of verse or prose. |
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| story told usually as a narrative song or poem. |
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| a quatrain where the second and fourth lines rhyme. It usually features alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. See Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats. |
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| a novel of growth and development, usually from childhood or adolecence to adulthood |
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| a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare used it, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. |
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| A verse form consisting of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel). Used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. |
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| a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin's Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example |
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| an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is especially common and apparent in Old English verse. |
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| adj. (verse) Lacking one or more syllables, especially in the final foot. |
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| (cah TEEN uh) n. (adj.) A closely linked series, especially of excerpted writings or commentaries. A chain of connected ideas or passages or objects so arranged that each member is closely related to the preceding and following members (especially a series of patristic comments elucidating Christian dogma) |
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| a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" –Byron) |
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| an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets. |
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| a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies. |
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| A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment. |
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| the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line. The following lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed: |
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| All the epics begin with an epic invocation, involving an announcement in the first person of the subject of the work and an extremely brief description of the main action of the work, in the course of which the speaker calls upon a muse to inspire the speaker and give him strength to carry out his weighty undertaking and to answer an epic question about the causes of the main action. |
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| refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally. See Spenser’s Epithalamium. |
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| An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar. |
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| Ornate, mannered, abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech—a popular form in the late 16th century. |
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| comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales. |
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| a rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually the final syllable is unaccented. Shakespeare's Sonnet number 20, uniquely among the sonnets, makes use exclusively of feminine rhymes: |
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| flat and round characters |
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| used to describe characters who do and do not develop over the course of a work respectively. The distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. |
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| a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse. |
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| of or relating to agriculture. The noun sense of "georgic," which dates from the early 16th century, refers to a poem that deals with the practical aspects of agriculture and rural affairs. The standard for such poems, Virgil's _Georgics_, was written between 37 and 30 B.C., and called for a restoration of agricultural life in Italy after its farms fell into neglect during civil war. |
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| tragic mistake or tragic flaw. It is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. |
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| rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. You should associate heroic couplets almost exclusively with Restoration verse. Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock. |
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| A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of recurring epithets, such as the rosy-fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. These epithets were metric stop-gaps as well as mnemonic devices. |
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| Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.). |
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| adj. (verse) Having an extra syllable or syllables at the end of a metrically complete line of verse or in a metrical foot. |
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| Classical epics begin in medias res (in the middle of things), at a critical point in the action rather than at the beginning of the story. |
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| n. 1. A literary work or speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom. 2. A long and mournful complaint. |
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| a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are both examples. |
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| a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Example: “That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now." (Beowulf) |
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| Term coined by Gertrude Stein after WWI to describe American writers who left the US and settled in Europe. Includes: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot |
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| a rhyme that ends on a final, stressed syllable (as opposed to two final rhyming syllables in feminine rhyme). |
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| the substitution of one word for another with which it is associated (i.e. the crown for a monarch) |
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| an ode sung by one voice (Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas) |
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| principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity and until after the renaissance. The three unities are place, time, and action. |
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| The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. Byron’s Don Juan and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” are examples. |
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| the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous examples is “The cruel crawling foam.” |
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| giving human qualities to animals or objects. |
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| a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example. |
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| An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost) |
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| a rhetorical device in which a speaker or narrator communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object. |
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| The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” is a good example. |
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| thinly fictionalized novel describing real-life events. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar are all examples |
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| consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind. |
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| a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each verse contains nine lines in total: eight lines of iambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an "alexandrine," with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” and Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Progress” both employ the Spensarian stanza. |
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| poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously-unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. |
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| a German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe. |
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| The description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) but in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense e.g. 'a deafening yellow'. Synesthesia is particularly associated with the French symbolist poets. Keats also uses synesthesia in Ode to a Nightingale with the term 'sunburnt mirth'. |
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| a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, etc. Terza rima is especially associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. See also “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley. |
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| a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Ubi Sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf. |
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| A poem or song of mourning or lamentation. |
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| The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds ("a" and "b") and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. |
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