ENGLISH LITERARY TERMS

Shakespearean sonnet

A Shakespearean sonnet is generally written in an iambic pentameter, there are 10 syllables in each line. "From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty's rose might never die./But as the riper should by time decease,/His tender heir might bear his memory"

Allusion

A brief and indirect reference in a literary work to a person/place/thing/concept of historical/political/cultural reference "Wow, aren't you an Einstein"

Conciet

A conceit is an expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or controlling image, containing a comparison so ingenious and out of the ordinary that it astonishes or amuses "Thou counterfeit'st a bark, a sea, a wind; For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea, Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is, Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs"

Alliteration

A device in which a number of words with the same first consonant sound occur together to form a pattern "But a better butter makes a batter better"

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which something is not named directly but indicated by associations or attributes. "The palace rejected the claims of the thief" where palace refers to the royalty

Hyperbole

A figure of speech involving exaggeration or overstatement of a subject and not to be understood literally. The purpose of hyperbole is to make a point by emphasis or irony. "He is as tall as the Empire State building"

Concrete poetry

A form of poetry in which the physical appearance of the poem conveys meaning or emotional impact apart from the significance of the words. For instance, the words in a poem about a pair of scissors or about the action of cutting may be arranged on the page in the shape of scissors.

Abstract poetry

A form of poetry in which words are chosen for their auditory/textural/rhythmic/rhyming relevance rather than their meaning "The red retriever-haired satyr/Can whine and tease her and flatter/But Lily O'Grady/Silly and shady"

Assonance

A literary device in which two or more words repeat the same vowel sounds but start with different consonant sounds "She wanted to be here and there and everywhere"

Anthropomorphism

A literary technique in which authors assign human traits/behaviour/mannerisms/emotions to animals/non-human beings/objects with the purpose to make them appear human "Pinocchio, was a wooden doll given human characteristics, and therefore is an example of anthropomorphism"

Ode

A long, dignified, deliberative poem devoted to a single subject.

Foot

A metrical unit in poetry. English metrical feet have a strongly stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables. "If music be the food of love, play on;/Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,/The appetite may sicken, and so die./That strain again! it had a dying fall;/O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound"

Ballad

A narrative poem composed in stanzas of four lines, with or without music. The lines alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. An example would be the Cool Fountain of Love.

Allegory

A narrative that conveys abstract ideas/concepts through the use of symbolism, such as characters, or plot in a story "The Lord of the Flies is an allegory for the human society and its inherent flaws"

Caesura

A notable pause in the rhythm of a poetic line, usually coming in the middle of the line. Reinforced by punctuation most of the time "Alas, how chang'd! || what sudden horrors rise! A naked lover || bound and bleeding lies! Where, where was Eloise? || her voice, her hand"

Elegy

A poem of mourning or lament. Elegies not only regret the passing of a person or a way of life but also ponder the circumstances of the loss and come to a consolation, often from a first-person point of view. "O Captain! My Captain!" is Walt Whitman's elegy on the death of President Lincoln

Inversion

A reversal of normal ordering. Inversion of word order is a technique to produce a poetic effect. "In my chair I sat thinking"

Feminine rhyme

A rhyme that begins with the stressed syllable of multi-syllable words and includes the unstressed syllables. "Seeming" and "dreaming" or "sillier" and "hillier"

Masculine rhyme

A rhyme that falls on the stressed, final syllable of words. "Junk" and "trunk" or "express" and "excess"

Simile

A trope comparing two unlike things with the use of connective terms "as," "like," "than," or "as if." "The painting was as beautiful as the sky during a sunset"

Couplet

A two-line unit in poetry, but the term can also refer to a poem of only two lines, that are marked by a rhyme or rhyme scheme. "The time is out of joint, O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!"

Paradox

An assertion concerning two elements that appear to be incompatible or contradictory. "To lead you have to follow behind"

Tone

An author's apparent attitude toward the subject of a work as can be inferred from how it is written. "In the Lord of the Flies, Golding's tone towards the situation of the boys was factual and removed"

Closed form poetry

Any traditional verse form having an unvarying number of lines, grouping of lines, rhythm, rhyme scheme, and (sometimes) content requirements is closed. Some well-known examples are the sonnet, haiku, limerick, and sestina.

Synecdoche

Identifies a thing by referring to one part of it—the part for the whole or the individual for the group. "I want all hands on deck right now!"

Anachronism

In a literary work, a reference to anything that is mentioned as existing in a time in which it didn't, due to an error "George Washington lost his iPhone"

Apostrophe

In literature work, a technique in which the writer addresses an imaginary idea or non-existent person as though they were present and capable of understanding feelings "Life, why must you do this? I thought it was all good between us?"

End stopped line

In poetry, a line is "end-stopped" if any punctuation mark appears at its end, indicating a pause. "Bright Star, would I were as stedfast as thou art-/Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,/And watching, with eternal lids apart,/Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite...."

Pasotral

Indicates a poem about shepherds and the rustic life. A pastoral idolises the setting, manners, and economy of the herdsman and usually contrasts it ironically or wistfully to the sophisticated life in cities. "Come live with me and be my love,/And we will all the pleasures prove/That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,/Woods, or steep mountain yields"

Cacophony

Jarring, jangling, inharmonious sound. In poetry cacophony created by discordant consonants and consonant clusters introduces harshness to the tone and slows the pace of the verse. "The nasal whine of power whips a new universe.... Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky, Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house/Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs"

Carpe diem poetry

Literally, the phrase is Latin for "seize the day,". The term refers to a common moral or theme in classical literature that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. Poetry or literature that illustrates this moral is often called poetry or literature of the "carpe diem" tradition.

Scansion

Means to divide the poetry or a poetic form into feet by pointing out different syllables based on their lengths.

Accent

Metrical accent is the pattern of stressed syllables in poetry "Don't put emPHAsis on the wrong syllABEle"

Refrain

One or more lines repeated at regular intervals at the end of stanzas or sections in a poem. "The art of losing isn't hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster.../Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./The art of losing isn't hard to master"

Rhyme

Partial echo of sounds in two or more words. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall"

Irony

Perceptible contrast between what is said in a statement and what it really must mean, or between appearance and reality. "The wall they built to protect the people fell and pinned three under it"

Open form poetry

Pertains to poetry that, while adhering to a form, has no restriction in length.

Narrative poetry

Poems that tell stories, such as epics, ballads, metrical romances, and dramatic monologues.

Symbol

Refers to a means of bringing together the abstract and concrete or the general and the specific in a memorable combination. "Piggy's glasses were a symbol of rational thinking in Lord of the Flies"

Theme

Refers to a topic of discussion or to the idea that a literary work tries to argue, illustrate, or suggest. "The theme in Lord of the Flies was that there is an inherent evil in all humans that presents itself when dire situations arise"

Free verse

Refers to poetry written without adhering to an established rhyme scheme, stanzaic organisation, or sustained metrical pattern. "A noiseless patient spider,/I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,/Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding"

Imagery

Refers to the images of a literary work taken collectively. Imagery entails the representation of the external world.

Paraphrase

Refers to the restatement of an idea. A paraphrase keeps the original meaning but uses different words or word order "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" and its paraphrase: "But please wait and see the light from that window? It is the east, and my love Juliet is the sun"

Onomatopoeia

Refers to words whose sound mimics their meaning, such as "clack," "hic ," "whoosh," "fizz," and "splat."

Internal rhyme

Rhyme occurring within a line of poetry instead of or in addition to rhyme at the end of the line. "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..."

Enjambment

The continuation of a grammatical structure from one line of poetry to the next without end-stopping. It is a running on of a thought from one line to another without final punctuation. "The holy time is quiet as a Nun/Breathless with adoration; the broad sun"

Iamb

The most common of the four traditional metrical feet in English poetry, an iamb consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable "The way a crow/Shook down on me/The dust of snow/From a hemlock tree"

Rhythm

The regular recurrence of a meaningful speech sound constitutes rhythm in language. "Two households, both alike in dignity,/In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,/From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,"

Stanza

The repeated grouping of lines as verse paragraphs in a poem. In each repetition the number of lines remains the same. "Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given"

Petrarchan sonnet

The rhyme scheme of Petrarchan sonnet has first eight lines called octet that rhymes as abba-abba -cdc-dcd. The remaining six lines called sestet might have a range of rhyme schemes. "Being one day at my window all alone, So manie strange things happened me to see, As much as it grieveth me to thinke thereon."

Connotation

The significance, ideas, or emotions summoned up by a word in addition to its dictionary definition. Usually subjective and difficult to pin down exactly, connotations are absorbed as a part of learning one's culture. "A dove implies peace or gentility"

Denotation

The strictly literal, objective definition of a word without regard to emotional, cultural, or historical associations. Home: Refers to the physical place where you live, but is often used to connote the intangible idea of family and belonging

Lyric poetry

They are brief, conveying a single unified impression, draw from imagery in preference to story, and have musical effects.

Meter

This is the technical description, or measurement, of poetic rhythm.

Consonance

This term has two meanings. The first is technical: the repetition of consonant sounds, in poetry it can suggest emotional overtones. Also, consonance in the words "ending lines of poetry" has an echoic quality similar to rhyme when the same consonants are separated by different vowels

Blank verse

This term refers to unrhymed iambic pentameter. That is, each line contains ten syllables with the stress on the even-numbered syllables, with occasional minor variation in stress placement or syllable count. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall. That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun;"

Metaphor

Transfers meaning by implied comparison "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"

Personification

Treats concepts, emotions, inanimate objects, and animals as if they were intelligent beings in their own right. "Look at all the time that slipped by, I have no idea where it ran away"

Figurative language

Use of words and expressions for effects in addition to their denotative and connotative meanings. For example, parallelism is a form of figurative language as it uses the repetition of certain words to create effect.

Diction

Word choice: diction is an essential feature of style and it also reveals the origins, time period, dialect, and idiosyncrasies of people in dialogue "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."

Pun

Word substitution for comic effect. A word appropriate to a context is replaced by a word that sounds similar but means something quite different so that in the context, the substitution creates an absurdity or amusing contrast. "The horse's condition seems stable now"

Approximate rhyme

Words in poetry that form a rhyming pattern that has some similarities in sounds, but are not perfect rhymes ""I never saw a moor; I never saw the sea; Yet I know how the heather looks; And what a billow be."

Eye rhyme

Words whose spelling suggests that they rhyme but whose pronunciations do not satisfy the requirements of exact rhyme. For example, "blood," "good," and "food" all look as if they should rhyme, but they do not.