English Comp
dramatic irony
Dramatic or situational irony involves a contrast between reality and a character's intention or ideals. For example, in Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus searches for his father's murderer, not knowing that he himself is that man. In "The Convergence of the Twain," Thomas Hardy contrasts the majesty and beauty of the ocean liner Titanic with its tragic fate and new ocean-bottom inhabitants: Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
imagery
Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images. Specifically, using vivid or figurative language to represent ideas, objects, or actions. Poems that use rich imagery include T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," and Mary Oliver's "At Black River."
what are the two types of ballads
Folk ballad and literary ballad
conceit
From the Latin term for "concept," a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Petrarchan (after the Italian poet Petrarch) conceits figure heavily in sonnets, and contrast more conventional sensual imagery to describe the experience of love. In Shakespeare's "Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been," for example, "What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!" laments the lover, though his separation takes place in the fertile days of summer and fall.
cacophony
Harsh or discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination of consonants within a group of words. The opposite of euphony. Writers frequently use cacophony to express energy or mimic mood.
diegesis
In a narrative film, the world of the film's story. The diegesis includes events that are presumed to have occurred and actions and spaces not shown onscreen.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times is an example of what
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
who were famous writers of literary ballads
John Keats, Samual Coleridge, Wordworth
metaphysical conceit
Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterize the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the reader's attention. In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donne's conceits, see Stephanie Burt's Poem Guide on John Donne's "The Sun Rising.")
difference between literary ballad and folk ballad
Literary ballad is actually an imitation of the traditional ballad. The only difference between the two ballads is the authorship. The author of the literary ballad is a known personality, while the author of the traditional ballad is anonymous. The author of the traditional ballad may be a common man or a shepherd, villager or a farmer. Nobody knows about the real author of the traditional ballad. Moreover, time cannot bring about any change in the text of the literary ballad as t it is preserved in hard and soft copies. The poet is the legal owner of his ballads. Literary ballads are more polished and lengthy when compared with the traditional ballads.
new criticism
Name given to a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century. New Criticism, like Formalism, tended to consider texts as autonomous and "closed," meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it. The reader does not need outside sources, such as the author's biography, to fully understand a text; while New Critics did not completely discount the relevance of the author, background, or possible sources of the work, they did insist that those types of knowledge had very little bearing on the work's merit as literature. Like Formalist critics, New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary devices, specifically metaphor, irony, tension, and paradox. The New Critics emphasized "close reading" as a way to engage with a text, and paid close attention to the interactions between form and meaning. Important New Critics included Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term "intentional fallacy"; other terms associated with New Criticism include "affective fallacy," "heresy of paraphrase," and "ambiguity."
free verse
Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman explored the possibilities of nonmetrical poetry in the 19th century. Since the early 20th century, the majority of published lyric poetry has been written in free verse. See the work of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. Browse more free-verse poems.
Anaphora
Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry: the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.
lyric
Originally a composition meant for musical accompaniment. The term refers to a short poem in which the poet, the poet's persona, or another speaker expresses personal feelings. See Robert Herrick's "To Anthea, who May Command Him Anything," John Clare's "I Hid My Love," Louise Bogan's "Song for the Last Act," or Louise Glück's "Vita Nova."
fixed and unfixed forms
Poems that have a set number of lines, rhymes, and/or metrical arrangements per line. Browse all terms related to forms, including alcaics, alexandrine, aubade, ballad, ballade, carol, concrete poetry, double dactyl, dramatic monologue, eclogue, elegy, epic, epistle, epithalamion, free verse, haiku, heroic couplet, limerick, madrigal, mock epic, ode, ottava rima, pastoral, quatrain, renga, rondeau, rondel, sestina, sonnet, Spenserian stanza, tanka, tercet, terza rima, and villanelle.
didactic poetry
Poetry that instructs, either in terms of morals or by providing knowledge of philosophy, religion, arts, science, or skills. Although some poets believe that all poetry is inherently instructional, didactic poetry separately refers to poems that contain a clear moral or message or purpose to convey to its readers.
consonance
Repetition of a consonant sound (in syllable-initial position) within two or more words in close proximity.
assonance
Repetition of a vowel sound within two or more words in close proximity
Chiasmus
Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture ("But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first"; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty").
example of dramatic monologue
Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," because it is a poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader.
anachronism
Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeare's placing of a clock in Julius Caesar is an anachronism, because clocks had not yet been invented in the period when the play is set. In Charles Olson's epic The Maximus Poems, the central figure encompasses the poet's alter ego, the second-century Greek philosopher Maximus of Tyre, and the fourth-century Phoenician mystic Maximus. This persona arises from outside of time to reflect on the state of American culture by recounting the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
foot
The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter. A foot usually contains one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English poetry are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables).
new American poets
The group of poets included in Donald Allen's influential 1960 anthology of the same name. Allen's anthology, which collected 15 years of American writing, divided its contributors into groups: the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara), the Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso). Allen alleged that he was collecting the "third generation" of writers in the Modernist tradition, and his book is notable for presenting so many poets now recognized as leading figures of 20th-century poetry. The anthology's impact was immediate, and it continues to be recognized as both a cultural document and a collection of the finest avant-garde writing of the period.
English Romanticism Odes
The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode,") or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn"). Browse more odes.
cadence
The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse).
elizabethan age
The period coinciding with the reign of England's Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), considered to be the literary height of the English Renaissance. Poets and dramatists drew inspiration from Italian forms and genres such as the love sonnet, the pastoral, and the allegorical epic. Musicality, verbal sophistication, and romantic exuberance dominated the era's verse. Defining works include Edmund Spenser's The Shephearde's Calendar and The Faerie Queene, the sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Raleigh's lyrics. Drama especially flourished during this time; see the comedies and tragedies of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe.
meter
The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry is accentual-syllabic. See also accentual meter, syllabic meter, and quantitative meter. Falling meter refers to trochees and dactyls (i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables). Iambs and anapests(i.e., one or two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) are called rising meter. See also foot.
enjambment
The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped.
who readily uses antithesis
William Blake; Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings. William Blake pits love's competing impulses—selflessness and self-interest—against each other in his poem "The Clod and the Pebble."Love "builds a Heaven in Hell's despair," or, antithetically, it "builds a Hell in Heaven's despite." Innocence vs experience
ballad stanza
a four-line stanza in iambic meter in which the first and third unrhymed lines have four metrical feet and the second and fourth rhyming lines have three metrical feet.
dramatic monologue
a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.
ballad
a poem meant for singing, quite impersonal in material, probably connected in its origins with the communal dance but submitted to a process of oral traditions among people who are free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous in character."
elegy
a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead. In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subject's death but ends in consolation. Examples include John Milton's "Lycidas"; Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam"; and Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." More recently, Peter Sacks has elegized his father in "Natal Command," and Mary Jo Bang has written "You Were You Are Elegy" and other poems for her son. In the 18th century the "elegiac stanza" emerged, though its use has not been exclusive to elegies. It is a quatrainwith the rhyme scheme ABAB written in iambic pentameter
Italian Sonnet (Petrarchan)
a sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba, followed by a sestet with the rhyme pattern cdecde or cdcdcd
Shakespearean sonnet (elizabethan/English)
a sonnet consisting three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg
what is usual rhyme scheme of ballad stanza
abcb
the opposite of an end-stopped line is
an enjambed line
My life is my purpose. My life is my goal. My life is my inspiration. is an example of what
anaphora
"Men sell the wedding bells" is an example of what rhyming device
assonance
"Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mouse ran up the clock" is an [example of...]
consonance (ck)
accentual verse
has a fixed number of stresses per line regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English, as opposed to syllabic verse which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.
in media res
in the middle of things
what is the opposite of hyperbole
litotes
anapest
metrical foot that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Words such as "understand" and "contradict" are examples because the stress comes at the end
anthropomorphism
the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.
antithesis
the direct opposite, a sharp contrast
alliteration
the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning (syllable-initial position) of adjacent or closely connected words in.
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene are examples of
two major allegorical works in English
blank verse
unrhymed iambic pentameter Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns. Poems such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," are written predominantly in blank verse.
example of apostrophe
"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky."
qualities of a ballad (11)
1. short story in verse, which dwells upon only on one particular episode of the story. John Keats's ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci is an excellent example in this regard. 2. Another fundamental characteristic of a is its universal appeal. Every single ballad touches upon a specific subject, which bears universal significance. It's not simply restricted to his personality or his country, rather; it deals with the whole humanity. John Keats's ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci convinces the readers that most of the women are perfidious and double-crossing. 3. Use of colloquial language is an indispensable feature of a ballad. The poet has a tendency to make use of day-to-day and commons words instead of bombastic and flowery language in the ballad. Read John Keats's ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci to know how the poet has used colloquial language in his ballad. 4. Unlike other kinds of poems, ballad has an abrupt and unexpected opening. The poem starts all of a sudden, without providing any details about the subject matter. Similarly, the ending of many ballads may also be abrupt and unexpected. 5. There are no extra details about the surroundings, atmosphere or environment. The poem starts suddenly and the reader has to visualise the setting himself through the words of the poet. Thus ballads lack in superfluous details. 6. Dialogue is also an indispensable feature of a ballad. The story is mostly told through dialogues. Look at of John Keats's ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci, which is a complete dialogue between the speaker and the knight. 7. Generally, in every ballad, there is a refrain. Refrain is a phrase or a line, which is repeated again and again after a stanza. 8. The poet tends to use stock phrases so that it may be easier to be memorized by the readers. That is why; every ballad is easier than any poem to be memorized. 9. Use of ballad stanza is another remarkable characteristic of a ballad. Every ballad is written a ballad stanza. Ballad stanza is a stanza, which consists of four lines with abcb rhyme scheme. There are four accented syllables in the first and third line, while in the second and the fourth lines there are three accented syllables. 10. Use of supernatural elements is an imperative feature of a ballad. Johan Keats and Coleridge's ballads are best examples in this regard. 11. Usually, the themes of most ballads are tragic, but is must be kept in mind that there are some ballads, which are comic in nature.
haiku
5-7-5
archetype
A basic model from which copies are made; a prototype. According to psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes emerge in literature from the "collective unconscious" of the human race. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, explores archetypes as the symbolic patterns that recur within the world of literature itself. In both approaches, archetypical themes include birth, death, sibling rivalry, and the individual versus society. Archetypes may also be images or characters, such as the hero, the lover, the wanderer, or the matriarch.
allusion
A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot's influential long poem is dense with allusions.
modernism
A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. In the early 20th century, novelists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad experimented with shifts in time and narrative points of view. While living in Paris before the war, Gertrude Stein explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices. Ezra Poundvowed to "make it new" and "break the pentameter," while T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other poets most often associated with Modernism include H.D., W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Modernism also generated many smaller movements; see also Acmeism, Dada, Free verse, Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Postmodernism, and Surrealism. Browse more Modern poets.
motif
A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works. Unlike themes, which are messages, statements, or ideas, motifs are details whose repetition adds to the work's larger meaning; multiple and varying motifs can take place within one work and across longer collections. For example, Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels and John Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress both feature the motif of a long journey. The repeated questions of an ubi sunt poem also compose a motif on the fleeting nature of life. Motifs are sometimes described as expressions of a collective unconsciousness; see archetype.
genre
A class or category of texts with similarities in form, style, or subject matter. The definition of a genre changes over time, and a text often interacts with multiple genres. A text's relationship to a particular genre—whether it defies or supports a genre's set of expectations—is often of interest when conducting literary analysis. Four major genres of literature include poetry, drama, nonfiction, and fiction. Poetry can be divided into further genres, such as epic, lyric, narrative, satirical, or prose poetry. For more examples of genres, browse poems by type.
metaphor
A comparison that is made directly (for example, John Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" from "Ode on a Grecian Urn") or less directly (for example, Shakespeare's "marriage of two minds"), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as "like," "as," or "than." See Sylvia Plath's description of her dead father as "Marble-heavy, a bag full of God" in "Daddy," or Emily Dickinson's "'Hope' is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul—." Browse poems with developed metaphors.
new historicism
A critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one's own "historicity," the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.
litotes
A deliberate understatement for effect; the opposite of hyperbole. For example, a good idea may be described as "not half bad," or a difficult task considered "no small feat." Litotes is found frequently in Old English poetry; "That was a good king," declares the narrator of the Beowulf epic after summarizing the Danish king's great virtues. See also Irony.
Cockney School of poets
A dismissive name for London-based Romantic poets such as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The term was first used in a scathing review in Blackwood's Magazine in October 1817, in which the anonymous reviewer mocked the poets' lack of pedigree and sophistication.
dissonance
A disruption of harmonic sounds or rhythms. Like cacophony, it refers to a harsh collection of sounds; dissonance is usually intentional, however, and depends more on the organization of sound for a jarring effect, rather than on the unpleasantness of individual words. Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of fixed stresses and variable unstressed syllables, combined with frequent assonance, consonance, and monosyllabic words, has a dissonant effect. See these lines from "Carrion Comfort": Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.
kenning
A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun. Many kennings rely on myths or legends to make meaning and are found in Old Germanic, Norse, and English poetry, including The Seafarer, in which the ocean is called a "whale-path." (See Ezra Pound's translation). "The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost also includes examples such as "mid-wood" and "petal-fall." The speaker in Frank Bidart's poem, "The Third Hour of the Night," mentions a creature referred to as the "wound-dresser." See also Franny Choi's "The Second Mouth."
hyperbole
A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. For example, see James Tate's lines "She scorched you with her radiance" or "He was more wronged than Job." Hyperbole usually carries the force of strong emotion, as in Andrew Marvell's description of a forlorn lover:The sea him lent those bitter tearsWhich at his eyes he always wears;And from the winds the sighs he bore,Which through his surging breast do roar.No day he saw but that which breaksThrough frighted clouds in forkèd streaks,While round the rattling thunder hurled,As at the funeral of the world.
metonymy
A figure of speech in which a related term is substituted for the word itself. Often the substitution is based on a material, causal, or conceptual relation between things. For example, the British monarchy is often referred to as the Crown. In the phrase "lend me your ears," "ears" is substituted for "attention." "O, for a draught of vintage!" exclaims the speaker in John Keats's "Ode to Nightingale," with "vintage" understood to mean "wine." Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy.
Onomatopoeia
A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense (for example, "choo-choo," "hiss," or "buzz"). In "Piano," D.H. Lawrence describes the "boom of the tingling strings" as his mother played the piano, mimicking the volume and resonance of the sound ("boom") as well as the fine, high-pitched vibration of the strings that produced it ("tingling strings").
oxymoron
A figure of speech that brings together contradictory words for effect, such as "jumbo shrimp" and "deafening silence." For instance, John Milton describes Hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost.
apostrophe
A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent, dead, or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love. In his Holy Sonnet "Death, be not proud," John Donne denies death's power by directly admonishing it
ode
A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552-442 B.C.E.) ode was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. (See Stephen Burt's article "And the Winner Is . . . Pindar!") English odes written in the Pindaric tradition include Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode" and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood." Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner; see Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. See Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Sapphics."
metaphysical poets
A group of 17th-century poets whose works are marked by philosophical exploration, colloquial diction, ingenious conceits, irony, and metrically flexible lines. Topics of interest often included love, religion, and morality, which the metaphysical poets considered through unusual comparisons, frequently employing unexpected similes and metaphors in displays of wit. The inclusion of contemporary scientific advancements were also typical. John Donne is the foremost figure, along with George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. For more on metaphysical poetry, see Stephen Burt's poem guide on John Donne's "The Sun Rising."
new formalism
A late 20th- and early 21st-century movement that championed a return to rhyme and meter in poetry. New Formalist poets such as Dana Gioia, X.J. Kennedy, Brad Leithauser, and Marilyn Hacker responded to the popularity of the dominant free-verse poetry of the 1960s and '70s by exploring the possibilities of prosody and form in their own work. Though not an orchestrated, coherent movement, New Formalism has been attacked by critics for its perceived retrogressive favoring of traditional metrical artifice over more recent, experimental modes of free verse.
epistle
A letter in verse, usually addressed to a person close to the writer. Its themes may be moral and philosophical, or intimate and sentimental.
refrain
A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.
canon
A list of authors or works considered to be central to the identity of a given literary tradition or culture. This secular use of the word is derived from its original meaning as a listing of all authorized books in the Bible. William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Blake are frequently found on lists of canonical literature in English.
epic
A long narrative poem in which a heroic protagonist engages in an action of great mythic or historical significance. Notable English epics include Beowulf, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (which follows the virtuous exploits of 12 knights in the service of the mythical King Arthur), and John Milton's Paradise Lost, which dramatizes Satan's fall from Heaven and humankind's subsequent alienation from God in the Garden of Eden.
aubade
A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. The form originated in medieval France. See John Donne's "The Sun Rising"
dactyl
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words "poetry" and "basketball" are both dactylic.
iamb
A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The words "unite" and "provide" are both iambic. It is the most common meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech. In Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking"the iamb is the vehicle for the "natural," colloquial speech pattern:My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a treeToward heaven still,And there's a barrel that I didn't fillBeside it, and there may be two or threeApples I didn't pick upon some bough.But I am done with apple-picking now.Essence of winter sleep is on the night,The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
end stopped
A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break—such as a dash or closing parenthesis—or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period. A line is considered end-stopped, too, if it contains a complete phrase. Many of Alexander Pope's couplets are end-stopped, as in this passage from "An Essay on Man: Epistle I": Then say not man's imperfect, Heav'n in fault; Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measur'd to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect in a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest today is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago.
hexameter
A metrical line of six feet, most often dactylic, and found in Classical Latin or Greek poetry, including Homer's Iliad. In English, an iambic hexameter line is also known as an alexandrine. Only a few poets have written in dactylic hexameter, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the long poem Evangeline:
caesura
A natural pause or break in a line of poetry, usually near the middle of the line. A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause. A medial caesura splits the line in equal parts, as is common in Old English poetry (see Beowulf). Medial caesurae (plural of caesura) can be found throughout contemporary poet Derek Walcott's "The Bounty."When the pause occurs toward the beginning or end of the line, it is termed, respectively, initial or terminal. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Mother and Poet" contains both initial ("Dead! One of them shot by sea in the east") and terminal caesurae ("No voice says 'My mother' again to me. What?")
couplet
A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length. A couplet is "closed" when the lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence
epigram
A pithy, often witty, poem.
hymn
A poem praising God or the divine, often sung. In English, the most popular hymns were written between the 17th and 19th centuries. See Isaac Watts's "Our God, Our Help," Charles Wesley's "My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine," and "Thou Hidden Love of God" by John Wesley.
deconstruction
A poststructuralist theory mainly based on the writings of the French intellectual Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction posits that meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate because language itself is indeterminate. It is a system of signifiers that can never fully "mean": a word can refer to an object but can never be that object. Derrida developed deconstruction as a response to certain strains of Western philosophy; in the United States, deconstruction was the focus of a group of literary theorists at Yale, including Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman. Used as a method of literary critique, deconstruction refocuses attention on a work as open-ended, endlessly available to interpretation, and far beyond the reach of authorial intention. Deconstruction traces how language generates meaning both within a text and across texts, while insisting that such meaning can only ever be provisional.
epigraph
A quotation from another literary work that is placed beneath the title at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem.
Circumlocution
A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "twice five miles of fertile ground" (i.e., 10 miles) in "Kubla Khan." Like periphrasis, which also involves the use of more words to convey what could be said in fewer, circumlocution is a way of saying something in a less direct manner.
epitaph
A short poem intended for (or imagined as) an inscription on a tombstone and often serving as a brief elegy. See Robert Herrick's "Upon a Child That Died" and "Upon Ben Jonson"; Ben Jonson's "Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H."; and "Epitaph for a Romantic Woman" by Louise Bogan.
folk ballad
A story told in verse that is by an unknown author and meant to be sung.
negative capability
A theory first articulated by John Keats about the artist's access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science. Contemplating his own craft and the art of others, especially William Shakespeare, in one of his famous letters to relatives Keats supposed that a great thinker is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated. See Keats's "To Autumn." The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Keats's notion of negative capability has been influential for those working outside of aesthetics, including scholars such as Roberto Unger who adopted and modified the term for his own work on social theory.
palindrome
A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward and forward. The words "civic" and "level" are palindromes, as is the phrase "A man, a plan, a canal—Panama." The reversal can be word by word as well, as in "fall leaves when leaves fall."
diction
A writer's or speaker's choice of words
invocation
An address to a deity or muse that often takes the form of a request for help in composing the poem at hand. Invocations can occur at the beginning of the poem or start of a new canto; they are considered conventions of the epic form and are a type of apostrophe. See the opening of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Alexander Pope mocked the convention in the first canto of "The Rape of the Lock." A contemporary example is Denise Levertov's poem "Invocation."
octave
An eight-line stanza or poem. See ottava rima and triolet. The first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnetare also called an octave.
figure of speech
An expressive, nonliteral use of language. Figures of speech include tropes (such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, and simile) and schemes (anything involving the ordering and organizing of words—anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for example). Browse all terms related to figures of speech.
allegory
An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegory's meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature.
tersa rima
An interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on.
lament
Any poem expressing deep grief, usually at the death of a loved one or some other loss. Related to elegy and the dirge. See "A Lament" by Percy Bysshe Shelley; Thom Gunn's "Lament"; and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Lament."
paradox
As a figure of speech, it is a seemingly self-contradictory phrase or concept that illuminates a truth. For instance, Wallace Stevens, in "The Snow Man," describes the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Man: Epistle II," describes Man as "Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all." Paradox is related to oxymoron, which creates a new phrase or concept out of a contradiction.
irony
As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant. Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the contradiction. When William Shakespeare relates in detail how his lover suffers in comparison with the beauty of nature in "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun," it is understood that he is elevating her beyond these comparisons; considering her essence as a whole, and what she means to the speaker, she is more beautiful than nature.
