Poetic Terms

Fireside Poets

The Fireside poets were a group of 19th-century American poets, mostly situated in the Northeast United States. Also referred to as the schoolroom or household poets, they wrote in conventional poetic forms to present domestic themes and moral issues. The "fireside" moniker arose out of their popularity, as families would read their books by the fire in their homes. Highly popular among both general readers and critics, the Fireside poets deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity in the early 1900s. Poets often included in this group were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. These poets' general adherence to standard poetic forms, rhythm, meter, and rhyme made their poetry especially suitable for memorization and recitation. Their themes and their presentation of traditional and nationalist values made them popular poets to teach.

Envoi (or Envoy)

The brief stanza that ends French poetic forms such as the ballade or sestina. It usually serves as a summation or a dedication to a particular person. See Hilaire Belloc's satirical "Ballade of Modest Confession."

Augustan Age

The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace—the great Latin poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE). Like the classical poets who inspired them, the English Augustan writers engaged the political and philosophical ideas of their day through urbane, often satirical verse.

Elision

The omission of unstressed syllables (e.g., "ere" for "ever," "tother" for "the other"), usually to fit a metrical scheme. "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs," goes the first line of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which "amorous" is elided to "am'rous" to establish the pentameter (five-foot) line.

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.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; "pizza" and "place" alliterate. Example: "With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim" from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty."

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme. See Amy Lowell's "In a Garden" ("With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur") or "The Taxi" ("And shout into the ridges of the wind").

Enjambment

The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped. William Carlos Williams's "Between Walls" is one sentence broken into 10 enjambed lines: the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

Blank verse

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

Concrete poetry

Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic. Examples include George Herbert's "Easter Wings" and "The Altar" and George Starbuck's "Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree".

Accentual-syllabic verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. From line to line, the number of stresses (accents) may vary, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed. The majority of English poems from the Renaissance to the 19th century are written according to this metrical system.

Accentual verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are accentual; see Ezra Pound's modern translation of "The Seafarer." More recently, Richard Wilbur employed this same Anglo-Saxon meter in his poem "Junk." Traditional nursery rhymes, such as "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake," are often accentual.

Confessional poetry

Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. The term was first used by M.L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies, the collection in which Robert Lowell revealed his struggles with mental illness and a troubled marriage. Read an interview with Snodgrass in which he addresses his work and the work of others associated with confessionalism.

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. The title of Seamus Heaney's autobiographical poem "Singing School" alludes to a line from W.B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" ("Nor is there singing school but studying /Monuments of its own magnificence").

Black Arts Movement

A cultural movement conceived of and promoted by Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960s. Its constellation of writers, performers, and artists included Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez. "We want a black poem. And / a Black World. / Let the world be a Black Poem," writes Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in his poem "Black Art," which served as a de facto manifesto for the movement. Its practitioners were energized by a desire to confront white power structures and assert an African American cultural identity. Its aims were community-minded as well as artistic; during its heyday, hundreds of Afrocentric repertory theater companies, public art projects, and publishing ventures were organized throughout the United States.

Epithalamion

A lyric poem in praise of Hymen (the Greek god of marriage), an epithalamion often blesses a wedding and in modern times is often read at the wedding ceremony or reception. See Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion."

Dactyl

A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words "poetry" and "basketball" are both dactylic. Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is written in dactylic meter. (See also double dactyl.)

Anapest

A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words "underfoot" and "overcome" are anapestic. Lord Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" is written in anapestic meter.

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.

Dark Room Collective

An artists group formed in 1987 by Boston poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange and musician Janice Lowe after they attended the funeral of James Baldwin. Based in a Victorian house near Harvard Square in Cambridge, they were inspired to celebrate living artists of color and to establish a reading series and to create comraderie and mentorships between black writers. Other members included poets Major Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Nehassaiu deGannes, and John Keene, among others. Over time the group grew to include scores of literary and visual artists. You can listen to a recording of the Dark Room Collective's 2012 reunion reading at the Poetry Foundation.

Acmeism

An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova.

Doggerel

Bad verse traditionally characterized by clichés, clumsiness, and irregular meter. It is often unintentionally humorous. The "giftedly bad" William McGonagall was an accomplished doggerelist, as demonstrated in "The Tay Bridge Disaster": It must have been an awful sight, To witness in the dusky moonlight, While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay, Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay, I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.

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).

Ekphrasis

"Description" in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the "action" of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion: What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new. . . . See W. S. DiPiero's poem guide on Robert Browning for more on ekphrasis.

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.

Formalism (Russian)

A brief but influential 20th-century critical method that originated in St. Petersburg through the group OPOYAZ, and in Moscow via the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Important Formalists included Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. Formalism viewed literature as a distinct and separate entity, unconnected to historical or social causes or effects. It analyzed literature according to devices unique to literary works and focused on the "literariness" of a text: words were not simply stand-ins for objects but objects themselves. Formalists advanced the concept of ostranenie, or defamiliarization, arguing that literature, by calling attention to itself as such, estranged the reader from ordinary experience and made the familiar seem new. Formalism's tendency to collapse form and content is somewhat similar to New Criticism's approach, though its main influence was on structuralism.

Dirge

A brief hymn or song of lamentation and grief; it was typically composed to be performed at a funeral. In lyric poetry, a dirge tends to be shorter and less meditative than an elegy. See Christina Rossetti's "A Dirge" and Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring Out Your Bells."

Eclogue

A brief, dramatic pastoral poem, set in an idyllic rural place but discussing urban, legal, political, or social issues. Bucolics and idylls, like eclogues, are pastoral poems, but in nondramatic form. See Edmund Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar: April," Andrew Marvell's "Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn," and John Crowe Ransom's "Eclogue."

Epic simile

A detailed, often complex poetic comparison (see simile) that unfolds over the course of several lines. It is also known as a Homeric simile, because the Greek poet Homer is thought to have originated the device in the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey. In the following passage from Book I of Paradise Lost, John Milton compares Lucifer's massive army to scattered autumn leaves: His legions—angel forms, who lay entranc'd Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High over-arch'd embow'r; or scatter'd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion arm'd Hath vex'd the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carkases And broken chariot-wheels: so thick bestrown, Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change.

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. Gertrude Stein's "Susie Asado" does not lack a musical quality, but its rapid repetition of sounds and varied sentence lengths create dissonance through tension and instability: This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must. Drink pups. Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.

Double dactyl

A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal, Anthony Hecht, and John Hollander. The double dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three double-dactyl lines followed by a shorter dactyl-spondee pair. The two spondees rhyme. Additionally, the first line must be a nonsense phrase, the second line a proper or place name, and one other line, usually the sixth, a single double-dactylic word that has never been used before in any other double dactyl. For example: Higgledy piggledy, Bacon, lord Chancellor. Negligent, fell for the Paltrier vice. Bribery toppled him, Bronchopneumonia Finished him, testing some Poultry on ice. (by Ian Lancashire)

Anthropomorphism

A form of personification in which human qualities are attributed to anything inhuman, usually a god, animal, object, or concept. In Vachel Lindsay's "What the Rattlesnake Said," for example, a snake describes the fears of his imagined prey. John Keats admires a star's loving watchfulness ("with eternal lids apart") in his sonnet "Bright Star, Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art."

Alcaic

A four-line stanza invented by the Classical Greek poet Alcaeus that employs a specific syllabic count per line and a predominantly dactylic meter. Alfred, Lord Tennyson imitated its form in his poem "Milton."

Fugitives

A group of Southern poets associated with the Fugitive, a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s. Its prominent ranks included Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. In general, their poetry was formal, featuring traditional prosody and concrete imagery frequently drawn from the rural Southern experience. These poet-critics' principles gave rise to the method of close reading and textual analysis known as New Criticism.

Black Mountain poets

A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, promoted a nontraditional poetics described by Olson in 1950 as "projective verse." Olson advocated an improvisational, open-form approach to poetic composition, driven by the natural patterns of breath and utterance.

Carol

A hymn or poem often sung by a group, with an individual taking the changing stanzas and the group taking the burden or refrain. See Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe". Many traditional Christmas songs are carols, such as "I Saw Three Ships" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

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. Alexander Pope favored the form; see his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," in which the poet addresses a physician in his social circle. The epistle peaked in popularity in the 18th century, though Lord Byron and Robert Browning composed several in the next century; see Byron's "Epistle to Augusta." Less formal, more conversational versions of the epistle can be found in contemporary lyric poetry; see Hayden Carruth's "The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill" or "Dear Mr. Fanelli" by Charles Bernstein.

Dimeter

A line of verse composed of two feet. "Some go local / Some go express / Some can't wait / To answer Yes," writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem "Yes," in which the dimeter line predominates. Kay Ryan's "Blandeur" contains this series of mostly dimeter lines: Even out Earth's rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers

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.

Canto

A long subsection of an epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante Alighieri's Commedia (The Divine Comedy), first employed in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene. Other examples include Lord Byron's Don Juan and Ezra Pound's Cantos.

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" and Louise Bogan's "Leave-Taking."

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. The opposite of an end-stopped line is an enjambed line.

Fourteener

A metrical line of 14 syllables (usually seven iambic feet). A relatively long line, it can be found in narrative poetry from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Fourteener couplets broken into quatrains are known as common measure or ballad meter. See also Poulter's measure.

Dada

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. The founders of this movement struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I. They salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both "everything and nothing" in their desire to "sweep, sweep clean," as Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto in 1920. In visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence. Dadaism gave rise to surrealism.

Beat poets

A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco's literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of the "Beat" aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. Beat poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality.

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 (see Dorothy Parker's "Interview": "The ladies men admire, I've heard, /Would shudder at a wicked word."). The "heroic couplet" is written in iambic pentameter and features prominently in the work of 17th- and 18th-century didactic and satirical poets such as Alexander Pope: "Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd, /Turn'd critics next, and proved plain fools at last."

Aphorism

A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage. See Benjamin Franklin's "How to get RICHES."

Epigram

A pithy, often witty, poem. See Walter Savage Landor's "Dirce," Ben Jonson's "On Gut," or much of the work of J.V. Cunningham: This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

Dramatic monologue

A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and Ai's "Killing Floor." A lyric may also be addressed to someone, but it is short and songlike and may appear to address either the reader or the poet.

Acrostic

A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. See Lewis Carroll's "A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky."

Complaint

A poem of lament, often directed at an ill-fated love, as in Henry Howard's "Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being upon the Sea," or Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella XXXI." A complaint may also be a satiric attack on social injustice and immorality; in "The Lie," Sir Walter Ralegh bitterly rails against institutional hypocrisy and human vanity ("Tell men of high condition, / That manage the estate, / Their purpose is ambition, / Their practice only hate.").

Ars Poetica

A poem that explains the "art of poetry," or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. Horace's Ars Poetica is an early example, and the foundation for the tradition. While Horace writes of the importance of delighting and instructing audiences, modernist ars poetica poets argue that poems should be written for their own sake, as art for the sake of art. Archibald MacLeish's famous "Ars Poetica" sums up the argument: "A poem should not mean / But be." See also Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism," William Wordsworth's Prelude, and Wallace Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry."

Ballad

A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event; examples include "Barbara Allen" and "John Henry." Beginning in the Renaissance, poets have adapted the conventions of the folk ballad for their own original compositions. Examples of this "literary" ballad form include John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Thomas Hardy's "During Wind and Rain," and Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee."

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.

Found poem

A prose text or texts reshaped by a poet into quasi-metrical lines. Fragments of found poetry may appear within an original poem as well. Portions of Ezra Pound's Cantos are found poetry, culled from historical letters and government documents. Charles Olson created his poem "There Was a Youth whose Name Was Thomas Granger" using a report from William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation

Common measure

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are written in common measure, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Hayden's "The Ballad of Nat Turner" and Elinor Wylie's "A Crowded Trolley Car." See also Poulter's measure and fourteener

Epigraph

A quotation from another literary work that is placed beneath the title at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem. For example, Grace Schulman's "American Solitude" opens with a quote from an essay by Marianne Moore. Lines from Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" preface Alfred Corn's "Sugar Cane." Browse more poems with epigraphs.

Consonance

A resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial rhyme (see also Alliteration). Consonance can also refer to shared consonants, whether in sequence ("bed" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab").

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.

Caesura

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?")

Elliptical poetry

A term coined in 1998 by poet and critic Stephen Burt in a review of Susan Wheeler's Smokes. In the piece, which first appeared in the Boston Review, Burt describes elliptical poets as those who "try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves." Burt's description of elliptical poetry emphasized its quick shifts in diction and referent, and use of occluded or partially obscured back-story. A special issue of American Letters and Commentary was devoted to elliptical poetry, sparking debates over contemporary trends and schools in American poetry. Burt pointed to several poets whose work commonly exhibits these features, including Mark Levine, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Liam Rector.

Deep Image

A term originally coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences, which posited a connection between the physical and spiritual realms. Rothenberg and Kelly were inspired by Federico García Lorca's "deep song." The idea was later redeveloped by the poet Robert Bly, and deep image became associated with a group of midcentury American poets including Galway Kinnell and James Wright. The new group of deep-image poets was often narrative, focusing on allowing concrete images and experiences to generate poetic meaning.

Anagram

A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word; for example, "The teacher gapes at the mounds of exam pages lying before her."

Ambiguity

A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. As poet and critic William Empson wrote in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), "The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry." A poet may consciously join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader's expectation of meaning, as e.e. cummings does in [anyone lived in a pretty how town]. The ambiguity may be less deliberate, steered more by the poet's attempts to express something ineffable, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Windhover." At the sight of a bird diving through the air, the speaker marvels, "Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!" The ambiguity of this phrase lies in the exclamation of "buckle": The verb could be descriptive of the action, or it could be the speaker's imperative. In both cases, the meaning of the word is not obvious from its context. "Buckle" could mean "fall" or "crumple," or it could describe the act of clasping armor and bracing for battle.

Cretic

Also known as amphimacer. A Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of a short syllable enclosed by two long syllables. Often found in folk poetry, its use in English poetry is rare, though instances can be found in proverbs and idiomatic expressions such as "After a while, crocodile." Contemporary uses of the cretic can be found in slogans and advertising phrases, and it is often used to make comparisons.

Ballade

An Old French verse form that usually consists of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoy, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbc bcbc. The last line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of subsequent stanzas and the envoy. See Hilaire Belloc's "Ballade of Modest Confession" and Algernon Charles Swinburne's translation of François Villon's "Ballade des Pendus" (Ballade of the Hanged).

Apostrophe

An address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if he or she were present. In his Holy Sonnet "Death, be not proud," John Donne denies death's power by directly admonishing it. Emily Dickinson addresses her absent object of passion in "Wild nights!—Wild nights!"

Futurism

An avant-garde aesthetic movement that arose in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. Its proponents—predominantly painters and other visual artists—called for a rejection of past forms of expression, and the embrace of industry and new technology. Speed and violence were the favored vehicles of sensation, rather than lyricism, symbolism, and "high" culture. F. T. Marinetti, in his futurist Manifesto (1909), advocated "words in freedom"—a language unbound by common syntax and order that, along with striking variations in typography, could quickly convey intense emotions. Marinetti and other Italian futurists allied themselves with militaristic nationalism, which alienated their cause internationally following World War II. Russian futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky profoundly influenced the development of Russian formalism, while in England the futurist movement was expressed as Vorticism by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in their magazine BLAST. Listen to "Futurism and the New Manifesto" here. See also Mina Loy's "Aphorisms on Futurism".

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).

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. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene are two major allegorical works in English.

Feminist theory

An extension of feminism's critique of male power and ideology, feminist theory combines elements of other theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction to interrogate the role of gender in the writing, interpretation, and dissemination of literary texts. Originally concerned with the politics of women's authorship and representations of women in literature, feminist theory has recently begun to examine ideas of gender and sexuality across a wide range of disciplines including film studies, geography, and even economics. Feminist theory emerged from the struggle for women's rights, beginning in the 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft's publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Important feminist theorists of the 20th century include Betty Friedan, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Elaine Showalter, Carol Gilligan, and Adrienne Rich.

Conceptual

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry's visual poetics. Nonreferential and interested in the materiality of language, conceptual poetry often relies on some organizing principle or information that is external to the text and can cross genres into visual or theoretical modes. Generally interested in blurring genres, conceptual poetry takes advantage of innovations in technology to question received notions of what it means to be "poetic" or to express a "self" in poetry. The ideas and practices of conceptual poetry are associated with a variety of writers including Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to conceptual poetry in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Blazon

Blazon: French for "coat-of-arms" or "shield." A literary blazon (or blason) catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, usually female. The device was made popular by Petrarch and used extensively by Elizabethan poets. Spenser's "Epithalamion" includes examples of blazon: "Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright, / Her forehead ivory white ..." Blazon compares parts of the female body to jewels, celestial bodies, natural phenomenon, and other beautiful or rare objects. See for example Thomas Campion's "There Is a Garden in Her Face." Contreblazon inverts the convention, describing "wrong" parts of the female body or negating them completely as in Shakespeare's famous sonnet "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun." For a contemporary example, see "My Boyfriend" by Camille Guthrie.

Antithesis

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."

Cultural criticism/cultural studies

Developing in the 18th and 19th centuries among writers such as Jonathan Swift, John Ruskin and, especially, Matthew Arnold, cultural criticism as it is practiced today has significantly complicated older notions of culture, tradition and value. While Arnold believed in culture as a force of harmony and social change, cultural critics of the 20th century sought to extend and problematize such definitions. Theorists like Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and those connected with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England—as well as French intellectuals such Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault—described culture not as a finished product but as a process that joined knowledge to interest and power. Cultural critics critique the traditional canon and focus their attention on a variety of texts and discourses, tracing the interactions of both through an eclectic mix of interpretive strategies that include elements of economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and new historicism. In critiquing the traditional canon, cultural critics avoid privileging one cultural product over another and often examine texts that are largely seen as marginal and unimportant in traditional criticism, such as those connected to various forms of pop culture. Essentially cross-disciplinary, cultural criticism and cultural studies have become important tools in theorizing the emergence and importance of postcolonial and multicultural literatures.

Collage

From the French coller, meaning to paste or glue. In visual arts, a technique that involves juxtaposing photographs, cuttings, newspapers, or other media on a surface. Widely seen as a hallmark of Modernist art, collage was first developed in the early 20th century by Pablo Picasso and other Cubists. Avant-garde groups such as the Dadaists and Surrealists also used the form to create new visual and language-based work. Tristan Tzara famously advocated a "cut-up" method of composition, involving cutting out words from a newspaper and drawing them randomly from a hat to create a poem. Collage in language-based work can now mean any composition that includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition. An early example is T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which includes newspaper clippings, music lyrics, nursery rhymes, and overheard speech. Ezra Pound's Cantos also use the technique extensively. For more examples of language-based collage see Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson and Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets.

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. 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.")

Choriamb

Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of two stressed syllables enclosing two unstressed; a trochee followed by an iamb. It is rarely used as a metrical scheme in English poetry, though Algernon Charles Swinburne imitated this classical meter in "Choriambics."

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. See also dissonance.

Alexandrine

In English, a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. The last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To a Skylark" is an alexandrine.

Carpe diem

In Latin, "Seize the day." The fleeting nature of life and the need to embrace its pleasures constitute a frequent theme of love poems; examples include Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time."

Ethnopoetics

In linguistics, folkloristics and anthropology, a method of analyzing linguistic structures in oral literature. The term was coined in 1968 by Jerome Rothenberg, whose anthology Technicians of the Sacred is considered a definitive text of the movement. In poetry, ethnopoetics refers to non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often those coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. In the early 20th century, Modernist and avant-garde poets such as Antonin Artaud and Tristan Tzara used "primitive" or oral traditions in their work; by midcentury, a curiosity regarding world literature had coalesced into a movement led by Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, who together edited the journal Alcheringa from 1970 to 1980. Contemporary poets with an interest in ethnopoetics include Gary Snyder, Kathleen Stewart, and William Bright.

Ellipsis

In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader's ability to understand the expression. For example, Shakespeare makes frequent use of the phrase "I will away" in his plays, with the missing verb understood to be "go." T.S. Eliot employs ellipsis in the following passage from "Preludes": You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands. The possessive "your" is left out in the second and third lines, but it can be assumed that the woman addressed by the speaker is clasping the soles of her own feet with her own hands.

Elegy

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 quatrain with the rhyme scheme ABAB written in iambic pentameter

Commedia dell'arte

Italian term for "theater of professional artists." A theater form that emerged in northern Italy in the 15th century and spread throughout Europe. Commedia dell'arte relied on masked stock characters who improvised dialogue within a basic, often familiar plotline or story (such as the struggles of young lovers or marital infidelity). The commedias were performed by itinerant troupes of actors who could respond to contemporary events through extemporized commentary and impromptu asides. Stock characters developed specific attributes, props, costumes, and gestures; masks meant that dialect and movement rather than facial expression were important to their portrayal. Zanni (servants) for instance were subversive characters who stirred up trouble; the most famous of these is Harlequin, a gluttonous acrobat dressed in patchwork. Performances of commedias dwindled throughout the 18th century as more realistic forms of drama gained popularity. However, the influence of commedia dell'arte can be seen in theatrical forms such as pantomime, puppetry, and physical theatre.

Canzone

Literally "song" in Italian, the canzone is a lyric poem originating in medieval Italy and France and usually consisting of hendecasyllabic lines with end-rhyme. Early versions include Petrarch's five to six-line stanzas plus an envoi, as well as Dante's modification: five twelve-line stanzas with repeated end words, finished by a five-line envoi. The canzone influenced the development of the sonnet and later writers such as James Merrill, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound took up the form. See Daryl Hine's "Canzone" and "About the Canzone," by John Hollander.

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.

Anaphora

Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which uses anaphora not only in its oft-quoted "I have a dream" refrain but throughout, as in this passage when he repeats the phrase "go back to": Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums andghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation canand will be changed. In Joanna Klink's poem "Some Feel Rain," the phrase "some feel" is repeated, which creates a rhythm and a sense of an accumulating emotions and meanings: Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. See Paul Muldoon's "As," William Blake's "The Tyger," or much of Walt Whitman's poetry, including "I Sing the Body Electric." See also Rebecca Hazelton's explanatory essay, "Adventures in Anaphora."

Flarf

Originally a prank on the scam contest sponsored by the organization Poetry.com, the experimental poetry movement flarf has slowly assumed a serious position as a new kind of Internet-based poetic practice. Known for its reliance on Google as a means of generating odd juxtapositions, surfaces, and grammatical inaccuracies, flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or "incorrect" poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape. Original flarf member Gary Sullivan describes flarf as "a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. 'Not okay.'" Flarf poets collaborate on poems, revising and sometimes plagiarizing them in semipublic spaces such as blogs or webzines. Original members of the "Flarfist Collective" include Sullivan, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, and Nada Gordon. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to flarf in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

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. John Milton's epic Paradise Lost and Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man are famous examples. See also William Blake's "A Divine Image," Rudyard Kipling's "If—," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

Abecedarian

Related to acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet. See Jessica Greenbaum, "A Poem for S." Tom Disch's "Abecedary" adapts the principles of an abecedarian poem, while Matthea Harvey's "The Future of Terror/The Terror of Future" sequence also uses the alphabet as an organizing principle. Poets who have used the abecedarian across whole collections include Mary Jo Bang, in The Bride of E, and Harryette Mullen, in Sleeping with the Dictionary.

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").

Curtal sonnet

See Sonnet.

Bucolic

See pastoral poetry

Ecopoetics

Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry. The influential journal Ecopoetics, edited by Jonathan Skinner, publishes writing that explores "creative-critical edges between making and writing" and features poets such as Jack Collom, Juliana Spahr, and Forrest Gander.

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.