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B
Bacchic
Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, and long
syllables / ~ ' ' /.
Ballad
A popular song, often recited aloud, narrating a story, and passed
down orally. Over 300 traditional English ballads, in up to 25 versions
each, were edited as the so-called "Child ballads" (named after the
editor, F. J. Child) 1882-98. Examples of the form include "Sir Patrick
Spens," "Twa Sisters of Binnorie," "The Three Ravens," the Lyrical
Ballads by William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, and "La Belle Dame
sans Merci" by John Keats. See also Broadside ballads.
Ballad Meter
A four-line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three
and three feet in lines two and four.
Ballad stanza
Quatrain rhyming abcb and alternating four-stress and three-stress
lines.
Ballade
Poem with three seven-, eight-, or ten-line stanzas and refrain.
Respectively, these have the rhyme schemes and envoys ababbcC bcbC
(cf. Chaucer's "Ballade of Good Counsel"), ababbcbC bcbC (Dorothy
Parker's "Ballade at Thirty-five"), and ababbccdcD ccdccD (cf.
Swinburne's "A Ballad of Fran&cced;ois Villon"). The refrains appear at
the end of each stanza and of the concluding envoy. Other examples
are Chaucer's "To Rosemounde" (which lacks an envoy), Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's "Ballad of Dead Ladies," Algernon Charles Swinburne's "A
Ballad of Burdens," William Ernest Henley's "Ballade of Dead Actors,"
and Austin Dobson's seven-line-stanza "Ballad of Imitation."
Bard
Originally a Celtic name for a poet-singer.
Baroque
An elaborate, extravagantly complex, sometimes grotesque, style of
artistic expression prevalent in the late sixteenth to early eighteenth
centuries. The baroque influence on poetry was expressed by Euphuism
in England, Marinism in Italy, and Gongorism in Spain.
Bathos
Alexander Pope's Peri-Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728)
describes bathos as a poet's fall, in a work of some seriousness, into
an unintentionally comic pathos.
Bathos
An unintentional shift from the sublime to the ridiculous which can
result from the use of overly elevated language to describe trivial
subject matter, or from an exaggerated attempt at pathos which
misfires to the point of being ludicrous. Bathos can be viewed as an
unintentional anticlimax.
Beat Poets
A San Francisco-based group of counter-culture poets such as Allen
Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kenneth Rexroth.
Black Mountain Poets
Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, all associated with
Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and all promoting a non-
traditional poetics.
Blank verse
Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse, a ten-syllable
line and the usual rhythm of English dramatic and epic poetry from its
introduction by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in his translation of
Books II and IV of Virgil's Certain Books of Virgil's Æneis.
Shakespeare's Hamlet II.2.339: "The Lady shall say her minde freely; or
the blanke Verse shall halt for't." Poems such as John Milton's Paradise
Lost, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Wallace Steven's
"Sunday Morning" use blank verse.
Blues
Oral black American folk or popular melancholic songs of the early
twentieth century.
Bob
A one-foot line in certain stanzaic forms of medieval alliterative poetry,
such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Bombast
Hyperbolic or wildly exaggerating speech, so-called after a kind of
cotton stuffing.
Bouts rimés
A French name, meaning "rhymed ends," for a popular 18th-century
game where poems had to be built around previously selected rhymes.
See John Addison's essay no. 60 in the Spectator.
Bretan lay
Brief narrative poems about Arthurian subjects. E.g., Chaucer's
Franklin's Tale.
Broadside Ballad
A ballad written in doggerel, printed on a single sheet of paper and sold
for a penny or two on English street corners in the late 16th and early
17th centuries. The name of the tune to which they were to be sung
was indicated on the sheet. The subject matter of broadside ballads
covered a wide range of current, historical or simply curious events and
also extended to moral exhortations and religious propaganda.
Broken Rhyme
Rhyming with an initial or medial syllable of a word that is split between
two lines with a hyphen.
Bucolic
Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary (1538) explains "Bucolicum
carmen, a poeme made of herdmen." Cf. eclogue, idyll, and pastoral.
Burden
The choric line or lines that signal the end or the beginning of a stanza
in a carol or hymn.
Burlesque
A work caricaturing another serious work. An example is Samuel
Butler's Hudibras.
Burns Stanza or Meter
Six-line stanza with the rhyme scheme aaabab (where a is a tetrameter
line, and b is a dimeter line).
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