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P
Paean
A hymn of praise, joy, triumph, etc.
Paeon
Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of three short and one long
syllables: the first paeon / ' ~ ~ ~ /, the second paeon / ~ ' ~ ~ /, the
third paeon / ~ ~ ' ~ /, and the fourth paeon / ~ ~ ~ ' /.
Palindromes
Thomas Blount's English dictionary (1656) explains that "Palindromes
(Gr.) are those sentences or verses, where the syllables are the same
backward as forward. As a noble Lady in Queen Elizabeths time, being
for a time forbidden the Court, for too much familiarity with a great
Lord in favour, gave this Devise, the Moon covered with a cloud, and
underneath this Palindrome for Motto. Ablata, at alba. A great Lawyer
this, Si nummi, immunis. Which may be Englished thus, Give me my fee
I'le warrant you free. roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor. And this in
English, which is more hard, comes near a true Palindrome, Lewd did I
live, and evil did I dwel."
Palinode
An ode or song that retracts what the poet wrote in a previous poem;
a recantation.
Panegyric
A poem in great praise of someone or something.
Pantoum
The pantoum consists of a series of quatrains rhyming abab. The
second and fourth lines of the first quatrain recur as the first and third
lines in the following quatrain. Succeeding quatrains introduce a new
second rhyme, i.e. abab bcbc. The form can include as many stanzas as
the poet wishes as long as they follow this structure. The closing
stanza opens with the second line of the previous stanza, but the
second and fourth lines come from the first stanza. Hence, the last
stanza is structured like this: Line 2 of previous stanza Line 3 of first
stanza Line 4 of previous stanza Line 1 of first stanza.
Pantun
The pantun was created in Malay. It was originally an oral literary form
of expression. Pantuns have an even number of lines and can range
from two to sixteen lines. It generally has four lines and has a
structured fixed rhythm. Every line tends to have anywhere from eight
to twelve syllables. The quatrains rhyme in an abab pattern with the
second and fourth lines of the first stanza becoming the third and first
lines of the following stanza respectively. While it’s similar to the
pantoum, the lines are reversed when they are repeated in the poem.
Parable
A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a
question. Parables are allegorical stories.
Paradox
A self-contradictory phrase or sentence, such as "the ascending rain"
or Alexander Pope's description of man, "Great lord of all things, yet a
prey to all." Don Marquis's "quote buns by great men quote" (archys
life of mehitabel [London: Faber and Faber, 1934]: 103-04), describes a
drunk trying to go up a down-escalator as "falling upwards / through
the night" (the poem also parodies Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "St.
Augustine").
Paralipsis
A figure of thought where less information is supplied than appears to
be called for by the circumstances.
Parallelism
Two or more expressions that share traits, whether metrical, lexical,
figurative, or grammatical, and can take the form of a list.
Pararhyme
Edmund Blunden's term for double consonance, where different vowels
appear within identical consonant pairs (a feature of Wilfrid Owens'
verse).
Parataxis
Linking clauses just by sequencing them, often without conjunction(s)
and only by means of associations that are implied, not stated.
Parnassian
Of or related to poetry, after Parnassus, a mountain in Greece with two
summits; one summit was consecrated to Bacchus, the other to Apollo
and the Muses, thus Parnassus was regarded as the seat of poetry and
music.
Parody
A not-uncomplimentary send-up of another work, such as Geoffrey
Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" in The Canterbury Tales. Wendy Cope adds
many expert modern parodies in her Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
(1986).
Paronomasia
Punning, a play of meaning by yoking similar-sounding words. See Pun.
Paronym
A word derived from or related to another word; also, the form in one
language for a word in another, as in the English canal for the Latin
canalis.
Pasquinade
A lampoon or satirical writing.
Pastiche
Work patched together from excerpts of other writers, or from
passages clearly recognizable as imitating others.
Pastoral
Following Theocritus (3rd cent. B.C.), verse about those shepherds and
their beloveds who lived the simple vice-free life in Arcadia, a
mountainous region in the Peloponnese of Greece. Also termed bucolic,
eclogues, and idylls.
Pastourelle
A form of pastoral poetry associated chiefly with French writers of the
12th and 13th centuries. Typically, the narrator, identified as a knight,
recounts his love affair with a shepherdess.
Pathetic Fallacy
An expression that endows inanimate things with human feelings.
Pathos
Pathos is the quality in an artistic work that evokes feelings of
sympathy, pity, or sorrow.
Pattern Poetry
Verse that creates the shape of its subject typographically on the page
(and thus also called "shape poetry"). George Herbert's "Easter Wings"
and Lewis Carroll's story of a cat and a mouse in Alice in Wonderland,
chapter III, are examples.
Pause
A pause for a beat in the rhythm of the verse (often indicated by a line
break or a mark of punctuation).
PEN
Acronym for the association, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and
Novelists (1921-).
Pentameter
Five feet; sometimes termed pentapody, a five-part foot, one measure
made up of five feet. Iambic pentameter or cinquepace is the rhythm of
so-called English `heroic' verse of ten syllables.
Perfect Rhyme
Also called true rhyme or exact rhyme, a rhyme which meets the
following requirements: (1) an exact correspondence in the vowel
sound and, in words ending in consonants, the sound of the final
consonant, (2) a difference in the consonant sounds preceding the
vowel, and (3) a similarity of accent on the rhyming syllable(s).
Periphrasis
Using a wordy phrase to describe something for which one term exists.
Persona
The speaker of a poem, a dramatic character distinguished from the
poet, such as Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi."
Personification
An anthropomorphic figure of speech where the poet describes an
abstraction, a thing, or a non-human form as if it were a person.
William Blake's "O Rose, thou art sick!" is an example, but not "Oh
Rose, you smashed up the Chevy again!"
Petrachan Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem with two sections, an octave (eight-line stanza
rhyming abbaabba), and a sestet (six-line-stanza rhyming cdcdcd or
cdecde). Examples are John Milton's "When I Consider How my Light is
Spent" (typical of his practice, this sonnet does not divide its thought
between the octave and the sestet) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
"How Do I Love Thee," and William Wordsworth's "The World is Too
Much with Us."
Pherecratean
A Classical Greek and Latin metrical pattern consisting of an iamb or a
trochee, a dactyl, and a trochee or a spondee.
Phonemic Alphabet
The twelve vowel sounds and twenty-two consonant sounds that make
up spoken English, normally encoded between virgules / /.
Phonetic Symbolism
Sound suggestiveness; the association of particular word-sounds with
common areas of meaning so that other words of similar sounds come
to be associated with those meanings. Also called sound symbolism, it
is utilized by poets to achieve sounds appropriate to their significance.
Phonolexis
A term coined by Philip Davies Roberts to describe "meaning conveyed
through phonemic connotation limited to speakers of a particular
language" (How Poetry Works: The Elements of English Poetry
[Penguin, 1986]: 53-54). For example, the nonce-word "oombaloo" has
connotations of "a billowing, clumpy" drawing rather than a pointy,
spiked one.
Picaresque
The term applied to literature dealing sympathetically with the
adventures of clever and amusing rogues.
Picture Poem
A type of open form poetry in which the poet arranges the lines of the
poem so as to create a particular shape on the page. The shape of the
poem embodies its subject; the poem becomes a picture of what the
poem is describing. Michael McFee’s "In Medias Res" is an example of a
picture poem. See also open form.
Pierian
Of or relating to learning or poetry, after the region of Pieria in ancient
Macedonia which once worshipped the Muses.
Pindaric Ode
See Sonnet.
Play on Words
See Paronomasia, Pun
Pleiad or Pleiade
Named after the open cluster in the constellation Taurus, a group of
16th century French poets who sought to restore the level of French
poetry from its decline in the Middle Ages to classical standards as well
as to enhance the richness of the French language.
Pleonasm
Unnecessary verbiage, redundancy as in "It was a dark and lightless
night."
Ploce
The general term for a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is
repeated in close proximity within a clause or line, usually for emphasis
or for extended significance, as "A wife who was a wife indeed" or
"there are medicines and medicines."
Poem
Defined by Samuel Johnson in his great dictionary (1755) as "The work
of a poet; a metrical composition."
Poems of Chance
Poetry created by adherents of the dadaistic movement, composed by
writing down, without alteration, an illogical chance association of
words, free of the limitations of rational and artistic thought processes.
Poesy
The art and craft of making poems, or the poems themselves.
Poet
A writer of poetry.
Poet Laureate
Apollo degreed that poets should receive laurels as a prize. The British
crown created the post of Poet Laureate in 1688 and awarded it to
poets for life.
Poetaster
"A vile petty poet" (Samuel Johnson, 1755).
Poetic Diction
A conventional subset of English vocabulary, phrasing, and grammatical
usage judged appropriate for verse through its continuous usage by
approved poets from the 18th century on and including effects like
periphrasis and Latinate terminology. See Aureate diction.
Poetic License
The freedom to depart from correctness and grammaticality sometimes
extended to poets by generous readers who believed that the poets
knew better but needed such effects to be true to their subject.
Poetics
Literary study or criticism on the nature and laws of poetic theory and
practice; also, a treatise on poetry or aesthetics.
Poeticule
A dabbler in poetry; a poetaster.
Poetry
A form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language
with its subject. To read a great poem is to bring out the perfect
marriage of its sound and thought in a silent or voiced performance. At
least from the time of Aristotle's Poetics, drama was conceived of as a
species of poetry.
Poet's Corner
An area in the south transept of Westminster Abbey that holds
monuments (or graves) for such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William
Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Michael
Drayton, Samuel Butler, Aphra Behn, John Gay, Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot,
and W. H. Auden.
Polyphonic Prose
A type of free verse using characteristic devices of verse such as
alliteration and assonance, but presented in a form resembling prose.
Polyptoton
Repetition of the same word in different forms, achieved by varying the
case, adding affixes, etc.
Polyrhythmic Verse
A type of free verse characterized by a variety of rhythms, often non-
integrated or contrasting.
Polysyllable
A word consisting of several syllables. It is most often applied to words
of more than three syllables.
Polysyndeton
A figure of speech where successive clauses or phrases are linked by
one or more conjunctions.
Portmanteau Word
Lewis Carroll's phrase for a neologism created by combining two
existing words. His "Jabberwocky," for example, fuses "lithe" and a term
like "slight" or "slimy" to produce "slithy" in the line "'Twas brillig, and
the slithy toves."
Postcolonial Criticism
An approach to literature that focuses on the study of cultural behavior
and expression in relationship to the colonized world. Postcolonial
criticism refers to the analysis of literary works written by writers from
countries and cultures that at one time have been controlled by
colonizing powers—such as Indian writers during or after British colonial
rule. Postcolonial criticism also refers to the analysis of literary works
written about colonial cultures by writers from the colonizing country.
Many of these kinds of analyses point out how writers from colonial
powers sometimes misrepresent colonized cultures by reflecting more
their own values.
Poulter's Measure
Couplets in which a twelve-syllable line rhymes with a fourteen-syllable
line. Chapman uses this form in his translation of Homer. Hymn writers
split the couplet into a quatrain (6 6 8 6), as did ballad writers (8 6 8
6). Limericks can be scanned as Poulter's Measure.
Prizes for Poetry
Examples include the Bollingen, (British) Arts Council, Queen's Gold
Medal for Poetry, Newdigate Prize (Oxford), Poetry Society of America,
Pulitzer Prize, and the Whitbread Literary Award. Prizes are no
guarantee of quality.
Proceleus Maticus
A Classical Greek and Latin foot having four short syllables.
Proceleusmatic
A metrical foot consisting of four short syllables.
Procephalic
In ancient prosody, having an excess of one syllable in the first foot of
a line of verse.
Prolepsis
Anticipation.
Prose
Ordinary language people use in speaking or writing, distinguished from
the language of poetry primarily in that the line is not treated as a
formal unit and it has no repetitive pattern of rhythm or meter.
Prose Poem
Continuous, non-end-stopped writing that has other traits of poetry
and is, from its context, associated with poems.
Prosody
The overall metrical structure of a poem. See also meter.
Prosopopeia
A figure of speech in which an imaginary or absent person is
represented as speaking.
Prothalamium
A song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom before their
wedding.
Proverb
A brief, pithy popular saying or epigram embodying some familiar truth,
practical interpretation of experience, or useful thought.
Psychological Criticism
An approach to literature that draws upon psychoanalytic theories,
especially those of Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan to understand
more fully the text, the writer, and the reader. The basis of this
approach is the idea of the existence of a human unconscious—those
impulses, desires, and feelings about which a person is unaware but
which influence emotions and behavior. Critics use psychological
approaches to explore the motivations of characters and the symbolic
meanings of events, while biographers speculate about a writer’s own
motivations—conscious or unconscious—in a literary work. Psychological
approaches are also used to describe and analyze the reader’s personal
responses to a text.
Pun
An expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled
identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time. For
example, "When Professor Fudge asked his graduate students to bring
a really good lay to the next class, their collective opinion of the scholar
went up a notch."
Pure Poetry
Verse that aims to delight rather than to instruct the reader.
Purple Passage
Lines that stand out from a longer poem because of their vivid diction
or figures of speech, and perhaps because of the agitated flush that
rises in the face of someone trying to recite it.
Pyrrhic
A pyrrhic is a metrical foot used in types of poetry. It consists of two
unstressed syllables (uu).
Pythiambic
A Classical Greek and Latin metrical form, dactylic hexameter and iambic
trimeter couplets.
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