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Our poetry glossary is absolutely one of the best on the internet today. We want you to be armed with knowledge about poetry, poets, and poems. By studying terms and this glossary, you can begin to write better poetry. Read the masters, study your poetry language, practice writing, and of course: post your wondrous creations on our site for all to admire!
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A
Abecedarian
An abecedarian is an alphabetic acrostic. Rather than spelling out the title, each line begins with a word beginning with the next successive line in the alphabet. For example, if the first line begins with "A" then the second line would begin with a word starting with the letter "B."
Abstract Language
Words that represent ideas, intangibles, and concepts such as 'beauty' and 'truth.'
Abstract Poetry
Poetry that aims to use its sounds, textures, rhythms, and rhymes to convey an emotion, instead of relying on the meanings of words.
Academic Verse
Poetry that adheres to the accepted standards and requirements of some kind of 'school.' Poetry approved, officially, or unofficially, by a literary establishment.
Acatalectic
A verse having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot.
Accent
A stressed syllable or ictus. These alternate with unstressed syllables or slacks to produce a theoretical metrical pattern termed the rhythm that often, but not always, matches how the line would be sounded in conversation. Prominence can be achieved by pitch (tone), loudness or impact (stress), or length. An increase in pitch usually creates stress. George Puttenham in 1589 says: "To that which was highest lift vp and most eleuate or shrillest in the eare, they gaue the name of the sharpe accent, to the lowest and most base because it seemed to fall downe rather than to rise vp, they gaue the name of the heauy accent, and that other which seemed in part to lift vp and in part to fall downe, they called the circumflex, or compast accent: and if new termes were not odious, we might very properly call him the (windabout) for so is the Greek word."
Accentual Meter
A rhythmic pattern based on a recurring number of accents or stresses in each line of a poem or section of a poem.
Accentual Verse
Lines whose rhythm arises from its stressed syllables rather than from the number of its syllables, or from the length of time devoted to their sounding. Old English poems such as Beowulf and Caedmon's Hymn are accentual. They fall clearly into two halves, each with two stresses.
Accentual-Syllabic Verse
Lines whose rhythm arises by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. Most English poems from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century are thought to be written according to this metrical system.
Acephalexis
Initial truncation (the dropping of the first, unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line of iambic or anapestic verse).
Acephalous
A line of verse without its expected initial syllable.
Acrostic
A word, phrase, or passage spelled out vertically by the first letters of a group of lines in sequence. Sir John Davies' Hymnes of Astraea dedicates 26 acrostic poems to Elizabeth I. Edgar Allan Poe's "Enigma" provides another example.
Action Poetry
Verse written for performance by several voices.
Adonic
A Classical Greek and Latin metre, a dimeter with a dactyl and a spondee / ~ ' ' / ' ' / such as are found at the close of sapphics.
Adynaton
A type of hyperbole in which the exaggeration is magnified so greatly that it refers to an impossibility, as "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles."
Aesthetic Movement
A literary belief that art is its own justification and purpose, advocated in England by Walter Pater and practiced by Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and others.
Afflatus
A creative inspiration, as that of a poet; a divine imparting of knowledge, thus it is often called divine afflatus.
Aisling
The aisling (pronounced ashling) was developed in Ireland after the 17th century. Unlike some of the other poetic forms listed, this poem does not have a rhyme scheme. It is identified by the content. The aisling is characterized by the poet reciting the tale of having a vision of Ireland in the form of a woman. She can be old or young, beautiful or haggard. This woman is referred to in the poems as an speirbhean (sky-woman). She mourns the state of the Irish people and predicts a change of fortune. This form is one that grew in popularity due to its political power. It is believed that this form was inspired by the French reverdie.
Alcaic verse
A Greek lyrical meter, said to be invented by Alcaeus, a lyric poet from about 600 B.C. Written in tetrameter, the greater Alcaic consists of a spondee or iamb followed by an iamb plus a long syllable and two dactyls. The lesser Alcaic, also in tetrameter, consists of two dactylic feet followed by two iambic feet.
Alcaics
A four-line Classical stanza named after Alcaeus, a Greek poet, with a predominantly dactylic metre, imitated by Alfred lord Tennyson's poem, "Milton."
Alexandrine
A metrical line of six feet or twelve syllables (in English), originally from French heroic verse. Randle Cotgrave in his 1611 French-English dictionary explains: "Alexandrin. A verse of 12, or 13 sillables." In his "Essay on Criticism," Alexander Pope says, "A needless Alexandrine ends the song / That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along" (359). Examples include Michael Drayton's "Polyolbion," Robert Bridges' "Testament of Beauty," and the last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain."
Allegory
Henry Cockeram, in his English dictionary (1623), explains this as "A sentence that must be understood otherwise than the literal interpretation shewes" but does not distinguish among allegory, irony, metaphor, and symbol. Medieval scholars developed Biblical exegesis to allow for at least three types of allegory. Moral allegory interpreted a story as a conflict between good and evil. The other two were types of historical allegory: anagogy foreshadowed the life of Christ (as Abraham's planned sacrifice of Isaac prefigured Christ the Son's self- sacrifice on the cross), and eschatology foreshadowed the end of the world (as Noah's flood looks forward to the Last Judgment and the four last things, heaven, hell, death, and judgment). John Dryden allegorizes secular history in "Absalom and Achitophel." Allegory reveals itself in poems such as Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene when personifications interact on a landscape populated by objectifications.
Alliteration
The repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words, usually at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable: "descending dew drops"; "luscious lemons." Alliteration is based on the sounds of letters, rather than the spelling of words; for example, "keen" and "car" alliterate, but "car" and "cite" do not. Used sparingly, alliteration can intensify ideas by emphasizing key words, but when used too self- consciously, it can be distracting, even ridiculous, rather than effective. See also assonance, consonance.
Allusion
A brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature. Allusions conjure up biblical authority, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, historic figures, wars, great love stories, and anything else that might enrich an author’s work. Allusions imply reading and cultural experiences shared by the writer and reader, functioning as a kind of shorthand whereby the recalling of something outside the work supplies an emotional or intellectual context, such as a poem about current racial struggles calling up the memory of Abraham Lincoln.
Ambiguity
A statement with two or more meanings that may seem to exclude one another in the context. Grammatical ambiguity (amphibologia) occurs where a word has two or more possible word classes. For example, in "BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED," the words "BILL POSTERS" could be either adjective and common noun or a proper name. Lexical ambiguity arises where one word has multiple senses (polysemous terms) or when two different words have the same sound (homonyms). Thus "present" is polysemous because it means both `current time' and `gift,' and "which" and "witch" are homonyms.
Amphibrach
Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, and short syllables / ~ ' ~ / (cf. the English word "romantic"). An example is Matthew Prior's "Jinny the Just." .
Amphigouri
A verse composition, while apparently coherent, contains no sense or meaning.
Amphimacer
A Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of long, short, and long syllables / ' ~ ' / (cf. the English word "forty-five"). An example is Alfred lord Tennyson's "The Oak." See under foot below.
Amphisbaenic Rhyme
A reversed rhyme, such as "trot" and "tort."
Amplification
Rhetorical figures of speech that repeat and vary the expression of a thought.
Anachronism
Someone or something belonging to another time period than the one in which it is described as being.
Anaclasis
The substitution of different measures to break up the rhythm.
Anacoluthon
An interruption in a sentence, sometimes indicated by a pause, that is afterwards restarted in a syntactically different way. See also aposiopesis.
Anacreontic Verse
Imitations of the 6th-century B.C. Greek poet Anacreon, who wrote about love and wine. Thomas Moore translated Anacreon's odes in 1800. Abraham Cowley adapted them in his Anacreontics.
Anacrucis
One or two unstressed syllables at the beginning of a line that are unnecessary to the metre.
Anadiplosis
A repetition of the last word in a line or segment at the start of the next line or segment.
Anagram
A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word. When both lexical forms appear in the same poem, especially in proximity, a reader may reasonably suspect that the anagram is a figure of speech. If only one form occurs, the encoding of an association is harder to prove. For example, "the teacher gapes at the mounds of exam pages lying before her."
Analepsis
A flashback.
Analogue
Usually a semantic or narrative feature in one work said to resemble something in another work, without necessarily implying that a cause- and-effect relationship exists (as would be the case with source and influence). For example, Beowulf's battle with the Dragon is analogous with the fight between the Red Cross Knight and the Dragon in Book I of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
Analogy
An agreement or similarity in some particulars between things otherwise different; sleep and death, for example, are analogous in that they both share a lack of animation and a recumbent posture.
Anapest
A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. Examples include the words "undermine" and "overcome." See Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib."
Anapestic (anapest)
A metrical foot containing three syllables--the first two are unstressed, while the last is stressed
Anaphora
An anaphora is the repetition of a word or a phrase as the beginning of successive clauses. For example, Winston Churchill is quoted as saying "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds...." The phrase "we shall fight" is an example of an anaphora.
Anastrophe
A type of hyperbaton involving the inversion of the natural or usual syntactical order of a pair of words for rhetorical or poetic effect.
Antagonist
The character, force, or collection of forces in fiction or drama that opposes the protagonist and gives rise to the conflict of the story; an opponent of the protagonist, such as Claudius in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. See also character, conflict.
Antanaclasis
A figure of speech in which the same word is repeated in a different sense within a clause or line.
Antepenultima
The second last word of a line, or the second last syllable of a word.
Anthology
A collection of selected literary, artistic, or musical works or parts of works.
Anthropomorphism
A figure of speech where the poet characterizes an abstract thing or object as if it were a person. See also personification.
Antibacchic
Classical Greek and Latin foot consisting of long, long, and short syllables / ' ' ~ / . An English example is the word "Goddamit."
Anticlimax
The intentional use of elevated language to describe the trivial or commonplace, or a sudden transition from a significant thought to a trivial one in order to achieve a humorous or satiric effect.
Antihero
A protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. He or she may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely pathetic. Often what antiheroes learn, if they learn anything at all, is that the world isolates them in an existence devoid of God and absolute values. Yossarian from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is an example of an antihero. See also character.
Antiphon
A sacred poem with responses or alternative parts.
Antiphrasis
The ironic or humorous use of words in a sense not in accord with their literal meaning, as in "a giant of three feet four inches."
Antispast
Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, long, and short syllables (i.e., an iambus and a trochee) / ~ ' ' ~ / . A possible English example is "unblackguarded."
Antisthecon
A rhyme created by distorting a word, such as "Samoa" for "some more of" in the limerick "An old maid in the land of Aloha."
Antistrophe
(1) a reply to the strophe, and the second stanza in a Pindaric ode; or (2) the repetition of the same word or phrase at the end of successive lines or clauses.
Antithesis
A figure of speech in which words and phrases with opposite meanings are balanced against each other. An example of antithesis is "To err is human, to forgive, divine." (Alexander Pope)
Antonomasia
Using an epithet or a title in place of a proper name.
Antonym
An antonym is a word that has the opposite meaning of another word. For example, the antonym of smooth is rough.
Antonymy
Semantic contrasts.
Aphaeresis or Apheresis
A type of elision in which a letter or syllable is omitted at the beginning of a word, as 'twas for it was.
Aphesis
The omission of the initial syllable of a word. See also Apocope.
Aphorism
One writer's citation of another, known author's truism or pithy remark.
Apocopated Rhyme
An imperfect rhyme between the final syllable of a word and the penultimate syllable of another word.
Apocope
The omission of the last syllable of a word. See also Aphesis.
Apologue
An allegorical narrative, usually intended to convey a moral or a useful truth.
Aporia
Explained by Samuel Johnson, in his great dictionary (1755), as "a figure in rhetorick, by which the speaker shews, that he doubts where to begin for the multitude of matter, or what to say in some strange and ambiguous thing; and doth, as it were, argue the case with himself."
Aposiopesis
An interruption of an expresion without a subsequent restarting. See also anacoluthon.
Apostrophe
Words that are spoken to a person who is absent or imaginary, or to an object or abstract idea. The poem God's World by Edna St. Vincent Millay begins with an apostrophe: "O World, I cannot hold thee close enough!/Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!/Thy mists that roll and rise!"
Arcadia
A region or scene characterized by idyllic quiet and simplicity, often chosen as a setting for pastoral poetry.
Archaism
Using obsolete or archaic words when current alternatives are available.
Archetype
A term used to describe universal symbols that evoke deep and sometimes unconscious responses in a reader. In literature, characters, images, and themes that symbolically embody universal meanings and basic human experiences, regardless of when or where they live, are considered archetypes. Common literary archetypes include stories of quests, initiations, scapegoats, descents to the underworld, and ascents to heaven. See also mythological criticism.
Arsis
The accented or longer part of a poetic foot; the point where an ictus is put.
Asclepiad
A Classical metrical line made up of a spondee, two or three choriambs, and one iamb or spondee, i.e., / ' ' / ' ~ ~ ' / ' ~ ~ ' / ~ ' / (named after the Greek poet Asclepiades, ca. 290 B.C.). Examples of accentual asclepiads in English include Sir Philip Sidney's "O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness" from Arcadia, and W. H. Auden's "In Due Season."
Assonance
The repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words that do not end the same, for example, "asleep under a tree," or "each evening." Similar endings result in rhyme, as in "asleep in the deep." Assonance is a strong means of emphasizing important words in a line. See also alliteration, consonance.
Asyndeton
Lists of words, phrases, or expressions without conjunctions such as `and' and `or' to link them. George Herbert uses this figure of speech in "Prayer (1)."
Atmosphere
The mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work.
Aubade (Provençal)
A medieval love poem welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. An example is John Donne's "The Sun Rising."
Augustan
English literature at the beginning of the 18th century by poets such as Addison, Pope, and Swift, who emulated Ovid, Horace, or Virgil, the great Latin poets of the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 B.C. - 14 A. D.).
Aureate Language
Polysyllabic Latinate poetic diction employed especially by the Scottish Chaucerians. See poetic diction.
Avant Garde
The innovating artists or writers who promote the use of new or experimental concepts or techniques.
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