Glossary Term of the Day

Fixed and unfixed forms

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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,. . .

Litotes

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Haiku (or hokku)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A Japanese verse form of three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. It creates a single, memorable image, as in these lines by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield:

        On a branch
        floating downriver
        a cricket, singing.
(In translating from. . .

Anachronism

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Anaphora

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines. See Paul Muldoon’s “As,” William Blake’s “The Tyger,” or much of Walt Whitman’s poetry, including “I Sing the Body Electric.”

Vers libre

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A French phrase meaning “free verse.”

Acmeism

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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.

Sestet

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet.

Ellipsis

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Pentameter

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A line made up of five feet. It is the most common metrical line in English. Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking” is written in iambic pentameter. Hart Crane maintains pentameter lines made up of variable feet in “The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge.” See also blank verse and iamb

Common measure

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Metaphor

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Synesthesia

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A blending or intermingling of different senses in description. “Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine,” writes Emily Dickinson. In her heavily synesthetic poem “Aubade,” Dame Edith Sitwell describes the “dull blunt wooden stalactite / Of rain creaks, hardened by the light.” In. . .

Fugitives

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Augustan Age

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Bucolic

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

See pastoral poetry.

Poulter's measure

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Couplets in which a 12-syllable iambic line (see Alexandrine) rhymes with a 14-syllable iambic line (see Fourteener). It was used frequently during the English Renaissance; see “Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being upon the Sea,” in which Henry Howard breaks the couplets into quatrains.. . .

Metaphysical poets

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A group of 17th-century poets whose works are marked by philosophical exploration, colloquial diction, ingenious conceits , irony , and metrically flexible lines. John Donne is the foremost figure, along with George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. For. . .

Iamb

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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. . .

Ekphrasis

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

“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. . .

OuLiPo

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and. . .

Psychoanalytic theory

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A critical approach influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on the unconscious and human behavior. Freud believed that the existence of three competing impulses in the psyche—the ego, id, and superego—and the conflict inherent in child-parent relations structured human responses to the world.. . .

Pastoral

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the. . .

Rondeau

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Originating in France, a mainly octosyllabic poem consisting of between 10 and 15 lines and three stanzas. It has only two rhymes, with the opening words used twice as an unrhyming refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas. The 10-line version rhymes ABBAABc ABBAc (where the. . .

Négritude

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A term coined in the 1930s by Afro-Martinican French poet Aimé Fernand Césaire, Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. The movement was a reaction against the European colonization of Africa and its legacy of cultural racism. Like the Harlem. . .