Forms & Types

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

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 Parkers Interview: The ladies men admire, Ive 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 passd, /Turnd critics next, and proved plain fools at last. Browse more couplet poems.

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

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.

Curtal sonnet
See Sonnet.

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 Rossettis A Dirge and Sir Philip Sidneys Ring Out Your Bells.

Aubade
A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. The form originated in medieval France. See John Donnes The Sun Rising and Louise Bogans LeaveTaking. Browse more aubade poems.

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 includeBarbara 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 Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci, Thomas Hardys During Wind and Rain, and Edgar Allan Poes Annabel Lee. Browse more ballads.

Doggerel
Bad verse traditionally characterized by clichs, 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 Silvry Tay, Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silvry 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.

Ballade
An Old French verse form that usually consists of three eightline stanzas and a four-line envoy, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbc bebc. The last line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of subsequent stanzas and the envoy. See Hilaire Bellocs Ballade of Modest Confession and Algernon Charles Swinburnestranslation of Franois Villons Ballade des Pendus (Ballade of the Hanged).

Dramatic monologue
A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Brownings My Last Duchess, T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Ais 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. Browse more dramatic monologue poems.

Bucolic
See pastoral poetry.

Canto
A long subsection of an epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante AlighierisCommedia (The Divine Comedy), first employed in English by Edmund Spenserin The Faerie Queene. Other examples include Lord Byrons Don Juan and Ezra Pounds Cantos.

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 Spensers Shepheardes Calendar: April, Andrew Marvells Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn, and John Crowe Ransoms Eclogue.

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. The canzone influenced the development of the sonnet.

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 Southwells The Burning Babe. Many traditional Christmas songs are carols, such as I Saw Three Ships and The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Elegy
In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subjects death but ends in consolation. Examples include John MiltonsLycidas; Alfred, Lord Tennysons In Memoriam; and Walt Whitmans 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. Browse more elegies.

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 HerbertsEaster Wings and The Altar and George Starbucks Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree. Browse more concrete poems.

1/POETRY GLOSSARY

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 Bellocs satirical Ballade of Modest Confession.

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 orballad meter. See also Poulters measure.

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 Spensers The Faerie Queene (which follows the virtuous exploits of 12 knights in the service of the mythical King Arthur), and John Miltons Paradise Lost, which dramatizes Satans fall from Heaven and humankinds subsequent alienation from God in the Garden of Eden. Browse more epics.

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. Browse more free-verse poems.

Epigram
A pithy, often witty, poem. See Walter Savage Landors Dirce, Ben Jonsons 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. Browse more epigrams.

Ghazal
(Pronounciation: guzzle) Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplets rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poets. In t he Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. English-language poets who have composed in the form includeAdrienne Rich, John Hollander, and Agha Shahid Ali; see Alis Tonight and Patricia Smiths Hip-Hop Ghazal. Browse more ghazal poems.

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 Byrons Epistle to Augusta. Less formal, more conversational versions of the epistle can be found in contemporary lyric poetry; see Hayden Carruths The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill or Dear Mr. Fanelli by Charles Bernstein. Browse more epistles.

Gnomic verse
Poems laced with proverbs, aphorisms, or maxims. The term was first applied to Greek poets in the 6th century BCE and was practiced in medieval Germany and England. See excerpts from the Exeter Book. Robert Creeley explored the genre in his contemporary Gnomic Verses.

Epitaph
A short poem intended for (or imagined as) an inscription on a tombstone and often serving as a brief elegy. See Robert Herricks Upon a Child That Died andUpon Ben Jonson; Ben Jonsons Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H.; and Epitaph for a Romantic Woman by Louise Bogan.

Haiku (or hokku)

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 Japanese to English, Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.) See also Three Haiku, Two Tanka by Philip Appleman and Robert Hasss After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa. The Imagist poets of the early 20th century, including Ezra Pound and H.D., showed appreciation for the forms linguistic and sensory economy; Pounds In a Station of the Metro embodies the spirit of haiku. Browse more haiku.

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 Spensers Epithalamion. Browse moreepithalamions.

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.

Heroic couplet
See couplet.

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 Pounds 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 Bradfords History of Plymouth Plantation.

Horatian ode
See ode.

Hymn
A poem praising God or the divine, often sung. In English, the most popular hymns were written between the 17th and 19th centuries. See Isaac Wattss Our God, Our Help, Charles Wesleys My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine, and Thou Hidden Love of God by John Wesley.

2/POETRY GLOSSARY

Italian sonnet
See Sonnet.

Lament
Any poem expressing deep grief, usually at the death of a loved one or some other loss. Related to elegy and the dirge. See A Lament by Percy Bysshe Shelley; Thom Gunns Lament; and Edna St. Vincent Millays Lament.

Landays
A form of folk poetry from Afghanistan. Meant to be recited or sung aloud, and frequently anonymous, the form is a couplet comprised of 22 syllables. The first line has 9 syllables and the second line 13 syllables. Landays end on ma or na sounds and treat themes such as love, grief, homeland, war, and separation. See Eliza Griswolds extensive reporting on the form in the June 2013 issue of Poetry, in which she explains how the form was created by and for the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552442 B.C.E.) ode was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. (See Stephen Burts article And the Winner Is . . . Pindar!) English odes written in the Pindaric tradition include Thomas Grays The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode and William Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood. Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (658 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner; see Andrew Marvells Horatian Ode upon Cromwells Return from Ireland. The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. See Algernon Charles Swinburnes Sapphics. The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridges Dejection: An Ode,) or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, andTo Autumn). Browse more odes.

Light verse
Whimsical poems taking forms such as limericks, nonsense poems, and double dactyls. See Edward Lears The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Lewis Carrolls The Walrus and the Carpenter. Other masters of light verse include Dorothy Parker,G.K. Chesterton, John Hollander, and Wendy Cope.

Ottava rima
Originally an Italian stanza of eight 11-syllable lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form in English, and Lord Byron adapted it to a 10-syllable line for his mock-epic Don Juan. W.B. Yeats used it for Among School Children and Sailing to Byzantium. Browse more ottava rima poems.

Limerick
A fixed light-verse form of five generally anapestic lines rhyming AABBA. Edward Lear, who popularized the form, fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. Limericks are traditionally bawdy or just irreverent; see A Young Lady of Lynn or Lears There was an Old Man with a Beard. Browse morelimericks.

Palinode
An ode or song that retracts or recants what the poet wrote in a previous poem. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales ends with a retraction, in which he apologizes for the works worldly vanitees and sinful contents.

Lyric
Originally a composition meant for musical accompaniment. The term refers to a short poem in which the poet, the poets persona, or another speaker expresses personal feelings. See Robert Herricks To Anthea, who May Command Him Anything, John Clares I Hid My Love, Louise Bogans Song for the Last Act, or Louise Glcks Vita Nova.

Panegyric
A poem of effusive praise. Its origins are Greek, and it is closely related to the eulogy and the ode. See Ben Jonsons To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare or Anne Bradstreets In Honor of That High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth.

Madrigal
A song or short lyric poem intended for multiple singers. Originating in 14th-century Italy, it became popular in England in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It has no fixed metrical requirements. See Rosalinds Madrigal by Thomas Lodge.

Pantoum
A Malaysian verse form adapted by French poets and occasionally imitated in English. It comprises a series of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The second and fourth lines of the final stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza. See A.E. Stallingss Another Lullaby for Insomniacs. Browse more pantoums.

Mock epic
A poem that plays with the conventions of the epic to comment on a topic satirically. In Mac Flecknoe, John Dryden wittily flaunts his mastery of the epic genre to cut down a literary rival. Alexander Popes The Rape of the Lock recasts a petty highsociety scandal as a mythological battle for the virtue of an innocent.

Pastoral
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 imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spensers The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowes The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and Sir Walter Raleghs response, The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd. The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adamss Country Summer, Dylan Thomass Fern Hill, or Allen GinsbergsWales Visitation. Browse more pastoral poems.

Occasional poem
A poem written to describe or comment on a particular event and often written for a public reading. Alfred, Lord Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigadecommemorates a disastrous battle in the Crimean War. George Starbuck wroteOf Late after reading a newspaper account of a Vietnam War protesters suicide. Elizabeth Alexanders Praise Song for the Day was written for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. See also elegy, epithalamion, and ode.

Octave
An eight-line stanza or poem. See ottava rima and triolet. The first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet are also called an octave.

Pattern poetry
See Concrete poetry.

Ode
A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and

Pindaric ode
See Ode.

3/POETRY GLOSSARY

Prose poem
A prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry. See Amy Lowells Bath, Metals Metals by Russell Edson, Informationby David Ignatow, and Harryette Mullens [Kills bugs dead.] Browse more prose poems.

the repetition of the first two lines in the middle of the poem and at its end. Algernon Charles Swinburnes The Roundel is 11 lines in two stanzas.

Sapphic verse
See ode.

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

Quatrain
A four-line stanza, rhyming -ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain), as in Samuel Taylor Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. -AABB (a double couplet); see A.E. Housmans To an Athlete Dying Young. -ABAB (known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic), as in Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard or Sadie and Maud by Gwendolyn Brooks. -ABBA (known as envelope or enclosed), as in Alfred, Lord Tennysons In Memoriam or John Ciardis Most Like an Arch This Marriage. -AABA, the stanza of Robert Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Browse poems with quatrains.

Sestina
A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza: 123456 615243 364125 532614 451362 246531 (6 2) (1 4) (5 3) See Algernon Charles Swinburnes The Complaint of Lisa," John AshberysFarm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," and David Ferrys The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People." Browse more sestinas.

Refrain
A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza. See the refrain jump back, honey, jump back in Paul Lawrence DunbarsA Negro Love Song or return and return again in James Laughlins O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again. Browse poems with a refrain.

Renga
A Japanese form composed of a series of half-tanka written by different poets. The opening stanza is the basis of the modern haiku form.

Shakespearean sonnet
See Sonnet.

Sijo
A Korean verse form related to haiku and tanka and comprised of three lines of 14-16 syllables each, for a total of 44-46 syllables. Each line contains a pause near the middle, similar to a caesura, though the break need not be metrical. The first half of the line contains six to nine syllables; the second half should contain no fewer than five. Originally intended as songs, sijo can treat romantic, metaphysical, or spiritual themes. Whatever the subject, the first line introduces an idea or story, the second supplies a turn, and the third provides closure. Modern sijo are sometimes printed in six lines.

Rhyme royal (rime royale)

A stanza of seven 10-syllable lines, rhyming ABABBCC, popularized by Geoffrey Chaucer and termed royal because his imitator, James I of Scotland, employed it in his own verse. In addition to Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, see Sir Thomas Wyatts They flee from me and William Wordsworths Resolution and Independence.

Romance
French in origin, a genre of long narrative poetry about medieval courtly culture and secret love. It triumphed in English with tales of chivalry such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Geoffrey Chaucers The Knights Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

Slam
A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points. Slam is a composite genre that combines elements of poetry, theater, performance, and storytelling. The genres origins can be traced to Chicago in the early 1980s. Since then, groups of volunteers have organized slams in venues across the world. The first National Poetry Slam was held in 1990, and has become an annual event in which teams from cities across the United States compete at events in a host city. For more on poetry slams, see Jeremy Richardss series Performing the Academy. See also poets Tyehimba Jess, Bob Holman, and Patricia Smith.

Rondeau
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 lower-case c stands for the refrain). The 15-line version often rhymes AABBA AABc AABAc. Geoffrey ChaucersNow welcome, summer at the close of The Parlement of Fowls is an example of a 13-line rondeau. A rondeau redoubl consists of six quatrains using two rhymes. The first quatrain consists of four refrain lines that are used, in sequence, as the last lines of the next four quatrains, and a phrase from the first refrain is repeated as a tail at the end of the final stanza. See Dorothy Parkers Roudeau Redoubl (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That).

Sonnet
A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally a little song, the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or turn of thought in its concluding lines. The Petrarchan sonnet, perfected by the Italian poet Petrarch, divides the 14 lines into two sections: an eight-line stanza (octave) rhyming ABBAABBA, and a six-line stanza (sestet)

Rondel (roundel)
A poetic form of 11 to 14 lines consisting of two rhymes and

4/POETRY GLOSSARY

rhyming CDCDCD or CDEEDE. John Miltons When I Consider How my Light Is Spent and Elizabeth Barrett Brownings How Do I Love Theeemploy this form. The Italian sonnet is an English variation on the traditional Petrarchan version. The octaves rhyme scheme is preserved, but the sestet rhymes CDDCEE. See Thomas Wyatts Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where Is an Hind and John DonnesIf Poisonous Minerals, and If That Tree. Wyatt and Surrey developed the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet, which condenses the 14 lines into one stanza of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG (though poets have frequently varied this scheme; see Wilfred Owens Anthem for Doomed Youth). George Herberts Love (II), Claude McKays America, and Molly PeacocksAltruism are English sonnets. These three types have given rise to many variations, including: -The caudate sonnet, which adds codas or tails to the 14-line poem. See Gerard Manley Hopkinss That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire. -The curtal sonnet, a shortened version devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins that maintains the proportions of the Italian form, substituting two six-stress tercets for two quatrains in the octave (rhyming ABC ABC), and four and a half lines for the sestet (rhyming DEBDE), also six-stress except for the final three-stress line. See his poem Pied Beauty. -The sonnet redoubl, also known as a crown of sonnets, is composed of 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous; the last sonnet consists of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets, in the same order in which they appeared. Marilyn Nelsons A Wreath for Emmett Till is a contemporary example. -A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets sharing the same subject matter and sometimes a dramatic situation and persona. See George Merediths Modern Love sequence, Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophel and Stella, Rupert Brookes 1914sequence, and Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Sonnets from the Portuguese. -The Spenserian sonnet is a 14-line poem developed by Edmund Spenser in hisAmoretti, that varies the English form by interlocking the three quatrains (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE). -The stretched sonnet is extended to 16 or more lines, such as those in George Merediths sequence Modern Love. -A submerged sonnet is tucked into a longer poetic work; see lines 235-48 of T.S. Eliots The Waste Land. Browse more sonnets.

modern free verse, the stanza, like a prose paragraph, can be used to mark a shift in mood, time, or thought.

Syllabic verse
Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Marianne Moores poetry is mostly syllabic. Other examples include Thomas Nashes Adieu, farewell earths bliss and Dylan Thomass Poem in October. Browse more poems in syllabic verse.

Tanka
A Japanese form of five lines with 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables 31 in all. See Philip Applemans Three Haiku, Two Tanka. See also renga.

Tercet
A poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed. Thomas Hardys The Convergence of the Twain rhymes AAA BBB; Ben Jonsons On Spies is a three-line poem rhyming AAA; and Percy Bysshe Shelleys Ode to the West Wind is written in terza rima form. Examples of poems in unrhymed tercets include Wallace Stevenss The Snow Man and David Wagoners For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop. Browse more poems with tercets.

Terza rima
An Italian stanzaic form, used most notably by Dante Alighieri in Commedia (The Divine Comedy), consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes (ABA BCB DED EFE, and so on). A concluding couplet rhymes with the penultimate line of the last tercet. See Percy Bysshe Shelleys Ode to the West Wind, Derek Walcotts The Bounty, and Omeros, and Jacqueline Osherows Autumn Psalm. Browse more poems in terza rima.

Triolet
An eight-line stanza having just two rhymes and repeating the first line as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line as the eighth. See Sandra McPhersons Triolet or Triolets in the Argolid by Rachel Hadas.

Verse
As a mass noun, poetry in general; as a regular noun, a line of poetry. Typically used to refer to poetry that possesses more formal qualities.

Verse paragraph
A group of verse lines that make up a single rhetorical unit. In longer poems, the first line is often indented, like a paragraph in prose. The long narrative passages of John Miltons Paradise Lost are verse paragraphs. The titled sections of Robert Pinskys Essay on Psychiatrists demarcate shifts in focus and argument much as prose paragraphs would. A shorter lyric poem, even when broken into stanzas, could be considered a single verse paragraph, insofar as it expresses a unified mood or thought; see Gail Mazurs Evening.

Villanelle
A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. See Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishops One Art, and Edwin Arlington Robinsons The House on the Hill. Browse more villanelles.

Spenserian stanza
The unit of Edmund Spensers long poem The Faerie Queene, consisting of eightiambic-pentameter lines and a final alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC. Later uses of this stanza form include John Keatss The Eve of St. Agnes, Percy Bysshe Shelleys Adonais, and Alfred Lord Tennysons The Lotos-Eaters.

Stanza
A grouping of lines separated from others in a poem. In

5/POETRY GLOSSARY

Rhythm & Meter

Cretic
Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of a short syllable enclosed by two long syllables. Its use in English poetry is rare, though instances can be found in proverbs and idiomatic expressions such as After a while, crocodile.

Accentual verse
Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllablesregardless of the total number of syllablesin each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are accentual; see Ezra Pounds modern translation ofThe 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.

Dactyl
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words poetry and basketball are both dactylic. Tennysons TheCharge of the Light Brigade is written in dactylic meter. (See also double dactyl.)

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.

Dimeter
A line of verse composed of two feet. Some go local / Some go express / Some cant wait / To answer Yes, writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem Yes, in which the dimeter line predominates. Kay Ryans Blandeur contains this series of mostly dimeter lines: Even out Earths rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers

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.

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

Double dactyl
A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal, Anthony Hecht, andJohn 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) Browse more double dactyl poems.

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 MiltonsParadise Lost, Robert Brownings dramatic monologues, and Wallace StevenssSunday Morning, are written predominantly in blank verse. Browse more blank verse poems.

Cadence
The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse).

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 Walcotts The Bounty. When the pause occurs toward the beginning or end of the line, it is termed, respectively, initial or terminal. Elizabeth Barrett BrowningsMother 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?)

End-stopped
A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break such as a dash or closing parenthesisor 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 Popes couplets are end-stopped, as in this passage from An Essay on Man: Epistle I: Then say not mans imperfect, Heavn in fault; Say rather, mans as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measurd 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.

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.

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 Dickinsons poems are written in common measure, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Haydens The Ballad of Nat Turner and Elinor Wylies A Crowded Trolley Car. See also Poulters measure and fourteener. Browse more common measure poems.

6/POETRY GLOSSARY

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).

Pentameter
A line made up of five feet. It is the most common metrical line in English. Theodore Roethkes 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.

Hendecasyllabic
A Classical Greek and Latin metrical line consisting of 11 syllables: typically aspondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the end. The classical Latin poet Catullus favored the line. It is seldom used in English, although Algernon Charles Swinburne worked with the meter in Hendecasyllabics: In the month of the long decline of roses I, beholding the summer dead before me, Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent, Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions Half divided the eyelids of the sunset . . .

Poulter's measure
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. This is a common feature of hymn and ballad meter as well. Limericks can be scanned as Poulters measure. See also common measure.

Pyrrhic meter
A metrical unit consisting of two unstressed syllables, in accentual-syllabic verse, or two short syllables, in quantitative meter. Though regularly found in classical Greek poetry, pyrrhic meter is not generally used in modern systems of prosody: unaccented syllables are instead grouped with surrounding feet. Andrew Marvells The Garden contains examples of pyrrhic meter, here in bold: To a green thought in a green shade.

Heptameter
A meter made up of seven feet and usually 14 syllables total (see Fourteener).George Chapmans translation of Homers the Iliad is written in heptameter, as is Edgar Allan Poes Annabel Lee. See also Poulters measure.

Hexameter
A metrical line of six feet, most often dactylic, and found in Classical Latin or Greek poetry, including Homers Iliad. In English, an iambic hexameter line is also known as an alexandrine. Only a few poets have written in dactylic hexameter, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the long poem Evangeline: Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and longer, And the retreating sun the sign of the Scorpion enters. Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the ice-bound, Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands.

Quantitative meter
The dominant metrical system in Classical Greek and Italian poetry, in which the rhythm depends not on the number of stresses, but on the length of time it takes to utter a line. That duration depends on whether a syllable is long or short a distinction that is harder to hear in English pronunciation. Edmund Spenser attempted to adapt quantitative meter to English in his poem Iambicum Trimetrum.

Rhyme
The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the words last stressed syllable. Thus tenacity and mendacity rhyme, but not jaundice and John does, or tomboy and calm bay. A rhyme scheme is usually the pattern of end rhymes in a stanza, with each rhyme encoded by a letter of the alphabet, from a onward (ABBA BCCB, for example). Rhymes are classified by the degree of similarity between sounds within words, and by their placement within the lines or stanzas. -Eye rhyme rhymes only when spelled, not when pronounced. For example, through and rough. -End rhyme, the most common type, is the rhyming of the final syllables of a line. See Midstairs by Virginia Hamilton Adair: And here on this turning of the stair Between passion and doubt, I pause and say a double prayer, One for you, and one for you; And so they cancel out. -Feminine rhyme applies to the rhyming of one or more unstressed syllables, such as dicing and enticing. Ambrose Bierces The Day of Wrath employs feminine rhyme almost exclusively. Half rhyme is the rhyming of the ending consonant sounds in a word (such as tell with toll, or sopped with leapt). This is also termed off-rhyme, slant rhyme, or apophany. See consonance. -Identical rhyme employs the same word, identically in sound and in sense, twice in rhyming positions. -Internal rhyme is rhyme within a single line of verse When a word from the middle of a line is rhymed with a word at the end

Iamb
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 speech. In Robert FrostsAfter Apple Picking the iamb is the vehicle for the natural, colloquial speech pattern: My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And theres a barrel that I didnt fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didnt pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

Meter
The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry is accentualsyllabic. See also accentual meter, syllabic meter, and quantitative meter. Falling meter refers to trochees anddactyls (i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables).Iambs and anapests (i.e., one or two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) are called rising meter. See also foot.

7/POETRY GLOSSARY

of the line. -Masculine rhyme describes those rhymes ending in a stressed syllable, such as hells and bells. It is the most common type of rhyme in English poetry. -Monorhyme is the use of only one rhyme in a stanza. See William Blakes Silent, Silent Night. -Pararhyme is poet Edmund Blundens term for double consonance, where different vowels appear within identical consonant pairs. For example, see Wilfred Owens Strange Meeting: Through granites which Titanic wars had groined. / Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned. See also alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia. Browse poems with rhymed stanzas.

Skylark employs trochaic trimeter in the first two lines of each stanza. See also Lonie AdamssThe Mount.

Trochee
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable. Examples of trochaic words include garden and highway. William Blake opens The Tyger with a predominantly trochaic line: Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright. Edgar Allan Poes The Raven is mainly trochaic.

Vers libre
A French phrase meaning free verse.

Rhythm
An audible pattern in verse established by the intervals between stressed syllables. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference, observes Edward Hirsch in his essay on rhythm, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. See also meter.

Scansion
The analysis of the metrical patterns of a poem by organizing its lines into feet of stressed and unstressed syllables and showing the major pauses, if any. Scansion also involves the classification of a poems stanza, structure, and rhymescheme.

Spondee
A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is hog-wild. Gerard Manley Hopkinss Pied Beauty is heavily spondaic: With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

Sprung rhythm
A metrical system devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins composed of one- to four-syllable feet that start with a stressed syllable. The spondee replaces the iamb as a dominant measure, and the number of unstressed syllables varies considerably from line to line (see also accentual verse). According to Hopkins, its intended effect was to reflect the dynamic quality and variations of common speech, in contrast to the monotony of iambic pentameter. His own poetry illustrates its use; though there have been few imitators, the spirit and principles of sprung rhythm influenced the rise of free verse in the early 20th century.

Stress
A syllable uttered in a higher pitchor with greater emphasis than others. The English language itself determines how English words are stressed, but sentence structure, semantics, and meter influence the placement and perception of stress. See alsoaccentual verse, accentual-syllabic verse, foot, meter, rhythm,and scansion.

Syllable
A single unit of speech sound as written or spoken; specifically, a vowel preceded by zero to three consonants (awl, bring, strand), and followed by zero to four consonants (too, brag, gloss, stings, sixths).

Tetrameter
A line made up of four feet. See William Shakespeares Fear No More the Heat o the Sun or Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy.

Trimeter
A line of three metrical feet. Percy Bysshe Shelleys To a

8/POETRY GLOSSARY

Techniques & Figures of Speech

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 Dischs Abecedary adapts the principles of an abecedarian poem, while Matthea Harveys 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.

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 and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and 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 Muldoons As, William Blakes The Tyger, or much of Walt Whitmans poetry, including I Sing the Body Electric. See also Rebecca Hazelton's explanatory essay, Adventures in Anaphora.

Allegory
An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegorys meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress and Edmund SpensersThe Faerie Queene are two major allegorical works in English.

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: We saw the sea sound sing, we heard the salt sheet tell, from Dylan Thomass Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed. Browse poems withalliteration.

Allusion
A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliots influential long poem is dense with allusions. The title of Seamus Heaneys autobiographical poem Singing Schoolalludes to a line from W.B. Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium (Nor is there singing school but studying /Monuments of its own magnificence). Browse poems withallusions.

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

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 readers 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 poets attempts to express something ineffable, as in Gerard Manley Hopkinss 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 speakers 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.

Antithesis
Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings. William Blake pits loves competing impulsesselflessness and self-interestagainst each other in his poem The Clod and the Pebble. Love builds a Heaven in Hells despair, or, antithetically, it builds a Hell in Heavens despite.

Aphorism
A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage. See Benjamin Franklins How to get RICHES. Browse more aphorisms.

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 deaths power by directly admonishing it. Emily Dickinson addresses her absent object of passion in Wild nights!Wild nights!

Anachronism
Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeares 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 Olsons epic The Maximus Poems, the central figure encompasses the poets 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.

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.

Anaphora
Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the

Assonance
The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants;

9/POETRY GLOSSARY

sometimes called vowel rhyme. See Amy Lowells In a Garden (With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur) or The Taxi (And shout into the ridges of the wind). Browse poems with assonance.

Cacophony
Harsh or discordant word sounds; the opposite of euphony. See dissonance.

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 Marvells To His Coy Mistress and Robert Herricks To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.

the metaphysicalconceit. John Donne and other socalled metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the readers attention. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donnes conceits, see Stephen Burts Poem Guide on John Donne's The Sun Rising.)

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

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 Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn (Beauty is truth, truth beauty).

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 Hopkinss 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 Steins 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.

Circumlocution
A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridges twice five miles of fertile ground (i.e., 10 miles) in Kubla Khan. Also known as periphrasis.

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. Eliots The Waste Land, which includes newspaper clippings, music lyrics, nursery rhymes, and overheard speech. Ezra Pounds Cantos also use the technique extensively. For more examples of language-based collage see Susan Howes My Emily Dickinson and Ted Berrigans The Sonnets.

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 endeard, 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!

Complaint
A poem of lament, often directed at an ill-fated love, as in Henry HowardsComplaint of the Absence of Her Love Being upon the Sea, or Sir Philip SidneysAstrophel 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.).

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 Shakespeares 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

10/POETRY GLOSSARY

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. DiPieros poem guide on Robert Browning for more on ekphrasis. Browse more ekphrastic poems.

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.

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 SchulmansAmerican Solitude opens with a quote from an essay by Marianne Moore. Lines from Phillis Wheatleys On Being Brought from Africa to America preface Alfred Corns Sugar Cane. Browse more poems with epigraphs.

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 amrous causes springs, goes the first line of Alexander Popes The Rape of the Lock, in which amorous is elided to amrous to establish the pentameter (five-foot) line.

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 wordsanaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for example). Browse all terms related to figures of speech.

Ellipsis
In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the readers 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.

Hyperbole
A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. For example, see James Tates lines She scorched you with her radiance or He was more wronged than Job. Hyperbole usually carries the force of strong emotion, as in Andrew Marvellsdescription of a forlorn lover: The sea him lent those bitter tears Which at his eyes he always wears; And from the winds the sighs he bore, Which through his surging breast do roar. No day he saw but that which breaks Through frighted clouds in forkd streaks, While round the rattling thunder hurled, As at the funeral of the world.

Enjambment
The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of endstopped. William Carlos WilliamssBetween 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

Invocation
An address to a deity or muse that often takes the form of a request for help in composing the poem at hand. Invocations can occur at the beginning of the poem or start of a new canto; they are considered conventions of the epic form and are a type of apostrophe. See the opening of John Miltons Paradise Lost. Alexander Pope mocked the convention in the first canto of The Rape of the Lock. A contemporary example is Denise Levertovs poem Invocation.

Irony
As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant. Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the contradiction. When William Shakespeare relates in detail how his lover suffers in comparison with the beauty of nature in My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun, it is understood that he is elevating her beyond these comparisons; considering her essence as a whole, and what she means to the speaker, she is more beautiful than nature. Dramatic or situational irony involves a contrast between reality and a characters intention or ideals. For example, in Sophocles Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus searches for his fathers murderer, not knowing that he himself is that man. In The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy contrasts the majesty and beauty of the ocean liner Titanic with its tragic fate and new ocean-bottom inhabitants: Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

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 Iliadand The Odyssey. In the following passage from Book I of Paradise Lost, John Milton compares Lucifers massive army to scattered autumn leaves: His legionsangel forms, who lay entrancd Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where th Etrurian shades High over-archd embowr; or scatterd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armd Hath vexd the Red-Sea coast, whose waves oerthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursud The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

11/POETRY GLOSSARY

Kenning
A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun. It is found frequently in Old Germanic, Norse, and English poetry, including The Seafarer, in which the ocean is called a whale-path. (See Ezra Pounds translation)

the motif of a long journey. Motifs are sometimes described as expressions of a collective unconsciousness; see archetype.

Negative capability
A theory of John Keats, who suggested in one of his famous letters that a great thinker is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. A poet, then, has the power to bury self consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated. See Keatss To Autumn. The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, Beauty is truth, truth beautythat is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Litotes
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 after summarizing the Danish kings great virtues. See also Irony.

Metaphor
A comparison that is made directly (for example, John Keatss Beauty is truth, truth beauty from Ode on a Grecian Urn) or less directly (for example, Shakespeares marriage of two minds), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as like, as, or than. See Sylvia Plaths description of her dead father as Marble-heavy, a bag full of God in Daddy, or Emily Dickinsons Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul . Browse poems with developed metaphors.

Neologism
A newly coined word. Lewis Carrolls Jabberwocky is filled with them, including slithy and gimble.

Objective correlative
T.S. Eliot used this phrase to describe a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader (Hamlet, 1919). There must be a positive connection between the emotion the poet is trying to express and the object, image, or situation in the poem that helps to convey that emotion to the reader. Eliot thus determined that Shakespeares play Hamlet was an artistic failure because Hamlets intense emotions overwhelmed the authors attempts to express them through an objective correlative. In other words, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was unable to provoke the audience to feel as Prince Hamlet did through images, actions, and characters, and instead only inadequately describedhis emotional state through the plays dialogue. Eliots theory of the objective correlative is closely related to the Imagist movement.

Metonymy
A figure of speech in which a related term is substituted for the word itself. Often the substitution is based on a material, causal, or conceptual relation between things. For example, the British monarchy is often referred to as the Crown. In the phrase lend me your ears, ears is substituted for attention. O, for a draught of vintage! exclaims the speaker in John Keatss Ode to Nightingale, with vintage understood to mean wine. Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy.

Mimesis (imitation)
Greek for imitation. In aesthetic theory, mimesis can also connote representation, and has typically meant the reproduction of an external reality, such as nature, through artistic expression. Plato disparaged mimesis for merely providing inferior copies of original forms; Aristotle, in his Poetics, recuperated the idea, alleging that mimesis is natural to humans. For Aristotle, mimesis in part both recreates the objects of reality and improves them; it provides humans with a special kind of symbolic order. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers and writers such as Rousseau and Lessing began to emphasize the relationship between mimesis and inner experiences and emotions, not just objective reality or nature. By the 20th century, the term housed a number of theories, theorists, and schools of thought. Erich Auerbachs highly influential book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) attempted to chart the history of culture through representational practices in literature. Thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, on the other hand, described mimesis as fundamental to human experience, a practice that precedes language but is suppressed or distorted by society. Rather than mimesis as the process of reproducing copies of nature, reality, or experience, these theorists suggested that mimesis has to do with social practices and inter-subjective relationships. Jacques Derrida also claimed mimesis for deconstruction, focusing on texts as doubled objects, which can never refer to an original source.

Onomatopoeia
A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense (for example, choo-choo, hiss, or buzz). In Piano, D.H. Lawrence describes the boom of the tingling strings as his mother played the piano, mimicking the volume and resonance of the sound (boom) as well as the fine, highpitched vibration of the strings that produced it (tingling strings).

Oxymoron
A figure of speech that brings together contradictory words for effect, such as jumbo shrimp and deafening silence. For instance, John Milton describes Hell as darkness visible in Book I of Paradise Lost.

Palindrome
A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward and forward. The words civic and level are palindromes, as is the phrase A man, a plan, a canalPanama. The reversal can be word by word as well, as in fall leaves when leaves fall.

Paradox
As a figure of speech, it is a seemingly self-contradictory phrase or concept that illuminates a truth. For instance, Wallace Stevens, in The Snow Man, describes the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Man: Epistle II, describes Man as Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all. Paradox is related to oxymoron, which creates a new phrase or concept out of a contradiction. The metaphysical poets often fixated on the paradoxical nature of the Christian Gods triune nature (Father, Son, Holy Ghost). In his Holy Sonnet: Batter my heart, three-persond God, John Donne considers Gods power to restore the spirit

Motif
A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and may serve an overall theme. For example, the repeated questions of anubi sunt poem compose a motif of the fleeting nature of life. Jonathan SwiftsGullivers Travels and John Bunyans A Pilgrims Progress both feature

12/POETRY GLOSSARY

to life by first dismantling it: Batter my heart, three-persond God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, oerthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

vocabulary in order to maintain a metrical or rhyme scheme; can also mean the manipulation of facts to suit the needs of a poem.

Prosody
The principles of metrical structure in poetry. See meter.

Pun
Wordplay that uses homonyms (two different words that are spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time. Harryette Mullen riffs on the multiple meanings of slip in [Of a girl, in white]. Ah, nothing more obscure than Browning / Save blacking, writes Ambrose Bierce in With a Book, making a pun on the name of poet Robert Browning and the color brown.

Parody
A comic imitation of another authors work or characteristic style. See Joan Murrays We Old Dudes, a parody of Gwendolyn Brookss We Real Cool.

Pastiche
A patchwork of lines or passages from another writer (or writers), intended as a kind of imitation. The term also refers to an original composition that deliberately mimics the style of another author, usually in a spirit of respect rather than mockery or satire.

Simile
A comparison (see Metaphor) made with as, like, or than. In A Red, Red Rose, Robert Burns declares: O my Luve is like a red, red rose Thats newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody Thats sweetly played in tune. What happens to a dream deferred? asks Langston Hughes in Harlem: Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Browse poems with developed similes.

Pathetic fallacy
The assignment of human feelings to inanimate objects, as coined by the Victorian literary critic John Ruskin. For him, a poets tendency to project his or her emotions outward onto the workings of the natural world was a kind of false vision. Today the term is used more neutrally, and the phenomenon is usually accepted as an integral part of the poets craft. It is related to personification andanthropomorphism, but emphasizes the relationship between the poets emotional state and what he or she sees in the object or objects. For instance, in William Wordsworths I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, the speaker sees a field of daffodils tossing their heads in a sprightly dance, outdoing the nearby lakes sparkling waves with their glee. The speaker, in times of solitude and introspection, is heartened by memories of the flowers joy.

Persona
A dramatic character, distinguished from the poet, who is the speaker of a poem. The persona who describes the process of composing and playing music in Robert Brownings Abt Vogler is a German organist by the same name. Similarly, three historical figures (Erasmus Darwin, James Whitfield, and Josiah Wedgewood) narrate Linda Bierdss three-part poem The Ghost Trio. The identity of the speaker is not always so clear; John Berrymans sequence ofDream Songs is narrated primarily by a persona named Henry, who refers to himself in the third person.

Strophe
In Greek drama, the strophe (turning) signified the first section of a choral ode, and was recited by the Chorus as it moved across the stage. The Choruss movement back to its original side was accompanied by the antistrophe. Finally, the Chorus stood still to chant the epode, the final section of the ode, which used a new metrical structure. This classic structure is explicitly foregrounded in Ben Jonsons A Pindaric Ode. Strophe came to be synonymous with the stanzas in an ode; see Coleridges France: An Ode. It has also been used to describe units or verse paragraphs in free verse. See Robert Duncans, A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar and Geoffrey Hills On Reading Crowds and Power for examples of this contemporary usage.

Personification
A figure of speech in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person. William Blakes O Rose, thou art sick! is one example; Donnes Death, be not proud is another. Gregory Corso quarrels with a series of personified abstractions in his poem The Whole Mess . . . Almost. Personification is often used in symbolic or allegorical poetry; for instance, the virtue of Justice takes the form of the knight Artegal in Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene.

Sublime
A lofty, ennobling seriousness as the main characteristic of certain poetry, as identified in the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to the 3rd-century Greek rhetorician Cassius Longinus. The concept took hold in the 18th century among English philosophers, critics, and poets who associated it with overwhelming sensation. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke identified the sublime as the experience of the infinite, which is terrifying and thrilling because it threatens to overpower the perceived importance of human enterprise in the universe. Aesthetes and writers of the era saw the natural world and its wild, mysterious expanses as a gateway to the experience of the sublime. Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley andWilliam Wordsworth were influenced by this notion.

Poetic diction
The vocabulary, phrasing, and grammatical usage deemed appropriate to verse as well as the deviations allowable for effect within it. Aristotle discussed the proper diction for writers in his Poetics, and English poets have long struggled with which kind of language to employ and when. Wordsworth argued against the ornate language of his predecessors in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Poetic diction is distinguished from common speech by effects such as circumlocution,elision, personification and Latinate terminology such as azure skies.

Symbol
Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or

Poetic license
A poets departure from the rules of grammar, syntax, and

13/POETRY GLOSSARY

otherworldly. A rose, for example, has long been considered a symbol of love and affection. Every word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol (to which a word, of course, may point) has a concreteness not shared by language, and can point to something that transcends ordinary experience. Poets such asWilliam Blake and W.B. Yeats often use symbols when they believe inor seeka transcendental (religious or spiritual) reality. A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must reveal something else transcendental. In To the Rose upon the Rood of Time, for instance, Yeatss image of the rose on the cross symbolizes the joining of flesh and spirit. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write in their book Understanding Poetry (3rd ed., 1960),The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted. See also allegory and imagism.

Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXIX, Thexpense of spirit in a waste of shame for examples of voltas of each type.

Zeugma
A figure of speech in which one verb or preposition joins two objects within the same phrase, often with different meanings. For example, I left my heartand my suitcasein San Francisco. Zeugma occurs in William Shakespeares Fear No More the Heat o the Sun: Golden Lads, and Girles all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust. Here, coming to dust refers to the chimney-sweepers trade as well as the bodys decay.

Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole (for example, Ive got wheels for I have a car, or a description of a worker as a hired hand). It is related to metonymy.

Synesthesia
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 George Merediths Modern Love: I, a womans heart is made to drink the pale drug of silence.

Tautology
A statement redundant in itself, such as free gift or The stars, O astral bodies! Also, a statement that is necessarily truea circular argumentsuch as she is alive because she is living.

Tone
The poets attitude toward the poems speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader. Often described as a mood that pervades the experience of reading the poem, it is created by the poems vocabulary, metricalregularity or irregularity, syntax, use of figurative language, and rhyme.

Ubi sunt
A number of medieval European poems begin with this Latin phrase meaning Where are they? By posing a series of questions about the fate of the strong, beautiful, or virtuous, these poems meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. The phrase can now refer to any poetry that treats these themes. One of the most famous ubi sunt poems is Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past) by medieval French poet Franois Villon, with its refrain Where are the snows of yesteryear? See also Thomas Nashes Adieu, Farewell, Earths Bliss, Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophel and Stella CII: W here be the roses gone, which sweetened so our eyes?, andWhere Are the Waters of Childhood? by Mark Strand.

Volta
Italian word for turn. In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet. See Thomas Wyatts Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where Is an Hind and William

14/POETRY GLOSSARY

Theory & Criticism

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, Englandas well as French intellectuals such Louis Althusser and Michel Foucaultdescribed 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.

across a wide range of disciplines including film studies, geography, and even economics. Feminist theory emerged from the struggle for womens rights, beginning in the 18th century with Mary Wollstonecrafts 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.

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. Formalisms tendency to collapse form and content is somewhat similar to New Criticisms approach, though its main influence was onstructuralism.

Gender studies
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender, sexual categories, and identity. As a discipline, gender studies borrows from other theoretical models likepsychoanalysis particularly that of Jacques Lacandeconstruction, and feminist theory in an attempt to examine the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity as they relate to class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Like gender studies, queer theory also questions normative definitions of gender and sexuality. As approaches to literary texts, gender studies and queer theory tend to emphasize the power of representation and linguistic indeterminacy.

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.

Marxism
A type of literary criticism based on the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. In its simplest form, Marxist criticism attempts to show the relationship between literature and the socialmainly economicconditions under which it was produced. Originally, Marxist critics focused on literary representations of workers and working classes. For later Marxists, however, literature became a document of a kind of knowledge and a record of the historical conditions that produced that knowledge. Like cultural criticism, Marxist literary criticism offers critiques of the canon and focuses on the ways in which culture and power intersect; for a Marxist critic, literature both reproduces existing power relations and offers a space where they can be contested and redefined. Important 20th-century Marxist literary critics include Georg Lucks, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, and Frederic Jameson.

Elliptical poetry
A term coined in 1998 by poet and critic Stephen Burt in a review of Susan Wheelers Smokes. In the piece, which first appeared in the Boston Review, Burt describes elliptical poets as those who try to manifest a personwho speaks the poem and reflects the poetwhile using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. Burts 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.

New Criticism
Name given to a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century. New Criticism, like Formalism, tended to consider texts as autonomous and closed, meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it. The reader does not need outside sources, such as the authors biography, to fully understand a text; while New Critics did not completely discount the relevance of the author, background, or possible sources of the work, they did insist that those types of knowledge had very little bearing on the works merit as literature. Like Formalist critics, New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary devices, specificallymetaphor, irony, tension, and paradox. The New Critics emphasized close reading as a way to engage with a

Feminist theory
An extension of feminisms 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 womens authorship and representations of women in literature, feminist theory has recently begun to examine ideas of gender and sexuality

15/POETRY GLOSSARY

text, and paid close attention to the interactions between form and meaning. Important New Critics included Allan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term intentional fallacy; other terms associated with New Criticism include affective fallacy, heresy of paraphrase, and ambiguity.

New Historicism
A critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape ones own historicity, the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.

suspicious of hierarchy and objective knowledge and embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, and diversity. It includes other 20th-century theoretical movements such as poststructuralism and deconstruction, mainly through a common emphasis on discourse and the power of language in structuring thought and experience. Because it attacks traditional concepts of history, knowledge, and reality itself arguing that truth is culturally and historically specific postmodernism has often been accused of relativism. Many of the central postmodernist theorists are French and include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-Franois Lyotard.

Poststructuralism
A school of thought that responded negatively to structuralisms insistence on frameworks and structures as access points to truth. Poststructuralism, likedeconstruction, emphasized the instability of meaning. While structuralism regarded language as a closed system, poststructuralism identified an inevitable gap between signifier and signified. In poststructuralism, the reader and not the writer became paramount: the authors intended meaning, because it could never be truly known, was less important than the readers perceived meaning. Like other postmodern theories that interrogated cultural assumptions, poststructuralists believe in studying both the text and the systems of knowledge that produced that text. Poststructuralism is associated with many French writers and thinkers, namely Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

Objectivism
A term coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 that developed from his reading of Alfred North Whiteheads Science and the Modern World. He described it as looking at a poem with a special eye to its structural aspects, how it has been constructed. Louis Zukofsky expanded the term and attempted to articulate its principles when he guest-edited the February 1931 issue of Poetry. He includedCharles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. Later, the poet Lorine Niedecker was closely associated with this movement. These objectivist poets, Zukofsky noted, were Imagists rather than Symbolists; they were concerned with creating a poetic structure that could be perceived as a whole, rather than a series of imprecise but evocative images. For more on objectivism, read Peter OLearys feature, The Energies of Words. Browse Objectivist poets.

Psychoanalytic theory
A critical approach influenced by Sigmund Freuds work on the unconscious and human behavior. Freud believed that the existence of three competing impulses in the psychethe ego, id, and superegoand the conflict inherent in child-parent relations structured human responses to the world. Initially, psychoanalytic literary theory consisted of applying psychoanalysis to either the author or the main character of a work, seeking unconscious or latent meaning underneath the manifest language and analyzing the symbols contained in a given work. Freud himself wrote many essays in this vein, applying his theories to characters such as Shakespeares Hamlet and Ibsens Rebecca West. Influenced by Jacques Lacan, later psychoanalytic theory focused on the unconscious and language and shared some concerns with deconstruction and poststructuralist theory. Psychoanalytic theory has been enormously influential on a number of other theories, such as readerresponse and feminist theory, as well as on individual thinkers. For example, critic Harold Blooms theory of the struggle between strong and weak poets owes much to Freuds Oedipus complex.

Postcolonial theory
A theoretical approach to analyzing the literature produced in countries that were once colonies, especially of European powers such as Britain, France, and Spain. Postcolonial theory also looks at the broader interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized by dealing with issues such as identity (including gender, race, and class), language, representation, and history. Because native languages and culture were replaced or superseded by European traditions in colonial societies, part of the postcolonialist project is reclamation. Acknowledging the effect of colonialisms aftermathits language, discourse, and cultural institutions has led to an emphasis on hybridity, or the mingling of cultural signs and practices between colonizer and colonized. The Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said was a major figure of postcolonial thought, and his book Orientalism is often credited as its founding text. Other important postcolonial critics include Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Frantz Fanon.

Reader-response theory
A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralisms emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiencesreadsit. The reader-response critics job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called interpretive communities, make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading. The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its main theorists include Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser.

Postmodernism
Defined variously as a reaction to modernism or merely the movement that followed it, postmodernism remains a controversial concept. As a term, it tends to refer to an intellectual, artistic, or cultural outlook or practice that is

16/POETRY GLOSSARY

Structuralism
A movement of thought in the humanities, widespread in anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory, and influential in the 1950s and 60s. Based primarily on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism considered language as a system of signs and signification, the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to the system. In literary theory, structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature reflected a given reality; instead, a text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated among other texts. Structuralist critics analyzed material by examining underlying structures, such as characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and could thus be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the systems from which they emerged. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was an important champion of structuralism, as was Roman Jakobsen. Northrop Fryes attempts to categorize Western literature by archetype had some basis in structuralist thought. Structuralism regarded language as a closed, stable system, and by the late 1960s it had given way to poststructuralism.

Textual criticism
A branch of literary criticism concerned with analyzing and determining the accuracy of texts. By examining the documents themselves in print and manuscript form as well as any associated documentation such as letters, journals, or notebookstextual critics attempt to identify and remove errors resulting from multiple transcriptions and printings and restore the work to its most original state. They also seek to present the text in a format that benefits readers and scholars, often with facsimile reproductions of the original manuscripts or print versions, along with a critical apparatus explaining textual variants between versions, critical commentaries, and bibliographies. Textual criticism developed out of ancient, classical, and Biblical scholarship, but has increasingly been used to deal with variations found in much modern literature, whether as a matter of typographical error, authorial revision, or historical and cultural textual support. Recent prominent textual critics include W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, G. Thomas Tanselle, D.C. Greetham, Peter Shillingsburg, and Jerome McGann.

17/POETRY GLOSSARY