English 2208 terminology

Poetry: In the words of writer Paul Valery, "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking." Prose is commonplace language generally used to communicate, while poetry is the elevation (and frequently the compression) of language to inspire or stir us.

Diction: Literally, what words have been used by a poet; word choice

Rhythm: The beat or meter (regular stresses) found in the music of the language

Form: How the poem appears on the page, including stanzas, blank lines, punctuation, and length

Image: What is conjured in the mind by the language of the poem

Verse: Any composition in line form that has (more or less) a regular rhythm (and that sometimes ends in rhyme)

Lyric: A short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker

Narrative poem: A poem that tells a story (like the ballad of "Sir Patrick Spence")

Dramatic poem: Verse written as if for the stage (Browning's "My Last Duchess" is classic example, also called a "dramatic monologue")

Didactic poem: A poem that intends to state a message or teach a lesson (like, I would argue, Wilfred Owens' "Dulce et Decorum Est")

Monologue: Spoken by one character to an audience that hears but does not respond

Soliloquy: Spoken by one character to him or herself, but with no audience implied

Rhyme scheme: recurrent rhyme pattern designated by assigning lowercase letters to each unique end rhyme

Enjambment: When a line continues unbroken in both sense and grammar to the next line of verse

Caesura: A deliberate break in a line of poetry; a stylistic pause

Persona: A character or (literally) a mask used by the poet to tell a story. It's the voice or speaker we hear in a dramatic poem (like the Duke in Browning's poem "My Last Duchess")

Tone: The mood or attitude conveyed by a poem

Imagism: poetry in the modern era that emphasized precision in imagery using sharp, clear language

Irony: Literary device in which a discrepancy in meaning is masked beneath the surface of language: what is said may not be what is meant

carpe diem: literally means "to seize the day"--a theme in poems like "To His Coy Mistress" (in which a lover invites beloved to act on their love)

Denotation and connotation: To "denote" is to tell or factually explain; to "connote" is to suggest or imply but not directly state.

Stanza: group of lines whose pattern is repeated throughout the poem.

Symbol: that which stands for both itself and something (deeper in meaning) else (think the white whale in Moby Dick)

Allusion: A reference (direct or indirect) in a poem to a person, place, or thing (real or fictional)

Metaphor: A statement whereby one thing is called something else, which it is not. (e.g., "My dog, Boris, is a tank.")

Simile: A statement of comparison using the words "like" or "as" to connect the two items (e.g., "My dog, Boris, is like a tank.")

Couplet: A two-line rhyme (heroic couplet, also called closed couplet, usually uses iambic pentameter and is self-contained)

Tercet: A three-line stanza or line grouping

Quatrain: Four-line stanza or grouping in verse

Sestet: A six-line stanza or line grouping

Octave: An eight-line stanza or line grouping

English (or Shakespearean) sonnet: 14-line poem which uses three quatrains and closing couplet, with rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg

Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet: 14-line poem which uses octave and sestet, usually with rhyme scheme of abbaabba cdecde

Volta: In a sonnet, this represents the "turn" or change in tone and sense: usually for Italian sonnets it's line 9; for English, line 13.

Alliteration: Repeating consonant sounds in a line or two of verse

Assonance: Repeating vowel sounds within a line or two of verse

Colloquial or vulgate language: Language used by common and ordinary speakers. Sometimes this is contrasted with poetic diction, which (at least in pre-modern periods of history) was once considered the appropriate language to be used by good poets. Modernity put an end to the notion that poetry must conform to formal or "poetic" language.

Onomatopoeia: Literary device where the word's meaning can be found in the very sound of the word, such as "bang," or "buzz," or "zap" (Gerard Manley Hopkins used onomatopoeia quite a bit in the sonnets we discussed.)

Sprung rhythm: Meter used by Hopkins where the number of stressed syllables is regular but the number of unstressed syllables is irregular.

Inscape: Coined by Hopkins to indicate what the essence or the identity of a thing (animate or inanimate) actually us: what it was meant to be.

The only poems I use on the exam that you might want to recall are Browning's "My Last Duchess," and a companion set of sonnets by John Donne ("Batter My Heart") and Mark Jarman ("Unholy Sonnet"). Anything else I use is just for illustration.

Terms after the first exam:

Ode: a more formal lyric (in tone, diction, and style) frequently addressing an abstract or lofty subject

Apostrophe: A direct address to someone or something (as in Donne's address to Death in "Death Be Not Proud")

Personification: Giving human characteristics to inanimate objects

Haiku: a poem of seventeen syllables (frequently used in a 5-7-5 format)

Mixed metaphor: a metaphor that makes a comparison including items that do not work together: "Water the spark of knowledge..."

Hyperbole: An extravagant over-exaggeration

Pun: A play on words based on the similarity of sound between two words with different meanings

Paradox: An idea that might at first glance appear self-contradictory but upon further reflection makes some sense. That Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is about an object both lifeless (as an inanimate ceramic work of art) and deathless (it can never die and thus "lives" on after we die) is a paradox.

Meter: The beat or discernible rhythm in poetry. "Meter" implies regularity and predictability in the emphases we might hear in verse. The most common kind of meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter (see our text's glossary for more examples of various feet and meter in poetry). We will only need to know about four meters: iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic.

Scansion: The method by which we consider the rhythm of poetry: counting beats, syllables and the like to determine the pulse or rhythm of a poem. We "scan" a line of poetry to determine how it should sound and be read aloud.

Foot: The unit of measure in metrical poetry. See glossary for examples.

Rhyme: Sounds following the vowel sound that are the same ("red" and "bread"). Internal rhyme is rhyme that occurs within a line of poetry as opposed to end rhyme. Slant rhyme (or "near rhyme" or "off rhyme") occurs when the consonant is the same but the vowel sound isn't: "bone" and "moon." Feminine rhyme--or double rhyme-- occurs when two rhymes of two or more syllables where the stress is on a syllable other than the last: "turtle" and "fertile" (and masculine rhyme--or single rhyme--simple means one syllable words that rhyme: "sail" and "tail").

Ballad: Narrative song. Folk ballads were story-songs that existed orally before they were written down. Ballad stanza is a four-line stanza usually in the rhyme scheme of abcb falling into 8, 6, 8, and 6 syllables. Common meter for ballads is four lines but in the rhyme scheme of abab.

Euphony: a combination of sound and sense that is pleasing to the ear (from the Greek meaning "good voice")

Cacophony: Deliberate discordant sounds that are harsh and rough to the ear and mind (from the Greek meaning "bad voice")

Blank verse: Unrhyming lines of iambic pentameter. Shakespeare used this frequently.

Free verse: Unmetered lines of poetry that only very occasionally rhyme. Also called open form.

Terza rima: Three-line stanzas with interlocking rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc etc.)

Elegy: Poem that is a lament or a sad meditation about a death or on a solemn theme. (Keats's "To Autumn" has been called elegiac.)

Acrostic poem: Poem in which first letters in each line spell out a word or name, when read downward

Epigram: Very short poem, often comic, usually ending with sharp turn of wit or meaning, or with a pun

Villanelle: Poem with six rhymed stanzas in which two lines are repeated in a prescribed pattern ("Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas is a classic example)

Sestina: Complex verse form ("song of sixes") in which six end words are repeated in a prescribed order through six stanzas

Approaches to literature, including (see Chapter 25 for definitions):

    formal criticism
    biographical criticism
    historical criticism
    psychological criticism
    social/cultural criticism
    mythological criticism
    gender criticism
    reader-response criticism

Symbol: A visible object that suggests some further meaning in addition to itself

   Terms after the second exam:

Allegory: an extended metaphor where objects, persons, or actions have meanings outside the story itself; more systematic than symbol

Myth: traditionally defined as stories about lives of immortal beings. Also seen as the story we tell (frequently using supernatural characters) to explain or understand natural events.

Archetype: a symbol that occurs frequently enough in literature that it is recognizable as the same symbol whenever and wherever it is used in literature

Poetic inversion: re-arranging the word order in normal syntax to enable a line to match a rhyme or rhythm pattern. (Our text gives us the example of John Milton's "ye myrtles brown" when ordinarily, in English, adjectives come before the nouns they modify: "brown myrtles")

Sentimentality: when a poet tries to create a great emotion but gives us insufficient grounds for sharing it. (Think Rod McKuen poem in Ch. 17)

Bathos: a description that should move us to tears but only generates laughter.

Conceit: An extended metaphor (such as John Donne's "The Flea")

Paradox: to hold in tension at the same time two contrary ideas; considered superficially, a paradox is self-contradictory but considered thoughtfully, a paradox can reveal deeper meanings

Poems and poets to know from our most recent discussions:

    John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn"
    T.S. Eliot, "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and "Journey of the Magi"
    W. B. Yeats, "Second Coming," and "Sailing to Byzantium"
    Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"
    Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias"
    Robert Frost, "Birches"
    John Donne, "The Flea"
  

And a couple of poems/poets we have used all semester as representative of types:

Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" for the dramatic monologue
Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress" as an example of carpe diem poems
William Shakespeare for his sonnets in the English tradition
John Donne for his sonnets primarily in the Italian tradition