Terms Common to All Periods:

Neoclassicism: a movement in English literature during the 18th century (just prior to the Romantic era) during which writers and thinkers valued ideals such as order, decorum, and rationality, using as models the literature of Greek and Roman antiquity. Perhaps Alexander Pope was the era's finest example. 

canon:  the selection of texts deemed worthy of inclusion in a set. Now, that "set" depends on some variables: who's choosing, the characteristics of the set, and probably limitations on the size of the set. If a text is considered "canonical," then it's a fair question to ask on what basis was the work included. In class, we discussed four categories by which works are considered canonical: is the work timeless, universal, meaningful, or innovative?

Four terms for understanding poetry:

form: what shape the poem takes, and what traditions it follows.
diction: word choice: the language used in the poem
rhythm: the meter and rhyme of the poem.
image: what metaphors, symbols, or pictures are conjured

meter:  the recurrence of a rhythmic pattern in poetry. The base unit within a line of poetry is called a foot, which usually consists of two syllables (but not always!), and poetic lines most often occur in three feet (trimeter), four feet (tetrameter), five feet (pentameter), or six feet (hexameter).

iambic pentameter:  one of several rhyme and meter patterns used to describe poems. The first word indicates the pattern of beats (how syllables are stressed or unstressed when spoken) in a line of poetry, and the second describes the length (in feet, or stresses). In this case, five iambic feet (unstressed syllable + stressed syllable, such as in the pronunciation of the word "Vermont") in a line of poetry.

rhyme scheme:  refers to the rhyming pattern within a stanza, and is indicated by lowercase letters of the alphabet.

ballad:  a poetic form owing its type to song. Ballads were originally folk songs and stories sung that were only recorded in print starting in the 1700s. Consequently, poets began to use the form to write their own "songs." The ballad stanza is usually a quatrain (four-line stanza) in iambic (see below) trimeter or tetrameter lines, rhyming abcb (See "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Rime of the Ancient Mariner").  Ballads frequently use repetition and refrains as features of their form.

lyric:  short, subjective poem full of imagination, emotion and melody (hence its association with song) about a singular subject. Has its finest expression in the Romantic era.

pastoral:  a form of poetry that celebrates the rustic life. In its early English manifestations, the subjects often were literally shepherds and shepherdesses (the root of the word "pastor" is Latin for "shepherd").

blank verse:  unrhymed iambic pentameter (see "Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth).

alliteration:  repeating consonant sounds, frequently occurring at the beginning of words

assonance:  repeating same or similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllables

caesura:  a deliberate break in a line of poetry; a stylistic pause

enjambment:  a continuation of thought and syntax across lines of poetry. In other words, the end of a line of poetry does not interrupt the flow of the idea present in the words.

ode:  unified poem of heightened lyricism, always about one subject, written using more elevated diction and tone (and consequently, more complicated) than a simple lyric.

elegy:  poem written to honor the dead.

sonnet:  a 14-line poem originating in the Italian Renaissance and practiced there most notably by the poet Petrarch.

    The Italian version (because Petrarch was Italian), uses an octave and sestet with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde.
    The English version (made famous by Shakespeare) has three quatrains and closing couplet, in rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

myth:  stories, often about supernatural characters and events, used by a culture to explain itself to others and to its own people.

Terms from the Romantic period (1789 - 1830):

Romantic stages:  a method of reading Romantic landscape poems, developed by Professor M.H. Abrams of Cornell, that suggests these might be understood this way:

    1. Description of the scene - emphasis on natural surroundings (see "Tintern Abbey" or Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty")

    2. Analysis of the scene's significance to the poet (also a meditative stage: see Coleridge's examples)

    3. Poet's affective response (Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight")

        Affective is one way of knowing. These three ways of knowing are ones epistemologists and psychologists generally cite:

                cognitive - intellectual understanding (I know it)
                affective - emotional understanding (I feel it)
                contextual - experiential understanding (I've lived it)

personification:  giving human characteristics to inanimate objects (e.g., "angry clouds"). If a poem or poet relies too much on bestowing every emotion on some inanimate object (sometimes a criticism of the Romantics) as a description, it or he can be said to use a "pathetic fallacy."

egotistical sublime:  a phrase used by the poet John Keats to describe Wordsworth's poetry. Keats may have meant it somewhat derogatorily, suggesting that Wordsworth's larger concern was to focus on the poetic impulse in himself rather than to explore the imaginative processes of poets in general, but the phrase has come to mean that which elevates understanding of the self.

Eolian harp:  a stringed instrument originally used by the ancient Greeks that became popular during the Romantic era. When wind passed over the instrument, the strings would vibrate and produce a sound that varied in its musicality by the amount of wind speed that passed over it. For Romantics, this became a common symbol for the mind inspired by imagination. For example, a small one and a large one.

laudanum:  an alcoholic tincture of opium used in the 19th century by many as a medicinal solution to a host of physical and psychological ailments. All Romantic poets, except Wordsworth, likely used it and for one--Coleridge--it was destructively addictive.

ottava rima:  a stanza form in poetry originally from the Italian but made famous in the English by Lord Byron's Don Juan. Each stanza consists of eight lines with a rhyme scheme of abababcc. In Byron, the closing couplet is used to heighten satire or to undercut any seriousness implied by the opening six lines.

Byronic hero:  not exactly the anti-hero, but rather a hero against his will (and almost always male).  He may possess strength, wisdom, beauty, and even virtue, but he's reluctant to use these gifts and would rather languish in melancholy or cynicism or comic insouciance. Don Juan serves as our model, but a previous example that may have inspired Byron would be Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. Modern examples may include actors James Dean, Heath Ledger, or singer Kurt Cobain. Perhaps even the Johnny Depp character Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies would qualify. In modern literature, perhaps Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, or Harry Angstrom of the Updike Rabbit novels might be good examples.

terza rima:  a stanza form in poetry made famous by Dante in his Divine Comedy. More difficult to use in English because the form relies so heavily on frequent end rhymes. The rhyme scheme follows this pattern: aba bcb cdc ded efe so that the more common rhyme in one stanza becomes the link to the next stanza. See Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."

Alexandrine:  a line of poetry consisting of twelve syllables, and often iambic hexameter in rhythm. In Shelley's "To a Skylark," each stanza ends with an Alexandrine.

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Spenserian stanza:  a stanza used by Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes" that follows a form created by Edmund Spenser in his epic romance poem The Faerie Queene. The stanza is nine iambic lines, with the first eight in pentameter and the final line in hexameter (and thus an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

negative capability:  a term the poet John Keats used to describe the ability to become completely selfless and imagine inhabiting the being of another without reasoning away or becoming self-conscious during the experience. This may be illustrated in his "Ode to a Nightingale" when he imagines himself "in embalmed darkness" as a nightingale in stanzas four, five, and six.

paradox:  a common term, but in the poetry of Keats, paradox carries with it the sense that much in life has within it shared opposites. For example, the urn (and art itself) in his famous ode is deathless (eternal, unchanging) because it is lifeless (durable but inanimate marble).

novel of manners:  a phrase that identifies novels that focus on one very specific social class and its customs. Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen's work in general, represent good examples. 

stock character:  refers to a character who is two-dimensional and even stereotypical. A villain with a black hat and handlebar moustache is such a character. In some ways, so is the Rev. Collins or Mrs. Bennet: these are types more than characters who provide comic relief in Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice.

Terms from the Victorian period (1830 - 1901):

dramatic monologue:  a poetic form popularized by Robert Browning. The dramatic monologue has one speaker (not necessarily the poet), who tells a story in a dramatic setting (i.e., the action of the story occurs as the speaker speaks).

sprung rhythm:  metrical invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins in which lines of poetry have a regular number of stressed syllables but an irregular number of unstressed syllables. Often, the first syllable of every line is stressed.

inscape:  coined by Hopkins, this refers to the "distinctive design that constitutes individual identity." Perhaps best understood as an organism's essence: what the organism was born to do.

instress:  also coined by Hopkins, this is a corollary to inscape: to recognize the individuality of an object and appreciate its distinctiveness. A poet writing poetry would demonstrate inscape, and the poem itself would be one manifestation of instress.

onomatopoeia:  when a word's meaning can be found in the very sound of the word. For example, boom, buzz, and rip all may act as onomatopoeias. Hopkins uses this technique, among others.

Aestheticism:  a movement in the 1890s, best represented by Oscar Wilde, that insisted art does not have to teach or morally enlighten its audience. The movement had the credo "art for art's sake" to express this anti-utilitarian idea.

Victorian periods:  using our anthology as a guide, the Victorian period may be divided into these three groups:

1830 - 1848 Early Victorianism--also called "Times of Troubles"--included great class unrest, the Irish potato famine, but also the First Reform Bill. Tennyson's early poetry ("Lady of Shallot" and "Ulysses") published during this time, as well as some of the best of Charles Dickens (although Dickens was prolific in both the early and mid-Victorian periods).

1848 - 1870 Mid-Victorianism, when Britain experienced some social calm and prosperity. Religion and humankind's place in the universe were called into question, especially with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and the general rise of the Industrial Age. Much of Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold poetry published.

1870 - 1901 Late Victorianism, when materialism, cynicism and decadence become more commonplace, especially in the 1890s. Queen Victoria dies in 1901. Age of Aestheticism when Oscar Wilde wrote (and when Hopkins would have been published, had he the inclination to do so).  

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Terms since the Victorian period (post 1901):

Modernism: use the 20th century handout for more information about the writers and events of this period. The primary traits of this period, expressed in the literature, are its fragmentary nature, its tendency toward cynicism, its apparent pointlessness (where meaning is determined within rather than from without), and its formlessness in literary expression.

allusion:  a figure of speech that makes reference to a historical or literary figure, event, or object. Yeats and Eliot are two poets who use allusions in a number of their poems to the Bible, mythology, and older literature.

villanelle:  unusual poetic form that consists of 19 lines, only two rhymes and uses five three-stanza forms of aba, and one final four-line stanza of abaa. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" is the best example in English.

magical realism: a narrative style that emphasizes the real world ("realism" is the noun in this phrase!) but introduces elements of magic or supernaturalism in the story. Most famously practiced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) but seen in our anthology in Salman Rushdie's "The Prophet's Hair."

onomatopoeia:  this has been defined earlier, and has been used in poems throughout the history of British literature, but we discussed it in the context of reading Seamus Heaney's "Digging" especially when he described the sounds of his father's and grandfather's shoveling the peat moss for fuel as "the squelch and slap of soggy peat."

Some historical information to remember:

1789:  Storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14th: the beginning of the French Revolution. 

1793:  Execution of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. Also the height of what was known as the "Reign of Terror" in the French Revolution

1798:  Publication of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. 

1797 - 1807:  The "Great Decade" of Wordsworth's best works. 

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1819:  The great year of poet John Keats when he composed most of his important poetry, including the great odes.  Remember that Wordsworth had his great decade (10 years) but Keats had his great year (10 months).

1830:  First passenger train built (Beginning of Victorian era in industrial terms)
1832:  Passage of the Reform Bill (Beginning of Victorian era in social terms)
1834:  Death of all Romantic poets, except for Wordsworth--and he had stopped publishing (Beginning of Victorian era in literary terms)
1837:  Victoria becomes queen (Beginning of Victorian era in political terms)

1859:  Publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species

1890s:  Age of Aestheticism when Oscar Wilde and others (artist Aubrey Beardsley among them) defined an age characterized by hedonism, cynicism, and decadence.

1901:  Death of Queen Victoria

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1914 - 1919:  World War I (European dates)

1922:  Publication of Eliot's The Waste Land (when the "world broke apart")

1938 - 1945:  World War II (European dates)

In addition, use the 20th Century handout as a guide for historical information since 1901.

Remember the primary features mentioned in our anthology's introductory section for Volume 3 that defined or described Britain's transition from Victorianism to Modernism.