The language of poetry
Glossary of Poetic Terms
207 terms for reading poems closely: forms, meters, figures, movements, and the vocabulary that names what a poem is doing.
A
16Accentual verse
Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →Acmeism
An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Alexandrine
In English, a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. The last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Anachronism
Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeare’s placing of a clock in Julius Caesar is an anachronism, because clocks had not yet been invented in the…
Read definition →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.”
Read definition →Anapest
A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words “underfoot” and “overcome” are anapestic. Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib”…
Read definition →Anthropomorphism
A form of personification in which human qualities are attributed to anything inhuman, usually a god, animal, object, or concept. In Vachel Lindsay’s “What the Rattlesnake Said,” for…
Read definition →Antithesis
Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings. William Blake pits love’s competing impulses—selflessness and self-interest—against each other in his poem…
Read definition →Aphorism
A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage. See Benjamin Franklin’s “How to get RICHES.” Browse more aphorisms.
Read definition →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 death’s power by directly admonishing…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Artist’s book
An artist’s book (also called an artist book) is a book and a piece of art, often integrating various forms of content such as text, images, and materials. Artists’ books can explore…
Read definition →Augustan Age
The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace—the great Latin poets of the reign of the…
Read definition →B
6Ballade
An Old French verse form that usually consists of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoy, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbc bcbc. The last line of the first stanza is repeated at…
Read definition →Beat poets
A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder.…
Read definition →Black Mountain poets
A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These poets, including Charles Olson and Robert…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Blazon
Blazon: French for “coat-of-arms” or “shield.” A literary blazon (or blason) catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, usually female. The device was made popular by Petrarch and…
Read definition →Bucolic
See pastoral poetry.
Read definition →C
22Cacophony
Harsh or discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination of consonants within a group of words. The opposite of euphony. Writers frequently use cacophony to express…
Read definition →Cadence
The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse).
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Canon
A list of authors or works considered to be central to the identity of a given literary tradition or culture. This secular use of the word is derived from its original meaning as a…
Read definition →Canto
A long subsection of an epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (The Divine Comedy), first employed in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene. Other…
Read definition →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. Early versions include…
Read definition →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 Southwell’s “The Burning Babe”. Many…
Read definition →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 Marvell’s “To His Coy…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →Circumlocution
A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “twice five miles of fertile ground” (i.e., 10 miles) in “Kubla Khan.” Like periphrasis, which also involves the use of more words…
Read definition →Cockney School of poets
A dismissive name for London-based Romantic poets such as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The term was first used in a scathing review in Blackwood’s Magazine in…
Read definition →Commedia dell’arte
Italian term for “theater of professional artists.” A theater form that emerged in northern Italy in the 15th century and spread throughout Europe. Commedia dell’arte relied on masked…
Read definition →Complaint
A poem of lament, often directed at an ill-fated love, as in Henry Howard’s “Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being upon the Sea,” or Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella XXXI.”…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Conceptual
An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics. Nonreferential and interested in the materiality of language,…
Read definition →Confessional poetry
Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John…
Read definition →Convention
Convention is an established practice, rule, or technique commonly used that has evolved over time. Conventions, such as poetic forms, provide poets with structure and a shared set of…
Read definition →Cretic
Also known as amphimacer. A Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of a short syllable enclosed by two long syllables. Often found in folk poetry, its use in English poetry is rare,…
Read definition →Crip Poetics
Crip poetics is a school of poetry that resists an ableist tradition of body representation in favor of explicitly turning to lived disabled experiences. As defined by poet Jim Ferris,…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Curtal sonnet
See Sonnet.
Read definition →D
11Dactyl
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words “poetry” and “basketball” are both dactylic. Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light…
Read definition →Dark Room Collective
An artists group formed in 1987 by Boston poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange and musician Janice Lowe after they attended the funeral of James Baldwin. Based in a Victorian…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Deep Image
A term originally coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences, which…
Read definition →Denotation
Denotation means what a word points to, names, or refers to, either in the world of things or in the mind. This only includes the word’s literal meaning and does not include metaphors…
Read definition →Dimeter
A line of verse composed of two feet. “Some go local / Some go express / Some can’t wait / To answer Yes,” writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem “Yes,” in which the dimeter line…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Doggerel
Bad verse traditionally characterized by clichés, clumsiness, and irregular meter. It is often unintentionally humorous. The “giftedly bad” William McGonagall was an accomplished…
Read definition →Double dactyl
A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal, Anthony Hecht, and John Hollander. The double dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three double-dactyl lines followed…
Read definition →Dramatic monologue
A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred…
Read definition →E
14Eclogue
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…
Read definition →Ecopoetics
Ecopoetics places emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the writing of poems—and the environment that produces it. It arose out of the increasing awareness…
Read definition →Elegy
In traditional English poetry, an elegy is often a melancholy poem that laments its subject’s death but ends in consolation. In the 18th century, the “elegiac stanza” emerged, though its…
Read definition →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 am’rous causes springs,” goes the first…
Read definition →Elizabethan Age
The period coinciding with the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), considered to be the literary height of the English Renaissance. Poets and dramatists drew inspiration…
Read definition →Ellipsis
In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader’s ability to understand the expression. For example, Shakespeare makes frequent use of the phrase “I will away”…
Read definition →Elliptical poetry
A term coined in 1998 by poet and critic Stephanie Burt in a review of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes. In the piece, which first appeared in the Boston Review, Burt describes elliptical poets as…
Read definition →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 Belloc’s satirical…
Read definition →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 Spenser’s The Faerie…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Epitaph
A short poem intended for (or imagined as) an inscription on a tombstone and often serving as a brief elegy. See Robert Herrick’s “Upon a Child That Died” and “Upon Ben Jonson”; Ben…
Read definition →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.
Read definition →Ethnopoetics
In linguistics, folkloristics and anthropology, a method of analyzing linguistic structures in oral literature. The term was coined in 1968 by Jerome Rothenberg, whose anthology…
Read definition →Eye rhyme
Eye rhyme, also known as sight rhyme, appears to rhyme due to visual similarity, but ultimately doesn’t sound the same when pronounced. Examples include: through and rough; love and…
Read definition →F
10Feminist theory
Feminist theory is an extension of feminism’s critique of male power and ideology that interrogates the role of gender in the writing, interpretation, and dissemination of literary…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Fireside Poets
The Fireside poets were a group of 19th-century American poets, mostly situated in the Northeast United States. Also referred to as the schoolroom or household poets, they wrote in…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Fugitive poets
A group of Southern poets associated with the Fugitive, a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s. Its prominent ranks included Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and…
Read definition →Futurism
An avant-garde aesthetic movement that arose in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. Its proponents—predominantly painters and other visual artists—called for a rejection of past…
Read definition →G
5Gender studies
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender, sexual categories, and identity. As a discipline, gender studies borrows from other theoretical models like…
Read definition →Genre
A class or category of texts with similarities in form, style, or subject matter. The definition of a genre changes over time, and a text often interacts with multiple genres. A text’s…
Read definition →Georgian poetry
A poetic movement in England during the reign of George V (1910–1936), promoted in the anthology series Georgian Poetry. Its ranks included Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la…
Read definition →Georgic
A poem or book dealing with agriculture or rural topics, which commonly glorifies outdoor labor and simple country life. Often takes the form of a didactic or instructive poem intended…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →H
7Hendecasyllabic
A Classical Greek and Latin metrical line consisting of 11 syllables: typically a spondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the…
Read definition →Heptameter
A meter made up of seven feet and usually 14 syllables total (see Fourteener). George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s the Iliad is written in heptameter, as is Edgar Allan Poe’s…
Read definition →Heroic couplet
See couplet.
Read definition →Hexameter
A metrical line of six feet, most often dactylic, and found in Classical Latin or Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad. In English, an iambic hexameter line is also known as an…
Read definition →Horatian ode
See ode.
Read definition →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 Watts’s “Our God, Our Help,” Charles…
Read definition →Hyperbole
A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. For example, see James Tate’s lines “She scorched you with her radiance” or “He was more wronged than Job.” Hyperbole usually…
Read definition →I
5Iamb
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 metrical foot in English…
Read definition →Idyll
Classically, an idyll is a pastoral poem about shepherds. In more contemporary contexts, an idyll is often seen as similar to a pastoral or descriptive poem depicting a peaceful,…
Read definition →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;…
Read definition →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.…
Read definition →Italian sonnet
See Sonnet.
Read definition →K
1L
8Lament
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 Gunn’s “Lament”; and…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Language poetry
Taking its name from the magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), Language, or LANGUAGE, poetry is an avant garde poetry movement that emerged in the…
Read definition →Light verse
Whimsical poems taking forms such as limericks, nonsense poems, and double dactyls. See Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” and Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”…
Read definition →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.…
Read definition →Litany
Initially a prayer or supplication used in formal and religious processions, the litany has been more recently adopted as a poetic form that catalogues a series. This form typically…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Lyric
Originally a composition meant for musical accompaniment. The term refers to a short poem in which the poet, the poet’s persona, or another speaker expresses personal feelings. See…
Read definition →M
8Madrigal
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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Meter
The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry is accentual-syllabic. See also accentual meter, syllabic meter, and…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →Middle English poetry
Middle English poetry is used to describe poetry written in Middle English, a form of the English language used between the late eleventh and late fifteenth centuries. Well-known…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Motif
A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works. Unlike themes, which are messages, statements, or ideas, motifs are details whose repetition adds…
Read definition →N
7Negative capability
A theory first articulated by John Keats about the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science. Contemplating his own craft and the art of others,…
Read definition →Neologism
A newly coined word. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is filled with them, including “slithy” and “gimble.”
Read definition →New American Poets
The group of poets included in Donald Allen’s influential 1960 anthology of the same name. Allen’s anthology, which collected 15 years of American writing, divided its contributors into…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →New Formalism
A late 20th- and early 21st-century movement that championed a return to rhyme and meter in poetry. New Formalist poets such as Dana Gioia, X.J. Kennedy, Brad Leithauser, and Marilyn…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Négritude
A term coined in the 1930s by Afro-Martiniquan French poet and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire, Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. The…
Read definition →O
10Objective 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…
Read definition →Objectivism
The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 and developed from his reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925).…
Read definition →Objectivist Poets
The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 and developed from his reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925).…
Read definition →Occasional poem
A poem written to describe or comment on a particular event and often written for a public reading. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” commemorates a disastrous…
Read definition →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.
Read definition →Old English Poetry
Old English poetry dates from the 5th to the 11th centuries and embodies the earliest form of English literature. Works from this era reflect the history, belief systems, and heroic…
Read definition →Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech in which a word imitates the sound associated with an action or an object, effectively mimicking the sound it describes. Some examples of onomatopoeia…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Overstatement
Overstatement (see hyperbole) is a figure of speech that involves exaggerating certain aspects of something to create a more noticeable effect or to emphasize a point. Overstatement is…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →P
24Palindrome
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 canal—Panama.” The reversal can be…
Read definition →Palinode
An ode or song that retracts or recants what the poet wrote in a previous poem. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales ends with a retraction, in which he apologizes for…
Read definition →Panegyric
A poem of effusive praise. Its origins are Greek, and it is closely related to the eulogy and the ode. See Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare”…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Parody
A comic imitation of another author’s work or characteristic style. See Joan Murray’s “We Old Dudes,” a parody of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.”
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Pathetic fallacy
The assignment of human feelings to inanimate objects, as coined by the Victorian literary critic John Ruskin. For him, a poet’s tendency to project his or her emotions outward onto the…
Read definition →Pattern poetry
See Concrete poetry.
Read definition →Pentameter
A line made up of five feet. It is the most common metrical line in English. Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking” is written in iambic pentameter. Hart Crane maintains pentameter lines made…
Read definition →Pindaric ode
See Ode.
Read definition →Poesy
Poesy is an archaic word for the craft of poetry, used beginning in the 14th century. Derived from the ancient Greek word for poetry, poiesis, meaning “the act of creation or making,”…
Read definition →Poet laureate
According to Virgil, the Greek god Apollo decreed that poets should receive laurels as a prize. The British crown created the post of poet laureate in 1688 and awarded it to poets for…
Read definition →Poet's Corner
An area in the south transept of Westminster Abbey in London that holds both monuments and graves of famous poets, playwrights, and writers. Among the poets buried there are Geoffrey…
Read definition →Poetaster
A derogatory term for an inferior poet. See also Doggerel.
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Poetic license
A poet’s departure from the rules of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in order to maintain a metrical or rhyme scheme; can also mean the manipulation of facts to suit the needs of a poem.
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →Poststructuralism
A school of thought that responded negatively to structuralism’s insistence on frameworks and structures as access points to “truth.” Poststructuralism, like deconstruction, emphasized…
Read definition →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 “Elegy…
Read definition →Pre-Raphaelites
An artistic movement founded in 1848 by the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who is often credited with the group’s…
Read definition →Psychoanalytic theory
A critical approach influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on the unconscious and human behavior. Freud believed that the existence of three competing impulses in the psyche—the ego, id, and…
Read definition →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”…
Read definition →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,…
Read definition →Q
2Quantitative 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…
Read definition →Quatrain
A four-line stanza, often with various rhyme schemes, including: -ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain), as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”…
Read definition →R
8Reader-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…
Read definition →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 Dunbar’s “A Negro Love Song” or…
Read definition →Rhetorical
Rhetorical describes the use of language to communicate something persuasively or to impart information. Encompassing speech, written work, and visual mediums, rhetoric, at large, is…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Romanticism
A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Rondel (roundel)
A poetic form of 11 to 14 lines consisting of two rhymes and the repetition of the first two lines in the middle of the poem and at its end. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Roundel” is…
Read definition →S
23San Francisco Renaissance
Not a single movement, but a constellation of writers and artists active in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of World War II. Poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance…
Read definition →Sapphic verse
See ode.
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Sestet
A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. A sestet refers only to the final portion of a sonnet, otherwise the six-line stanza is known as a…
Read definition →Shakespearean sonnet
The variation of the sonnet form that Shakespeare used—comprised of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg—is called the English or Shakespearean sonnet…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Soliloquy
A soliloquy is a monologue in which a character in a play expresses thoughts and feelings while being alone on stage. Soliloquies allow dramatists to communicate information about a…
Read definition →Soloem
A soloem (pronounced so-lo-em) is a poem that identified the “soul“ or very special aspect of a particular geographic point, whether urban or rural. Created by inaugural Chicago Poet…
Read definition →Spenserian stanza
The unit of Edmund Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queene, consisting of eight iambic-pentameter lines and a final alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC. Later uses of this stanza…
Read definition →Spoken word
A broad designation for poetry intended for performance. Though some spoken word poetry may also be published on the page, the genre has its roots in oral traditions and performance.…
Read definition →Spondee
A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is “hog-wild.” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” is heavily spondaic: With swift, slow; sweet,…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Stanza
A grouping of lines separated from others in a poem. In modern free verse, the stanza, like a prose paragraph, can be used to mark a shift in mood, time, or thought.
Read definition →Stress
A syllable uttered in a higher pitch—or with greater emphasis—than others. The English language itself determines how English words are stressed, but sentence structure, semantics, and…
Read definition →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 Chorus’s movement back to its original…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Syllabic verse
Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Marianne Moore’s poetry is mostly syllabic. Other examples include Thomas…
Read definition →Symbol
Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or otherworldly. A rose, for example, has long been considered a…
Read definition →Symbolist poets
A group of late 19th-century French writers, including Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, who favored dreams, visions, and the associative powers of the imagination in their poetry.…
Read definition →Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole (for example, “I’ve got wheels” for “I have a car,” or a description of a worker as a “hired hand”). It is related to…
Read definition →Synesthesia
In description, a blending or intermingling of different sense modalities. While synesthesia appears in ancient literatures, including both the Iliad and Odyssey, it became especially…
Read definition →T
11Tautology
A statement redundant in itself, such as “free gift” or “The stars, O astral bodies!” Also, a statement that is necessarily true—a circular argument—such as “she is alive because she is…
Read definition →Tercet
A poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed. Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” rhymes AAA BBB; Ben Jonson’s “On Spies” is a three-line poem rhyming AAA; and Percy Bysshe…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Tetrameter
A line made up of four feet. See William Shakespeare’s “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun” or “Channel Firing” by Thomas Hardy.
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Transcendentalism
A strain of Romanticism that took root among writers in mid-19th-century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson laid out its principles in his 1836 manifesto Nature, in which he asserted that…
Read definition →Triadic/stepped line
A poetic line that unfolds in three descending or “stepped” parts. Invented by William Carlos Williams who used the device in poems such as “Desert Music,” “The Descent,” and “Asphodel,…
Read definition →Trimeter
A line of three metrical feet. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark” employs trochaic trimeter in the first two lines of each stanza. See also Léonie Adams’s “The Mount.”
Read definition →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 McPherson’s “Triolet” or “Triolets…
Read definition →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…
Read definition →Trope
A trope, similar to a convention, is a figure of speech used in literature and culture to describe a common theme or device. Some examples include tropes for plots such as a love…
Read definition →U
2Ubi 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…
Read definition →Understatement
Understatement is a mode or figure of speech that describes something in a way that reduces its importance and may make it seem less important or serious than it actually is.…
Read definition →V
6Verisimilitude
The appearance of being true, or a likeness to truth. Verisimilitude is related to mimesis or imitation, though it is also connected to ideas of literary decorum and proper use of…
Read definition →Vers libre
A French phrase meaning “free verse.”
Read definition →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.
Read definition →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 Milton’s…
Read definition →Victorian
Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) may be referred to as Victorian poetry. Following Romanticism, Victorian poets continued many of the previous…
Read definition →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…
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