Norton Anthology Poetry Terms
Norton Anthology Poetry Terms
Norton Anthology Poetry Terms
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nap/glossary_flashcards.htm
accentual meter
accentual stress
meter
Lines of verse based on the metrical foot. This is the most common form of
English poetry.
alcaics
alliteration
The repetition of sounds in nearby words, most often involving the initial
consonants of words (and sometimes the internal consonants in stressed
syllables).
allusion
An indirect reference to a text, myth, event, or person outside the poem itself
(compare echo). Although it is woven into the context of the poem, it carries
its own history of meaning: for example, see the reference to Hamlet in T. S.
Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1917).
ambiguity
analogy
anapest
anaphora
assonance
aubade
A lyric about the dawn (e.g., see John Donne, 'The Sun Rising' [1633]).
ballad
ballad stanza
A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter
and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do
not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as 'common
meter'; a loose form of it is often used by Emily Dickinson.
blank verse
caesura
concrete poetry
confessional poem
A relatively new (or recently defined) kind of poetry in which the speaker
focuses on the poet's own psychic biography. This label is often applied to
writings of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.
connotation
controlling
metaphors
conventions
couplet
dactyl
denotation
The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase (as distinct from its
implication). Compare connotation.
dramatic poetry
Poetry written in the voice of one or more characters assumed by the poet.
For example, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are dramatic narratives.
dramatic
monologue
echo
elegy
In classical times, any poem on any subject written in 'elegiac' meter (dactylic
couplets comprising a hexameter followed by a pentameter line), but since
the Renaissance usually a formal lament for the death of a particular person.
For example, see W. H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats' (1940).
end stop
A line break that coincides with the end of the sentence (vs. a run-on line;
compare enjambment).
English sonnet
Three four-line stanzas and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. For
example, see William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146 (1609; 'Poor soul, the center
of my sinful earth').
enjambment
The use of a line that 'runs on' to the next line, without pause, to complete
its grammatical sense (compare end stop). For example, see Gwendolyn
Brooks, 'We Real Cool' (1960).
envoy
A short concluding stanza found in certain poetic forms (e.g., the sestina)
epigram
Originally any poem carved in stone (on tombstones, buildings, gates, etc.),
but in modern usage a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the
end (e.g., much of the light verse of Ogden Nash).
extended
metaphors
Detailed and complex metaphors that extend over a long section of a poem
(e.g., the metaphor of grass in Whitmans 'Song of Myself' [1881], section 6
or of the compass in Donnes 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning').
feminine rhyme
figures of speech
Uses of a word or words that go beyond the literal meaning to show or imply
a relationship, evoking a further meaning. Such figures, sometimes called
'tropes' (i.e., rhetorical 'turns'), include anaphora, metaphor, metonymy, and
irony.
foot
The basic unit, consisting of two or three syllables, into which a line is divided
in scansion. Verse is labeled according to its dominant foot (e.g., iambic) and
the number of feet per line (e.g., pentameter). Lines of one, two, three, four,
five, and six feet are respectively called monometer, dimeter, trimeter,
tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter. See anapest, iamb, dactyl, spondee,
and trochee.
free verse
Poetry that does not follow the rules of regularized meter and strict form.
However, these open forms continue to rely on patterns of rhythm and
repetition to impose order; for example, see Whitman, 'Song of Myself'
(1881).
heroic couplet
image
irony
Italian sonnet
An octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines); typically rhymed abbaabba
cdecde, it has many variations that still reflect the basic division into two
parts separated by a rhetorical turn of argument (e.g., see Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese [1850]).
limerick
A five-line light poem, usually in anapestic rhythm. The first, second, and fifth
lines are rhymed trimeter; lines three and four are rhymed dimeter. The
rhymes are frequently eccentric, and the subject matter is often nonsensical
or obscene.
lyric
masculine rhyme
Rhymes that consist of a single stressed syllable. This is the most common
form of end rhyme in English (compare feminine rhyme).
meditation
metaphor
meter
The formal organization of the rhythm of a line into regular patterns; see
foot, scansion.
metonymy
mnemonic devices
Forms, such as rhyme, built into poems to help reciters remember the
poems.
motif
mythologies
Large systems of belief and tradition on which cultures draw to explain and
understand themselves. These are often political or religious, and often
become conventional over time (for example, see the use of 'Venus' son' in
Elizabeth s 'When I Was Fair and Young').
narrative
occasional poem
A poem written about or for a specific occasion, public or private (e.g., Maya
Angelou s poem for the 1993 presidential inauguration, 'On the Pulse of
Morning'). Such poems can transcend the particular incident that inspired
them; for example, see William Butler Yeats, 'Easter 1916' (1916).
ode
off-rhyme
Rhyme that does not perfectly match in vowel or consonant sound; for
example, see William Butler Yeats, 'Easter 1916' (1916): faces / houses,
gibe / club, etc.
onomatopoeia
Use of a word or words the sound of which approximates the sound of the
thing denoted (e.g., 'splash').
oxymoron
A poem that imitates another poem closely, but changes details for comic or
critical effect. For example, 'The Dover Bitch' by Anthony Hecht (1968)
parodies Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' (1867).
pastoral
pattern poetry
A poem with lines in the shape of the subject of the poem. This form was
popular in English poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g.,
George Herbert, 'Easter Wings' [1633]) and again in the twentieth century
(notably by John Hollander and May Swenson). Compare with concrete
poetry.
persona
personification
Petrarchan sonnet
prosopopoeia
See personification.
protest poem
pyrrhic
quantitative meter
Lines of verse divided into feet, which are scanned by syllable length (actual
duration of the sound) rather than stress (compare accentual meter). This is
the form of classical Greek and Latin verse, and it is very difficult to
reproduce in English, which privileges stress.
quatrain
rhyme
The repetition of the same ('perfect rhyme') or similar sounds, most often at
the ends of lines. See off-rhyme, vowel rhyme.
rhyme royal
scansion
sestina
Six six-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza in a complex form that
repeats words, not lines (as in the villanelle) or rhymes. The final word in
each line of the first stanza becomes the final word in other stanzas (in a set
pattern: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA); the lines in
the concluding stanza, or envoy, usually end ECA and each line contains one
of the remaining three end words. Invented in the twelfth century by the
troubadours, the form has again come into use in the twentieth century (e.g.,
by Marilyn Hacker); the repetitions often convey a sense of circling around a
subject.
setting
simile
A direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another that usually draws the
connection with the words 'like' or 'as.' Compare metaphor.
situation
The context of the action in a poem; that is, what is happening when the
poem begins.
sonnet
A form, usually only a single stanza, that offers several related possibilities for
its rhyme scheme; however, it is always fourteen lines long and usually
written in iambic pentameter. See English sonnet, Italian sonnet, and
Spenserian sonnet.
speaker
The person, not necessarily the author, who is the voice of a poem. See
persona.
Spenserian sonnet
Spenserian stanza
Eight lines of iambic pentameter and a ninth line of iambic hexameter, called
an alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbbc. The name of the stanza comes from
Edmund Spenser's use of it in 'The Faerie Queene' (1596); see also John
Keats, 'The Eve of St. Agnes' (1820).
spondee
sprung rhythm
Gerard Manley Hopkins' blending of accentual meter with the more familiar
feet of accentual-syllable meter. In his system, each foot begins with a stress;
the line is measured by the number of stresses, which fall with normal word
stress (and need not be separated by unstressed syllables).
stanzas
subject
The general or specific area of concern of a poem; also called its topic.
syllabic verse
symbol
A word or image that stands for something else in a vivid but indeterminate
way: it suggests more than what it actually says. For example, see Li-Young
Lee, 'Persimmons' (1986).
symbolic poem
synesthesia
syntax
terza rima
theme
tone
topic
See subject.
tradition
trochee
villanelle
A poem that contains five three-line stanzas and a final four-line stanza. Only
two rhyme sounds are permitted in the entire poem, and the first and third
lines of the first stanza are repeated, alternately, as the third line of
subsequent three-line stanzas; the last stanza ends with these two lines. Like
the sestina, the villanelle is a circular form; its movement recalls a dance, and
indeed it was originally derived from an Italian folk song. For a loose
example, see Rita Dove, 'Parsley: 1. The Cane Fields' (1983); for a stricter
example, see Dylan Thomas, 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night'
[1952]).
vowel rhyme
Rhyme words that have only their vowel sounds in common. For example,
see Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill' (1946): boughs / towns, green / leaves, etc.
zeugma
The use of one word (usually a verb) to 'yoke' two or more words to which it
applies in different senses (e.g., see Alexander Pope's Belinda, who may
'stain her Honour, or her new Brocade'; The Rape of the Lock 2.107 [1714]).
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