Some Terms for Poetics
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accentual-alliterative verse: poetry that relies on lines of four accented syllables, two on each side of a caesura (a mid-line break).  The lines do not rhyme, but the first accented syllables alliterate.  Derives from Old English form as e.g. in Beowulf. top

aesthetics:derives from `sensuous apprehension of the object' & means principles of or philosophy underlying the fine arts, the Beautiful, & their appreciation. top

agon: (as in ‘anxiety of influence’) — struggle between a poet & her/his precursor poets. top

allegory: literally “other reading” e.g. The Odyssey as the universal voyage of all human life. top

alliteration: repeated initial consonant sounds in successive words; this is visual as well as aural.  top

allusion: an intentional reference to something else (a person, place, time, event, another poem or art work etc.) top

anadiplosis: repeating the last word of a line at the start of the next line. top

anaphora: repeating a word or phrase at the start successive lines or clauses. top

apostrophe: a direct address, often to someone or something absent. top

archetype: proto-type, the primitive original model, not a copy.  Also the universal prior concept of the thing, the pattern of the created thing in the ectypal world. top

ars poetica: [Latin] the art of poetry, or a poem on the art of poetry. top

assonance: repeated vowel sounds (& part-rhymes) in successive words, usually within a line.  Compare with consonance, repeated consonant sounds. top

aubade: a song at dawn where the lover regrets the daylight that means leaving the beloved. top

Blank verse:  unrhymed iambic pentameter verse, e.g.

                .  /    .    /  .   /    .   /  .   /

                I am not merry; but I do beguile

                .       /     .   /  .   /    .    /   .  /

                The thing I am by seeming otherwise. (Othello II.i.122-23) top

caesura: originally the break in an Old English line of accentual-alliterative verse.  Now, it often refers to a pause within a line at a syntactical or phrase boundary. top

centrifugal art works vs. centripetal art works: in the former, the elements of the poetry spin out from a core of energy in an expansive pattern (cf. Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass); in the latter the elements are more like pieces of a mosaic which form a gestalt (cf. Dickinson's lyric poems). top

chiasmus: a pattern of criss-crossing a syntactic structure or a reversal of normal syntax. top

cliché: overly familiar, too easy, predictable, trite, stereotyped, or predictable language. top

couplets: two-line stanzas in which the lines are often the same length.  Historically, lines in couplets had the same meter and frequently rhymed. top

elegy: from the 16th c., any serious meditative piece.   Formally, a lament or dirge for the dead. top

end-stopped: when the sense of a line comes to an end coincidentally with the end of a line.  See enjambment. top

enjambment: when the sense is straddling a line-break, i.e. sense is not endstopped. top

envoi: From the French for “farewell,” hence, a conclusion.  This can mean the last lines of a poem, especially the last three lines of a sestina. top

epic: as a genre, (i) the primary epic is from heroic oral poetry like Homer's Iliad, Beowulf etc.  It features great deeds, high level of diction, intense music, crisis in the history of a people, a culture... (ii) more recently, the literary or secondary epic — a long ambitious poem by one author modelled upon an older primary form e.g. The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queen, The Prelude, Don Juan... top

figure/figurative language: any shift away from literal  meaning brought about by use of tropes. top

found poem: originally a “poem” encountered in the environment from e.g. signs, advertisements, notices magazines, articles, notices, memoranda etc.  The poet shapes this material into a poem to heighten what is poetic in the “found poem.”  Broadly defined, a found poem is any poem made of borrowed or stolen parts which are then recast into art. top

free verse/ Vers Libre: any verse form whose lines are not measured by (i) the number of stressed syllables per line (accentual verse), or (ii) alternations of stressed and unstressed syllables, or (iii) syllables alone. top

full rhyme: when the vowels and consanants are the same, e.g. “blue” and “shoe” are a full rhyme, or “librarian” and “agrarian.”  Polysyllabic rhymes tend to be funnier, e.g. Byron, the Romantic poet, rhymed “in-tell-ect-u-al” with “hen-pecked you all” in the following couplet: “You Lords of Ladies in-tell-ect-u-al, / Have they not hen-pecked you all?” In contrast, “cloth” and “growth” are a half-rhyme (only the terminal consanants rhyme), and “south” and “down” (only the vowels rhyme).  See RHYME, below... top

genre: the typical form of the whole work, the whole utterance i.e. not just a set of defined devices in a set form.  Genres exist in a two-fold way (i) in relation to their specific audience and their generic expectations, and (ii) in relation to its subject, its theme, or problems in real life. top

Ghazal: As few as ten to twenty-four lines in length (and infinitely expandable) – originally a Persian form.  These long-lined couplets often develop mystical and/or romantic themes.  They may be monorhymed (aa, ba, ca, da.) and/or include the poet’s name in the last line. top

Haiku: Growing out of Zen Buddhist philosophy (a version of Buddhism that began in India and then spread widely, in which believers seek enlightenment through meditation, introspection and intuition rather than through reason or the interpretation of a text or scripture).  Originally, in Japanese, a three-line poem of 5, 7, 5 syllables; haiku writers sought to capture a moment of perception usually of nature.  Haikus turn on strong natural images—using a word, called the kigo, that indicates the season—and relay intense emotions, often leading to spiritual insights. Contemporary haiku writers can drop the three-line requirement (often writing the poem as a single line) and/or the syllable count and/or the kigo. top

Heroic Couplet: A closed couplet of rhymed iambic pentameter. top

Homonyms: Words with the same pronunciation but different meanings and spellings, like son/sun. top

hyperbole: exaggeration that intensifies, e.g. “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” top

icon: an image or picture, esp. in Church, a mosaic or holy picture of a religious figure.  So iconoclasm is image-breaking, assaulting tradition.... top

image: a representation to any of the six senses – sight, taste, touch, sound, smell, kinesthesia – which creates a mental picture or experience.  Visual images are the most common. top

Irony: saying one thing but meaning another, e.g. in sarcasm.  There are many kinds of literary irony, e.g. dramatic irony is when the audience/ reader has knowledge that exceeds what a speaker/character knows, or when a speaker says something that the audience/reader knows will change in time. top

Metaphor and simile: both compare one thing with another, but simile actually uses the words “like” or “as.”   Meanwhile, metaphor identifies one with the other. top

Meter: in English and American poetry, when verse follows a regular pattern such as with  metrical feet (iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapests, spondees) in various line-lengths: dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter... top

Metonymy and synechdoche: the former is a figure or trope in which one says an associated object instead of the thing itself, e.g.  “Sword” for “warfare” and “crown” for a “king.”  In the latter, a part is used to stand for the whole, e.g. “we saw ten sails” for “we saw ten ships.” top

naive [vs. sentimental] or visionary vs. psychological aesthetics: in naive or visionary aesthetics, the artwork may use the artist as a medium, shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purposes, i.e. there is something out there beyond ourselves which inter-relates with the artist at work.  Blake's The Book of Thel and the last part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land are great examples of visionary writing; see also Whitman's “The Sleepers.” In the latter, the conscious will of the artist is always fully involved, engaged, awake(!)  W. B. Yeats is a great exponent of this method. top

Onomatopoeia: when the words in the poem imitate what the thing sounds like; for example, the word “woof” sounds like the sound a dog makes.  More generally, this can also mean when the poem’s words or form imitate the meaning. top

Oxymoron: a self-contradiction in rhetoric creating a seemingly absurd or impossible situation, e.g. a “victor-victim.” top

Paradox: a self-contradictory statement, hence meaningless (or a situation producing one); e.g. Epimenedes the Cretan said that all Cretans are liars. top

Parody: a humorous imitation of a famous work.

pedestrian poetry (musa pedestris) or the plain style, as opposed to elevated (high) or elegant (middle) styles...: poetry that does not attempt to fly above ordinary world events or ordinary language. top

Persona: the speaker of the poem (as opposed to the poet her or himself in an autobiographical piece), a mask that the poet wears, a constructed or imagined identity. top

personification: treating a thing or an abstract quality as if it were a person; attributing feelings to inanimate objects. top

Praise Song: In many African societies, griots (tribal singers or bards) recite traditional epics of praise and celebration at festivals and coronations and perform these epics in rhythmic prose and verse, often accompanied by musicians. top

Prose Poem: A block-shaped, usually paragraphed text that relies on the poetic techniques of imagery and condensed, rhythmic, repetitive, often rhymed language and often makes its point via metaphor, analogy, or association, yet still may partake of fictional techniques like character building, plot, dialogue, and so on. top

Prosody: The study of verse forms, sounds, and patterns in poetry. top

Rhyme: usually refers to full rhyme (also called perfect or exact rhyme): the repetition of the sound of the final stressed syllable (plus any subsequent unstressed syllables) of a word; for example, “rent” rhymes with “bent, “prevent,” or “consent.”   “Conversation” rhymes with “disintegration,” “Harriet” rhymes with “proletariat,” etc.  Generally, the longer the rhyme, the funnier it gets.  

satire: mode that distorts or exaggerates a view of  the world to show its true moral (not just physical) nature.  Frequently used to point out the lack of morality in the world. top

Stream of consciousness: literary technique (especially of modern fiction) that imitates the flow of thoughts, impressions, memories, meditations, etc.  Virginia Woolf and James Joyce exploited this technique in British literature, influencing modernist and postmodernist poetics. top

Sublime: lofty, in 18th c., perceived in Nature & Art; inspiring awe and terror with wildness, power. top

symbol [vs. emblem] : broadly, when one phenomenon stands for another or is associated with another.  For example, the sun and moon frequently are symbols of masculine and feminine forms of energy or power, and  images of grass or leaves are often symbols for human life – there’s a “natural” association.  However, explicit correlations that are invented by writers or other elements in the culture as found in Medieval and Renaissance lit. are emblems.  For example, an olive branch is an emblem of peace. top

Symbolist Movement: in France around the fin de siècle [end of the 19th c., also le mal du siècle] formed in disillusioned reaction against late Romanticism's inflated Imaginative ego [e.g. Victor Hugo] and the pervasive materialism of the era.  They sought truer forms of individuality and deeper introspection through language as a mystical tool or absolute essence.  They followed the decadent lead of Charles Baudelaire and introduced more slang, grotesque humor, and doggerel in violent, apocalyptic writings.  Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière were associated with the school of decadence, and Mallarmé with the aesthetic school which celebrated beauty but in a far more internalized consciousness.  They were crucial precursors for the Modernists: Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot, Joyce; Rimbaud in particular influenced the Surrealists (1930s), Post-modernists (e.g. Ashbery) and other contemporary New York City Poets (e.g. Ted Berrigan, Jim Carroll etc). top

theme: more than just the totality of meanings found in the parts, the lines, sentences, stanzas or any other structure, theme is not an element of language — “Theme always transcends language... The theme of the work is the theme of the whole utterance as a definite sociohistorical act” (Bakhtin's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 132). top

Trope: figurative language that involves manipulations of meanings in which meanings are nonliteral. top