POETRY:
- Lyric:
- A poem of almost any length from two to two hundred lines that concentrates on a single moment of emotional intensity.
- Free Verse:
- Poetry that rejects regular rhyme and rhythm. It may be highly metaphorical, musical in an irregular way. It may use unusual diction and highly intensified emotional expression.
- Iambic Rhythm:
- "Short-long." The most common English meter. Each foot has two syllables, an unaccented one followed by an accented one. It may appear in lines of various lengths; the most familiar is probably a pentameter–a line with five feet. As in all poetic meters, a good deal of variation is allowed in each foot: Often at the beginning of a line the accented syllables are reversed to accented-unaccented. Occasionally feet may be composed of two accented syllables or two unaccented syllables.
- Hymn/Ballad Meter:
- Iambic rhythm. "Fourteeners" is the old shape, that is, a line of seven feet or fourteen syllables. This meter usually appears on the page, however, as tetrameter-trimeter, that is: a four-foot line followed by a three-foot line. This is why rhymes often occur only at the ends of the second and fourth lines.
- Rhyme:
- Lines that end with the same vowel and concluding consonant.
- Slant Rhyme:
- A favorite trick of Emily Dickinson. The vowels are not quite rhyming, e.g, arm-exclaim; seen-Appenine; pearl-alcohol; run-come.
- Riddle:
- The details are given; you have to figure out what's being described.
- Metaphor:
- An identification of two different things: e.g. Keats, "Before my pen has gleaned by teeming brain." To glean is to go through a field already harvested and gather up the last remnants of the grain. So: His brain is an already harvested but very fertile (teeming) field.
- Symbolism:
- The use in poetry of objects that have broad and deep meanings in a particular culture: the flag, the cross, the heart, the phallus, mother and child, Christmas tree. The meaning, of course, is hard to define because it can connect with so many different things.
- Eulogy:
- A speech in praise of someone.
- Elegy:
- An evocation of sadness over some loss.
- Dramatic Monologue:
- A soliloquy that isn't in a play, but stands alone.
- Pastoral Ideal:
- An ideal relationship between humankind and its natural surroundings.
- Pastoral Design:
- The use of the Pastoral Ideal by sophisticated poets to communicate the yearning for a simpler existence to a sophisticated audience.
- Allusion:
- A name or a situation in a work of literature which evokes a similar name or situation in an other work of literature, in order to intensify and complicate the meaning. E.g. Mark Twain has Tom Sawyer talk about Don Quixote. In doing so he makes us see that the book Huck Finn is a reversal and a commentary on the book Don Quixote.
- Modernism:
- A literary and artistic movement of the early 20th century which emphasized form as a way of bringing into poetic control the disorganized chaos of contemporary culture. "These fragments we have shored against our ruin."
- Syntagm:
- A structuralist term. Syntax, as you know, means the way you line up a group of words to make a sentence. A poem, a play, a novel, is also organized syntagmatically. You line up a series of thoughts, images, actions, events to make a total meaning. That organization is called the syntagm of the work.
- Paradigm:
- A paradigm in learning a language is all the words that a certain word is related to either by similarity or contrast. E.g. Mother: momma, maternal, womb, breast, grandmother, step-mother, daughter, step-daughter, witch, etc. A paradigm when applied to a large work of literature would be similar but more difficult to grasp. T.S.Eliot's "The Wasteland" is connected with and echoes fragments of the Old and New Testaments, stories from Greek Mythology, the Tarot pack of cards. Huck Finn, as I've said, is related to Don Quixote in this way.
- Tradition and the Individual Talent:
- An essay by T. S. Eliot discussing the relationship between the whole body of previous literature as it influences the poet.
- Visual/Print Poetry:
- When the physical image on the printed page as well as deliberate distortions of the conventions of print are used to heighten the sense of poetic artistry. E.g. Writing the poem so that it appears on the page as a pair of wings. Writing the poem without capital letters, jambing words together, hyphenating long strings of words.
- Satire:
- Making fun of social conventions or beliefs.
- Imagism:
- Writing poetry that evokes an image but refuses to comment on it further.
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