AP Lit Vocab Essays

AP Lit Vocab Essays AP Lit Vocab Paper AP Lit Vocab Paper Essay Topic: A Raisin in the Sun A. E. Housman Poems Anne Sexton Poems Christina Rossetti Poems Elizabeth Bishop Poems Ezra Pound Poems George Herbert Poems Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Poems Jonathan Swift Poems Keats Poems and Letters Lycidas Phillis Wheatley Poems Poes Poetry Poes Short Stories Poetry Seamus Heaney Poems The Complete Poems of William Blake The Convergence Of the Twain The Faerie Queene The Poetry of Dh Lawrence The Poetry Of Robert Penn Warren The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The Sonnets of John Milton Thomas Gray Poems Thomas Hardy Poems Wallace Stevens Poems William Carlos Williams Poems Accentual 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 accentual; see Ezra Pounds modern translation of The Seafarer. More recently, Richard Wilbur employed this same Anglo-Saxon meter in his poem Junk. Traditional nursery rhymes, such as Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, are often accentual. 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, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed. The majority of English poems from the Renaissance to the 19th century are written according to this metrical system. Alexandrine In English, a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. The last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardys The Convergence of the Twain and Percy Bysshe Shelleys To a Skylark is an alexandrine. Allegory An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegorys meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress and Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene are two major allegorical works in English. Alliteration The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; pizza and place alliterate. Example: We saw the sea sound sing, we heard the salt sheet tell, from Dylan Thomass Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed. Browse poems with alliteration. Allusion A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. The Waste Land, T. S. Eliots influential long poem is dense with allusions. The title of Seamus Heaneys autobiographical poem Singing School alludes to a line from W.B. Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium (Nor is there singing school but studying /Monuments of its own magnificence). Browse poems with allusions. Anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words underfoot and overcome are anapestic. Lord Byrons The Destruction of Sennacherib is written in anapestic meter. Anaphora The repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines. See Paul Muldoons As, William Blakes The Tyger, or much of Walt Whitmans poetry, including I Sing the Body Electric. Anthropomorphism A form of personification in which human qualities are attributed to anything inhuman, usually a god, animal, object, or concept. In Vachel Lindsays What the Rattlesnake Said, for example, a snake describes the fears of his imagined prey. John Keats admires a stars loving watchfulness (with eternal lids apart) in his sonnet Bright Star, Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art. 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 deaths power by directly admonishing it. Emily Dickinson addresses her absent object of passion in Wild nights!- Wild nights! 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 Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, explores archetypes as the symbolic patterns that recur within the world of literature itself. In both approaches, archetypical themes include birth, death, sibling rivalry, and the individual versus society. Archetypes may also be images or characters, such as the hero, the lover, the wanderer, or the matriarch. Assonance The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme. See Amy Lowells In a Garden (With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur) or The Taxi (And shout into the ridges of the wind). Browse poems with assonance. Aubade A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. The form originated in medieval France. See John Donnes The Sun Rising and Louise Bogans Leave-Taking. Browse more aubade poems. Ballad A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating fours of this literary ballad form include John Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci, Thomas Hardys During Wind and Rain, and Edgar Allan Poes Annabel Lee. Browse more ballads. 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 English speech patterns. Poems such as John Miltons Paradise Lost, Robert Brownings dramatic monologues, and Wallace Stevenss Sunday Morning, are written predominantly in blank verse. Browse more blank verse poems. Cacophony Harsh or discordant word sounds; the opposite of euphony. See dissonance. Cadence The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse). 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 Old English poetry (see Beowulf). Medial caesurae (plural of caesura) can be found throughout contemporary poet Derek Walcotts The Bounty. When the pause occurs toward the beginning or end of the line, it is termed, respectively, initial or terminal. Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Mother and Poet contains both initial (Dead! One of them shot by sea in the east) and terminal caesurae (No voice says My mother again to me. What?) 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 listing of all authorized books in the Bible. William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Blake are frequently found on lists of canonical literature in English. Canto A long subsection of an epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante Alighieris Commedia (The Divine Comedy), first employed in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene. Other examples include Lord Byrons Don Juan and Ezra Pounds Cantos. 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 many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn (Beauty is truth, truth beauty). Circumlocution A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridges twice five miles of fertile ground (i.e., 10 miles) in Kubla Khan. Also known as periphrasis. Common Measure A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Many of Emily Dickinsons poems are written in common measure, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Haydens The Ballad of Nat Turner and Elinor Wylies A Crowded Trolley Car. See also Poulters measure and fourteener. Browse more common measure poems. Complaint A poem of lament, often directed at an ill-fated love, as in Henry Howards Complaint of the Absence of Her Love Being upon the Sea, or Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophel and Stella XXXI. A complaint may also be a satiric attack on social injustice and immorality; in The Lie, Sir Walter Ralegh bitterly rails against institutional hypocrisy and human vanity (Tell men of high condition, / That manage the estate, / Their purpose is ambition, / Their practice only hate.). 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 (after the Italian poet Petrarch) conceits figure heavily in sonnets, and contrast more conventional sensual imagery to describe the experience of love. In Shakespeares Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been, for example, What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! laments the lover, though his separation takes place in the fertile days of summer and fall. Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterize the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets [link to glossary term] used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the readers attention. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donnes conceits, see Stephen Burts Poem Guide on John Donnes The Sun Rising.) Concrete poetry Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic. Examples include George Herberts Easter Wings and The Altar and George Starbucks Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree. Browse more concrete poems. 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 Berryman. The term was first used by M.L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies, the collection in which Robert Lowell revealed his struggles with mental illness and a troubled marriage. Read an interview with Snodgrass in which he addresses his work and the work of others associated with confessionalism. Browse more poets who wrote confessional poems. Connotation there was a connotation of distrust in his voice: overtone, undertone, undercurrent, implication, hidden meaning, nuance, hint, echo, vibrations, association, intimation, suggestion, suspicion, insinuation. Consonance A resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial rhyme (see also Alliteration). Consonance can also refer to shared consonants, whether in sequence (bed and bad) or reversed (bud and dab). Browse poems with consonance. Controlling metaphor controlling metaphors: Metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem. For example, metaphors of movement structure John Donne ´s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning (1633). couplet couplet: A pair of lines, almost always rhyming, that form a unit. dactyl A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words poetry and basketball are both dactylic. Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade is written in dactylic meter. (See also double dactyl.) dead metaphor A dead metaphor is a metaphor which has lost the original imagery of its meaning owing to extensive, repetitive popular usage. flowerbed head teacher forerunner to run for office to lose face to lend a hand to broadcast pilot originally meant the rudder of a boat. flair originally meant a sweet smell. a computer mouse denotation denotation: The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase (as distinct from its implication). Compare connotation. dimeter A line of verse composed of two feet. Some go local / Some go express / Some cant wait / To answer Yes, writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem Yes, in which the dimeter line predominates. Kay Ryans Blandeur contains this series of mostly dimeter lines: Even out Earths rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers 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 Christina Rossettis A Dirge and Sir Philip Sidneys Ring Out Your Bells. 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 sound for a jarring effect, rather than on the unpleasantness of individual words. Gerard Manley Hopkinss use of fixed stresses and variable unstressed syllables, combined with frequent assonance, consonance, and monosyllabic words, has a dissonant effect. See these lines from Carrion Comfort: Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. doggerel Bad verse traditionally characterized by clichà ©s, clumsiness, and irregular meter. It is often unintentionally humorous. The giftedly bad William McGonagall was an accomplished doggerelist, as demonstrated in The Tay Bridge Disaster: It must have been an awful sight, To witness in the dusky moonlight, While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, Along the Railway Bridge of the Silvry Tay, Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silvry Tay, I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed. dramatic monologue A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Brownings My Last Duchess, T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Ais Killing Floor. A lyric may also be addressed to someone, but it is short and songlike and may appear to address either the reader or the poet. Browse more dramatic monologue poems. elegy In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subjects death but ends in consolation. Examples include John Miltons Lycidas; Alfred, Lord Tennysons In Memoriam; and Walt Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd. More recently, Peter Sacks has elegized his father in Natal Command, and Mary Jo Bang has written You Were You Are Elegy and other poems for her son. In the 18th century the elegiac stanza emerged, though its use has not been exclusive to elegies. It is a quatrain with the rhyme scheme ABAB written in iambic pentameter. Browse more elegies. 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 amrous causes springs, goes the first line of Alexander Popes The Rape of the Lock, in which amorous is elided to amrous to establish the pentameter (five-foot) line. ellipsis In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the readers ability to understand the expression. For example, Shakespeare makes frequent use of the phrase I will away in his plays, with the missing verb understood to be go. T.S. Eliot employs ellipsis in the following passage from Preludes: You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands. The possessive your is left out in the second and third lines, but it can be assumed that the woman addressed by the speaker is clasping the soles of her own feet with her own hands. end-stopped A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break- such as a dash or closing parenthesis- or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period. A line is considered end-stopped, too, if it contains a complete phrase. Many of Alexander Popes couplets are end-stopped, as in this passage from An Essay on Man: Epistle I: Then say not mans imperfect, Heavn in fault; Say rather, mans as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measurd to his state and place, His time a moment, and a point his space. If to be perfect in a certain sphere, What matter, soon or late, or here or there? The blest today is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago. The opposite of an end-stopped line is an enjambed line. enjambment The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped. William Carlos Williamss Between Walls is one sentence broken into 10 enjambed lines: the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle 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 Spensers The Faerie Queene (which follows the virtuous exploits of 12 knights in the service of the mythical King Arthur), and John Miltons Paradise Lost, which dramatizes Satans fall from Heaven and humankinds subsequent alienation from God in the Garden of Eden. epigram A pithy, often witty, poem. See Walter Savage Landors Dirce, [link to archived poem] Ben Jonsons On Gut, [link to archived poem] or much of the work of J.V. Cunningham [link to poet page]: This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained. epigraph A quotation from another literary work that is placed beneath the title at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem. For example, Grace Schulmans American Solitude opens with a quote from an essay by Marianne Moore. Lines from Phillis Wheatleys On Being Brought from Africa to America preface Alfred Corns Sugar Cane. epitaph A short poem intended for (or imagined as) an inscription on a tombstone and often serving as a brief elegy. See Robert Herricks Upon a Child That Died and Upon Ben Jonson; Ben Jonsons Epitaph on Elizabeth, L. H.; and Epitaph for a Romantic Woman by Louise Bogan. 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 of words- anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for example). Browse all terms related to figures of speech. figurative language Whenever you describe something by comparing it with something else, you are using figurative language. Simile A simile uses the words like or as to compare one object or idea with another to suggest they are alike. Example: busy as a bee Metaphor The metaphor states a fact or draws a verbal picture by the use of comparison. A simile would say you are like something; a metaphor is more positive it says you are something. Example: You are what you eat. Personification A figure of speech in which human characteristics are given to an animal or an object. Example: My teddy bear gave me a hug. Alliteration The repetition of the same initial letter, sound, or group of sounds in a series of words. Alliteration includes tongue twisters. Example: She sells seashells by the seashore. Onomatopoeia The use of a word to describe or imitate a natural sound or the sound made by an object or an action. Example: snap crackle pop Hyperbole An exaggeration that is so dramatic that no one would believe the statement is true. Tall tales are hyperboles. Example: He was so hungry, he ate that whole cornfield for lunch, stalks and all. Idioms According to Websters Dictionary, an idiom is defined as: peculiar to itself either grammatically (as no, it wasnt me) or in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements. Example: Monday week for the Monday a week after next Monday Clichà ©s A clichà © is an expression that has been used so often that it has become trite and sometimes boring. Example: Many hands make light work. 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 poetry are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables) found poem A prose text or texts reshaped by a poet into quasi-metrical lines. Fragments of found poetry may appear within an original poem as well. Portions of Ezra Pounds Cantos are found poetry, culled from historical letters and government documents. Charles Olson created his poem There Was a Youth whose Name Was Thomas Granger using a report from William Bradfords History of Plymouth Plantation. 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 metrical plan in their composition. Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman explored the possibilities of nonmetrical poetry in the 19th century. Since the early 20th century, the majority of published lyric poetry has been written in free verse. See the work of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. Browse more free-verse poems. haiku A Japanese verse form of three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. It creates a single, memorable image, as in these lines by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield: On a branch floating downriver a cricket, singing. (In translating from Japanese to English, Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.) See also Three Haiku, Two Tanka by Philip Appleman and Robert Hasss After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa. The Imagist poets of the early 20th century, including Ezra Pound and H.D., showed appreciation for the forms linguistic and sensory economy; Pounds In a Station of the Metro embodies the spirit of haiku. Browse more haiku. heptameter A meter made up of seven feet and usually 14 syllables total (see Fourteener). George Chapmans translation of Homers the Iliad is written in heptameter, as is Edgar Allan Poes Annabel Lee. See also Poulters measure. hexameter A metrical line of six feet, most often dactylic, and found in Classical Latin or Greek poetry, including Homers Iliad. In English, an iambic hexameter line is also known as an alexandrine. Only a few poets have written in dactylic hexameter, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the long poem Evangeline: 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 Wattss Our God, Our Help, Charles Wesleys My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine, and Thou Hidden Love of God by John Wesley. hyperbole A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. For example, see James Tates lines She scorched you with her radiance or He was more wronged than Job. Hyperbole usually carries the force of strong emotion iamb 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 meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech. In Robert Frosts After Apple Picking the iamb is the vehicle for the natural, colloquial speech pattern: My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And theres a barrel that I didnt fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didnt pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. imagery (sensory) Describing words! internal rhyme In poetry, internal rhyme, or middle rhyme, is rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse.[1] 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. When William Shakespeare relates in detail how his lover suffers in comparison with the beauty of nature in My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun, it is understood that he is elevating her beyond these comparisons; considering her essence as a whole, and what she means to the speaker, she is more beautiful than nature. (titantic beauty vs. worms) italian sonnet 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]). lyric poetry Lyric poems typically express personal or emotional feelings and is traditionally the home of the present tense.[1] They have specific rhyming schemes and are often, but not always, set to music or a beat lyricism An artists expression of emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way; the quality of being lyrical. kenning A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun. It is found frequently in Old Germanic, Norse, and English poetry, including The Seafarer, in which the ocean is called a whale-path. (See Ezra Pounds translation) light verse Whimsical poems taking forms such as limericks, nonsense poems, and double dactyls. See Edward Lears The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Lewis Carrolls The Walrus and the Carpenter. Other masters of light verse include Dorothy Parker, G.K. Chesterton, John Hollander, and Wendy Cope. 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. Limericks are traditionally bawdy or just irreverent; see A Young Lady of Lynn or Lears There was an Old Man with a Beard. Browse more limericks. metaphor A comparison that is made directly (for example, John Keatss Beauty is truth, truth beauty from Ode on a Grecian Urn) or less directly (for example, Shakespeares marriage of two minds), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as like, as, or than. See Sylvia Plaths description of her dead father as Marble-heavy, a bag full of God in Daddy, or Emily Dickinsons Hope is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul- . Browse poems with developed metaphors. 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 quantitative meter. Falling meter refers to trochees and dactyls (i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables). Iambs and anapests (i.e., one or two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) are called rising meter. See also foot. 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, the British monarchy is often referred to as the Crown. In the phrase lend me your ears, ears is substituted for attention. O, for a draught of vintage! exclaims the speaker in John Keatss Ode to Nightingale, with vintage understood to mean wine. Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy. motif A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and may serve an overall theme. For example, the repeated questions of an ubi sunt poem compose a motif of the fleeting nature of life. Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels and John Bunyans A Pilgrims Progress both feature the motif of a long journey. Motifs are sometimes described as expressions of a collective unconsciousness; see archetype. narrative poem Poetry that tells a story and is primarily characterized by linear, chronological description. negative capability A theory of John Keats, who suggested in one of his famous letters that a great thinker is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated. See Keatss To Autumn. The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, Beauty is truth, truth beauty- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. objective 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 the reader (Hamlet, 1919). There must be a positive connection between the emotion the poet is trying to express and the object, image, or situation in the poem that helps to convey that emotion to the reader. Eliot thus determined that Shakespeares play Hamlet was an artistic failure because Hamlets intense emotions overwhelmed the authors attempts to express them through an objective correlative. In other words, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was unable to provoke the audience to feel as Prince Hamlet did through images, actions, and characters, and instead only inadequately described his emotional state through the plays dialogue. Eliots theory of the objective correlative is closely related to the Imagist movement. objectivism A term coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 that developed from his reading of Alfred North Whiteheads Science and the Modern World. He described it as looking at a poem with a special eye to its structural aspects, how it has been constructed. Louis Zukofsky expanded the term and attempted to articulate its principles when he guest-edited the February 1931 issue of Poetry. He included Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. Later, the poet Lorine Niedecker was closely associated with this movement. These objectivist poets, Zukofsky noted, were Imagists rather than Symbolists; they were concerned with creating a poetic structure that could be perceived as a whole, rather than a series of imprecise but evocative images. For more on objectivism, read Peter OLearys feature, The Energies of Words. Browse Objectivist poets. occasional poem A poem written to describe or comment on a particular event and often written for a public reading. Alfred, Lord Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade commemorates a disastrous battle in the Crimean War. George Starbuck wrote Of Late after reading a newspaper account of a Vietnam War protesters suicide. Elizabeth Alexanders Praise Song for the Day was written for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. See also elegy, epithalamion, and ode. 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. ode A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552-442 B.C.E.) ode was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. (See Stephen Burts article And the Winner Is . . . Pindar!) English odes written in the Pindaric tradition include Thomas Grays The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode and William Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood. Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner; see Andrew Marvells Horatian Ode upon Cromwells Return from Ireland. The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. See Algernon Charles Swinburnes Sapphics. The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridges Dejection: An Ode,) or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn). Browse more odes. onomatopoeia A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense (for example, choo-choo, hiss, or buzz). In Piano, D.H. Lawrence describes the boom of the tingling strings as his mother played the piano, mimicking the volume and resonance of the sound (boom) as well as the fine, high-pitched vibration of the strings that produced it (tingling strings) 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 for his mock-epic Don Juan. W.B. Yeats used it for Among School Children and Sailing to Byzantium. Browse more ottava rima poems. panegyric A poem of effusive praise. Its origins are Greek, and it is closely related to the eulogy and the ode. See Ben Jonsons To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare or Anne Bradstreets In Honor of That High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth. 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 not there and the nothing that is. Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Man: Epistle II, describes Man as Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all. Paradox is related to oxymoron, which creates a new phrase or concept out of a contradiction. parody A comic imitation of another authors work or characteristic style. See Joan Murrays We Old Dudes, a parody of Gwendolyn Brookss We Real Cool. paraphrase summarize pastoral Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spensers The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowes The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and Sir Walter Raleghs response, The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd. The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adamss Country Summer, Dylan Thomass Fern Hill, or Allen Ginsbergs Wales Visitation. Browse more pastoral poems. personification A figure of speech in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person. William Blakes O Rose, thou art sick! is one example; Donnes Death, be not proud is another. Gregory Corso quarrels with a series of personified abstractions in his poem The Whole Mess . . . Almost. Personification is often used in symbolic or allegorical poetry; for instance, the virtue of Justice takes the form of the knight Artegal in Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene. pathetic fallacy ascribes human, emotional qualities (feelings, thought, sensation) to inanimate objects, as if possessed of human awareness.[1] [2] As such, in the term pathetic fallacy, the word pathetic communicates feelings of two types, pathos (emotion) and empathy (capability of emotion). poetic device A poetic device is a language feature such as a simile, metaphor, pun etc. poetic devices or often called poetic methods can be a number of things used in a poem. Examples of poetic devices are. language, imagery, assonance, alliteration, metaphor, similie and there are many more. poetic inversion inversion, also called anastrophe, in literary style and rhetoric, the syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence, as, in English, the placing of an adjective after the noun it modifies (the form divine), a verb before its subject (Came the dawn), or a noun preceding its preposition (worlds between). Inversion is most commonly used in poetry in which it may both satisfy the demands of the metre and achieve emphasis: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree - (from Samuel Taylor Coleridges Kubla Khan) Inversion used simply for the sake of maintaining a rhyme scheme is considered a literary defect, although it is a common convention in folk ballads: quatrain A four-line stanza, rhyming -ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain), as in Samuel Taylor Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. -AABB (a double couplet); see A.E. Housmans To an Athlete Dying Young. -ABAB (known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic), as in Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard or Sadie and Maud by Gwendolyn Brooks. -ABBA (known as envelope or enclosed), as in Alfred, Lord Tennysons In Memoriam or John Ciardis Most Like an Arch This Marriage. -AABA, the stanza of Robert Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 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 Dunbars A Negro Love Song or return and return again in James Laughlins O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again. Browse poems with a refrain. rhyme scheme A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme between lines of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other. In other words, it is the pattern of end rhymes or lines. Bid me to weep, and I will weep While I have eyes to see; And having none, and yet I will keep A heart to weep for thee. rhyme royal 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 addition to Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, see Sir Thomas Wyatts They flee from me and William Wordsworths Resolution and Independence. rhythm An audible pattern in verse established by the intervals between stressed syllables. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference, observes Edward Hirsch in his essay on rhythm, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. See also meter. 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 refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas. The 10-line version rhymes ABBAABc ABBAc (where the lower-case c stands for the refrain). The 15-line version often rhymes AABBA AABc AABAc. Geoffrey Chaucers Now welcome, summer at the close of The Parlement of Fowls is an example of a 13-line rondeau. A rondeau redoublà © consists of six quatrains using two rhymes. The first quatrain consists of four refrain lines that are used, in sequence, as the last lines of the next four quatrains, and a phrase from the first refrain is repeated as a tail at the end of the final stanza. See Dorothy Parkers Roudeau Redoublà © (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That). 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 classification of a poems stanza, structure, and rhyme scheme. sestet A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. sestina A complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoy. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoy contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. The patterns of word repetition are as follows, with each number representing the final word of a line, and each row of numbers representing a stanza: 1 2 3 4 5 6 6 1 5 2 4 3 3 6 4 1 2 5 5 3 2 6 1 4 4 5 1 3 6 2 2 4 6 5 3 1 (6 2) (1 4) (5 3) See Algernon Charles Swinburnes The Complaint of Lisa, John Ashberys Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape, and David Ferrys The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People. Browse more sestinas. simile A comparison (see Metaphor) made with as, like, or than. In A Red, Red Rose, Robert Burns declares: O my Luve is like a red, red rose Thats newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody Thats sweetly played in tune. What happens to a dream deferred? asks Langston Hughes in Harlem: Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over- like a syrupy sweet? sonnet A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally a little song, the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or turn of thought in its concluding lines. spondee A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is hog-wild. Gerard Manley Hopkinss Pied Beauty is heavily spondaic: With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. 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 the number of unstressed syllables varies considerably from line to line (see also accentual verse). According to Hopkins, its intended effect was to reflect the dynamic quality and variations of common speech, in contrast to the monotony of iambic pentameter. His own poetry illustrates its use; though there have been few imitators, the spirit and principles of sprung rhythm influenced the rise of free verse in the early 20th century. 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. syllabic verse Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Marianne Moores poetry is mostly syllabic. Other examples include Thomas Nashes Adieu, farewell earths bliss and Dylan Thomass Poem in October. Browse more poems in syllabic verse. 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 symbol of love and affection. Every word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol (to which a word, of course, may point) has a concreteness not shared by language, and can point to something that transcends ordinary experience. Poets such as William Blake and W.B. Yeats often use symbols when they believe in- or seek- a transcendental (religious or spiritual) reality. A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must reveal something else transcendental. In To the Rose upon the Rood of Time, for instance, Yeatss image of the rose on the cross symbolizes the joining of flesh and spirit. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write in their book Understanding Poetry (3rd ed., 1960),The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted. synecdoche A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole (for example, Ive got wheels for I have a car, or a description of a worker as a hired hand). It is related to metonymy. synesthesia A blending or intermingling of different senses in description. Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine, writes Emily Dickinson. In her heavily synesthetic poem Aubade, Dame Edith Sitwell describes the dull blunt wooden stalactite / Of rain creaks, hardened by the light. In George Merediths Modern Love: I, a womans heart is made to drink the pale drug of silence. tautology 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 living. tercet A poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed. Thomas Hardys The Convergence of the Twain rhymes AAA BBB; Ben Jonsons On Spies is a threes of poems in unrhymed tercets include Wallace Stevenss The Snow Man and David Wagoners For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop. tetrameter A line made up of four feet. See William Shakespeares Fear No More the Heat o the Sun or Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy. trimeter A line of three metrical feet. Percy Bysshe Shelleys To a Skylark employs trochaic trimeter in the first two lines of each stanza. See also Là ©onie Adamss The Mount. 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 predominantly trochaic line: Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright. Edgar Allan Poes The Raven is mainly trochaic. tone The attitude taken in or by a poem toward the subject and theme. 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. villanelle A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. See Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishops One Art, and Edwin Arlington Robinsons The House on the Hill. word order The syntactic arrangement of words in a sentence, clause, or phrase.