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| a metric line having six iambs, therefore iambic hexamater. Example: Wordsworth in the Immortality Ode uses Alexandrine as the concluding lines of his poem's first two stanzas. |
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| the repetition of initial sounds in poetry or prose |
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| a reference to another (usually) literary work on which the current work bases itself or which it critiques or admires. |
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| a narrative poem that proceeds on the basis of incremental repetition and is written in ballad measure, that is, rhyming xbxb (with x designating no rhyme) and usually in alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. |
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| unrhymed iambic pentameter |
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| a pause or stop in a line of poetry. |
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| a comedy (play which goes from bad fortune to good fortune) satirizing in witty dialogue the customs, rituals, speech, beliefs and values of a certain class. Example: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest |
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| poem with a counterpart poem that contrasts with it or answers it. Example: Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience contains companion poems. |
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| concept in Wordsworth's poetry that the power to imagine and to create fully compensates humanity for what has been lost as we move through the stages of maturation; despite our loss of childhood oneness with nature and of joy not bound to thought, the imagination affords us an "abundant recompense" for these losses as it allows us to add thought to sensation and feeling and to develop a moral sense. |
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| a poetic form developed by Coleridge in which the speaker locates the self in a specific place, allows the mind to travel, and then experiences the return of the mind to the same specific place, but the mind returns changed; the poem has a conversational tone but is written usually in iambic pentameter. |
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two-line stanza
Example: A Shakespearean sonnet ends in a rhyming couplet |
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| a poem which catches its sole speaker at a moment of crisis; the speaker speaks to a silent but identifiable audience; during his monologue the speaker reveals information about himself/herself of which s/he is unaware. |
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a poem generally about loss or death following the typical formula of past happiness, present sorrow, & future consolation.
Example: Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH |
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| "Emotion recollected in tranquility" |
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| Wordsworth's theory of poetic composition, to be elaborated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads; it holds that the poet recalls a deep emotion in a place and spirit removed from the original experience; in his recollection, the emotion emerges again but is changed by the addition of thought. |
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a poetic line whose meaning ends at the end of the line; the opposite of an enjambed line.
Example: Blake's "Little Black Boy" has several end-stopped lines. |
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| a literary device in which the sense of the line of poetry carries over to the next line. |
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a quotation from another work which prefaces a new work and which relates in some way to the new work.
Example: Eliot's "The Hollow Men" has an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. |
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| literally, a recognition of a god (as in the Christian Feast of the Epiphany when the Magi recognized the Christ Child as God); literarily, any sort of sudden realization or insight into the self or a situation. Gabriel Conroy in The Dead comes to such an epiphany at the end of the novella. A work that contains epiphanies is often called an epiphany. |
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a novel written in letters.
Example: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein |
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literary and philosophical movement of the mid 20th century which embraced the atheistic philosophy of Sartre and others which denied any meaning to our lives, insisting that the only meaning our lives might have is the meaning we create for ourselves every day.
Example: Krapp's Last Tape |
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the rhyming words or syllables look as if they should rhyme, but they do not sound the same
Example: "wind" and "behind" in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" |
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| lines with fourteen syllables. Blake's favorite line. |
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a narrative which contains other narratives embedded within it.
Example: Frankenstein opens with a frame story written in letters by and to Walton, the ship captain. |
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| lines of poetry without rhyme or meter. Example: Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" |
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| a kind of literary work; the major genres are prose, poetry, and drama, but under them fall a multitude of genres such as the short story, the sonnet, and the one-act play. |
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| a marginal note in a text furnished either by an editor or by the author and meant to help the reader understand a passage. Coleridge added the glosses to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when audiences asked for more clues to an understanding of the poem. |
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| heroic or elegiac quatrain |
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a four-line stanza written in iambic pentameter.
Example: Blake's "Little Black Boy" |
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gentle ridiculing of minor human foibles or weaknesses
Example: The Importance of Being Earnest pokes fun at Victorian upper-class lifestyles and values. |
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the most common metric foot in English poetry, consisting of one relatively unstressed syllable followed by a relatively stressed one.
Example: the word bemoan |
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| a line of poetry consisting of five iambic feet |
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the relationship one text has to another, especially in the way in which two or more texts may be in conversation with each other.
Example: Frankenstein re-writes Milton's Paradise Lost, and thus the two texts have an intertextual relationship. |
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| Irish Literary Renaissance |
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| the great flowering in the early 20th century of poetry and prose drawing on Irish themes and legend; led by Yeats as an artistic movement which had the potential to bring freedom from British imperialism. |
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| the gap between what is said and what is meant; what one character knows and another knows; what the character knows and what the audience knows. |
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| the revolutionary volume of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge whose publication in 1798 marked the beginning of English Romanticism |
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a statement of political or religious principles usually in essay form.
Example: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft |
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one of the three great narrative cycles dating from the Middle Ages, the Matter of Britain refers chiefly to work devoted to the legends of King Arthur and his court.
Examples: Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" and "The Lady of Shalott" |
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| the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. |
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the literary movement following Victorianism and occurring in the early to mid-20th century and including within it many smaller movements such as Imagism, Expressionism, and Surrealism; modernist writers wrote in despair at the great failings of humanity, especially those associated with imperialism, the World Wars, genocide; they felt acutely the emptiness of human lives lived without the values of faith, a sense of dignity, and a trust that goodness will prevail over evil.
Example: Eliot's "The Hollow Men" |
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| Keats's theory that the poet can negate the self and become another self in the act of writing; for instance, in the "Ode to a Nightingale" the poet negates the self and becomes the nightingale and its song. |
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| a long and extended prose narrative with several plot sequences, multiple characters, and multiple settings. |
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a short noel with fewer characters, plot sequences, and settings than the longer novel; the novella generally revolves around a symbol, the meaning of which often unfolds for the reader the meaning of the novella.
Example: The Dead |
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poem in an exalted tone on a lofty and single subject, a unified strain, and having an irregular appearance on the page.
Example: Keats's great odes |
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a literary movement coinciding with post-modernism (mid-20th to today) but which examines the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, generally to critique hegemony and to understand how identity, nationhood, ethnicity, personhood develop under oppression and emerge from that oppression. Salman Rushdie famously summed up the political agenda of post-colonial literature by saying: "The Empire Writes Back"
Example: Wole Soyinka's poetry and Ngugi wa Thiongo's essay on decolonizing the mind express the early values of Post-Colonialism. |
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the literary period following modernism, running from the mid-20th century through today, marked by extreme experimentalism, an exploration of gender/class/race issues as well as power relationships.
Example: Krapp's Last Tape |
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a four-line stanza. The heroic or elegiac quatrain is a four-line stanza written in iambic pentameter.
Example: Blake's "The Little Black Boy" |
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| the objectification of persons or other animals, but especially of women, as when the Duke of Ferrara in Browning's "My Last Duchess" turns his late wife into an art object. |
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| the pattern in a poem of a line's ending word sounding like the ending word of another line. The pattern is usually regular. |
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| 1798-1832, the period of innovative and experimental work in poetry and in prose by such writers as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and the Shelleys; major principles of the romantics include exuberance, excess, the self, originality, the emotions, intuition, the imagination, a return to simple, rural values, etc. |
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poetry whose physical appearance on the page resembles the subject of the poetry
Example: the three-line stanzas created for "The Convergence of the Twain" by Hardy to resemble the decks of a ship |
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| a comparison using "like" or "as" |
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| a 14-line poem or stanza; sonnets are usually either Shakespearean or Italian |
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a series of sonnets on a single topic.
Example: Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese redefines a genre previously "owned" by male writers to create love sonnets written from the female perspective. |
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| an object that is itself but that can take on fixed and loose associations |
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an early 20th century movement coinciding with Modernism; Symbolist writers use symbols as a means to communicate across cultures and time, as through the workings of the collective unconscious and its store of human history and signs; they proclaim a world beyond that of concrete phenomena.
Example: Yeats's "The Circus Animal's Desertion" |
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a stanzaic and rhyme form developed by Dante for the Divine Comedy; characterized by tercets or triplets (3-line stanzas) with interlocking rhyme that tiesall the tercets together.
Example: Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" joins the ode with the sonnet form and terza rima. |
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a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin to describe the work of playwrights like Beckett whose lays depict the meaninglessness or absurdity of human interaction and lives.
Example: Krapp's Last Tape |
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the literary period following Romanticism from the mid-to the late-19th century, corresponding closely to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) in which writers moved away from Romantic values and toward realism, away from the interest in the self to an interest in society and societal issues and ills; the Victorians embraced to a greater or lesser degree newer developments in science and technology, especially the theory of evolution which precipitated much religious doubt; the Victorian era marks the highpoint of British imperialism, a subject for much of the literature of the era.
Examples: Tennyson and Browning |
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| willing suspension of disbelief |
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| a term developed by Coleridge to define a reader's (and a writer's) stance in the face of fantastic or supernatural events in a narrative or a poem, events that might easily be disbelieved. |
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