Synecdoche

Refers to a person or object by a single important feature.

Ex: In Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

I should have been a pair of ragged claws (refers to an entire animal)

Referring to phrases that suggest an interplay of the senses. "Hot pink" and "golden tones" for example.

Ex: Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"

Tasting of flora and the country green,/Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!/O for a beaker of the warm South...

Created & used in the 19th cent. by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Like Old Eng. verse, sprung rhythm fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line--only the stresses count in a scansion.

Ex: From G.M. Hopkins's "Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things--

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

A form of humorous poetry, using very short rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm, made popular by John Skelton. The only real difference between a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of thought expressed.

Ex: From Skelton's "How the Doughty Duke of Albany"

O ye wretched Scots

Ye puant pisspots,

It shall be your lots

To be knit up with knots.

A novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rogue, whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail.

Ex: Twain's "Huckleberry Finn", Defoe's "Moll Flanders"

Coined by John Ruskin. Refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects.

Ex: Ruskin's famous line, "The cruel crawling foam."  

Poem that is an elegy form (lament for the dead) sung by a shepherd.  The shepherd is a stand-in for the author, and the elegy is for another poet.

Ex: Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelly's "Adonais" (for Keats)

Phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature (don't confuse with Synecdoche)

Ex: Edward Bulwer Lytton's play 'Richelieu': "The pen is mightier than the sword."

Pen represents the written words, the sword violent acts.

An understatement created through a double negative.

Ex: Book of Acts--"Paul answered, 'I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city." (Acts 21:39)

Derived from Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras'.  Refers to the couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (8 syllables), or generally to any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhythmed, ill-rhymed couplets.  Butler had a genius for 'bad' poetry.(Not Skeltonics!)

Ex: We grant, although he had much wit

He was very shy of using it

As being loathe to wear it out

And therefore bore it not about...

A repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer's epics (duh).

Ex: Rosy-fingered dawn

Wine-dark sea

The ever-resourceful Odysseus

Assigning human attributes (emotions or physical characteristics) to nonhumans.  Differs from 'personification' in that it is applied through an entire work.

Ex: Aslan (lion king) in C.S. Lewis's 'Narnia'

A speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction. The innate grandiosity lends itself to parody.

Ex: Donne's 'The Sun Rising', addressing the sun.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

"Novel of education."  Follows a young person over a period of years, into harsher realities and hypocrises of the adult world.

Ex: Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye'

Derived from Lyly's 'Euphues' (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech.  This was popular in the late 16th century.

Ex: Polonius in Hamlet

"To thine own self be true"

"Neither a borrrower nor a lender be"

"Brevity is the soul of wit"

Poems that deal with people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops, etc.  Not to be confused with pastoral poetry.

Ex: Derived from Virgil's 'Georgics'

Essentially, it's a poem about the virtues of farming life.

Aristotle's term for the 'tragic flaw'.  Hamartia differs from the tragic flaw, in that it implies fate, whereas tragic flaw implies an inherent psychological flaw in the tragic character.

Ex: Oedipus

The perspective from which a story is written.

Ex: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person

Main character, usually the hero

Ex: Othello

Giving an inanimate object human qualities or form.

Ex: From Emily Dickinson's 'The Train'

I like to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step...

Deals with the lives of people, especially shepherds, in country or in nature.

Ex: Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love'

Principles of dramatic structure from Aristotle's 'Poetics'. Essential unities are of time, place, and action:

• To observe unity of time, it should take place within the span of one day
• To observe unity of place, a work should take place within a single locale
• To observe unity of action, a work should contain a single dramatic plot, no subplot 

A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable.

Ex: Frost's 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening'

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.  

Deliberate exaggeration

Ex: Emerson's 'The Concord Hymn'

Here once embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

A line of iambic hexameter.  The final line of a Spenserian stanza is an alexandrine.

Ex: Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism

A needless alexandrine ends the song

That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

The use of repeated consonant or sound, usually at the beginning of a series of words.

Ex: Frost's 'Acquainted with the Night'

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street...

A reference to someone or something, usually literary.

Ex: "Call me Ishmael."  Melville alludes to the biblical figure of Ishmael.

'The Sound and the Fury' alludes to Macbeth: "...it is a tale/told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/signifying nothing."

The main character opposing the protagonist, usually the villain.

Ex: Iago from 'Othello'

The pause that breaks a line of Old English verse.  Also, any particularly deep pause in a line of verse.

One of the neoclassical principles of drama.  The relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters (for example, speech matches his/her social station).

Ex: Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest'

Writing, especially a poem, written to celebrate a wedding.

Ex: Spenser's 'Epithalamium'

Song! made in lieu of many ornaments,

With which my love should duly have deen dect,

Which cutting off through hasty accidents,

Ye would not stay your dew time to expect...

A derogatory term for poorly written poetry of little literary value.

Ex: Shakespeare did this on purpose with the Dromie twins in 'The Comedy of Errors'

Lines rhymed by their final two syllables.  Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed, the final syllables unstressed.

Ex: Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 20'

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted

Has thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion...

Coined by E.M. Forster to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (flat) and those with greater complexity.

Ex (flat): Mrs. Micawber in 'David Copperfield'

Ex (round): Anna Karenina