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Superglossary - Poetry Category: Language and Literature > Poetry Date & country: 27/12/2013, USA Words: 375

Accent
A stressed syllable or ictus. These alternate with unstressed syllables or slacks to produce a theor

Accentual Verse
Lines whose rhythm arises from its stressed syllables rather than from the number of its syllables,

Accentual-Syllabic Verse
Lines whose rhythm arises by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, or

Acephalous
A line of verse without its expected initial syllable.

Acrostic
A word, phrase, or passage spelled out vertically by the first letters of a group of lines in sequen

Action Poetry
Verse written for performance by several voices.

Adonic
A classical greek and latin metre, a dimeter with a dactyl and a spondee / ~ ' ' / ' ' / such as are

Aesthetic Movement
A literary belief that art is its own justification and purpose, advocated in england by walter pate

Alcaics
A four-line classical stanza named after alcaeus, a greek poet, with a predominantly dactylic metre,

Alexandrine
A metrical line of six feet or twelve syllables (in english), originally from french heroic verse. R

Allegory
Henry cockeram, in his english dictionary (1623), explains this as 'a sentence that must be understo

Alliteration
Using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syll= ables in a phrase or verse lin

Allusion
A reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, movement, etc.

Ambiguity
A statement with two or more meanings that may seem to exclude one another in the context. Grammatic

Amphibrach
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, and short syllables / ~ ' ~ / (cf. The engl

Amphimacer
A greek and latin metrical foot consisting of long, short, and long syllables / ' ~ ' / (cf. The eng

Amphisbaenic Rhyme
A reversed rhyme, such as 'trot' and 'tort.'

Amplification
Rhetorical figures of speech that repeat and vary the expression of a thought.

Anachronism
Someone or something belonging to another time period than the one in which it is described as being

Anacoluthon
An interruption in a sentence, sometimes indicated by a pause, that is afterwards restarted in a syn

Anacreontic Verse
Imitations of the 6th-century b.c. greek poet anacreon, who wrote about love and wine. Thomas moore

Anacrucis
One or two unstressed syllables at the beginning of a line that are unnecessary to the metre.

Anadiplosis
A repetition of the last word in a line or segment at the start of the next line or segment.

Anagram
A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word. When both lexical forms appear in the

Analepsis
A flashback.

Analogue
Usually a semantic or narrative feature in one work said to resemble something in another work, with

Anapest
A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. Examples include

Anaphora
Successive phrases, clauses, or lines start with the same word or words. Emily bront

Antepenultima
The second last word of a line, or the second last syllable of a word.

Anthropomorphism
A figure of speech where the poet characterizes an abstract thing or object as if it were a person.

Antibacchic
Classical greek and latin foot consisting of long, long, and short syllables / ' ' ~ / . An english

Antiphon
A sacred poem with responses or alternative parts.

Antispast
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, long, and short syllables (i.e., an iambus

Antisthecon Or Wrenched Rhyme
A rhyme created by distorting a word, such as 'samoa' for 'some more of' in the limerick 'an old mai

Antistrophe
(1) a reply to the strophe, and the second stanza in a pindaric ode

Antithesis
Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposed or antithetical meanings.

Antonomasia
Using an epithet or a title in place of a proper name.

Antonymy
Semantic contrasts.

Aphesis
The omission of the initial syllable of a word. See also apocope.

Aphorism
One writer's citation of another, known author's truism or pithy remark.

Apocopated Rhym
an imperfect rhyme between the final syllable of a word and the penultimate syllable of another word

Apocope
The omission of the last syllable of a word. See also aphesis.

Aporia
Explained by samuel johnson, in his great dictionary (1755), as 'a figure in rhetorick, by which the

Aposiopesis
An interruption of an expresion without a subsequent restarting. See also anacoluthon.

Apostrophe
An address to a dead or absent person or personification as if he or she were present.

Archaism
Using obsolete or archaic words when current alternatives are available.

Archetype
Something in the world, and described in literature, that, according to the psychologist karl jung,

Asclepiad
A classical metrical line made up of a spondee, two or three choriambs, and one iamb or spondee, i.e

Assonance
The rhyming of a word with another in one or more of their accented vowels, but not in their consona

Asyndeton
Lists of words, phrases, or expressions without conjunctions such as 'and' and 'or' to link them. Ge

Atmosphere
The mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work.

Aubade
A medieval love poem welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. An example is john donne's 'the

Augustan
English literature at the beginning of the 18th century by poets such as addison, pope, and swift, w

Aureate Language
Polysyllabic latinate poetic diction employed especially by the scottish chaucerians. See poetic dic

Bacchic
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, and long syllables / ~ ' ' /.

Ballad
A popular song, often recited aloud, narrating a story, and passed down orally. Over 300 traditional

Ballad Stanza
Quatrain rhyming abcb and alternating four-stress and three-stress lines.

Ballade
Poem with three seven-, eight-, or ten-line stanzas and refrain. Respectively, these have the rhyme

Bard
Originally a celtic name for a poet-singer.

Bathos
Alexander pope's peri-bathous, or the art of sinking in poetry (1728) describes bathos as a poet's f

Beat Poets
A san francisco-based group of counter-culture poets such as allen ginsberg, lawrence ferlinghetti,

Black Mountain Poets
Charles olson, robert creeley, and robert duncan, all associated with black mountain college, north

Blank Verse
Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse, a ten-syllable line and the usual rhythm of e

Blues
Oral black american folk or popular melancholic songs of the early twentieth century.

Bob
A one-foot line in certain stanzaic forms of medieval alliterative poetry, such as sir gawain and th

Bombast
Hyperbolic or wildly exaggerating speech, so-called after a kind of cotton stuffing.

Bouts Rim�s
A french name, meaning 'rhymed ends,' for a popular 18th-century game where poems had to be built ar

Bretan Lay
Brief narrative poems about arthurian subjects. E.g., chaucer's franklin's tale.

Broadside Ballads
Poems printed on one side of a single sheet during the renaissance period.

Broken Rhyme
Rhyming with an initial or medial syllable of a word that is split between two lines with a hyphen.

Bucolic
Sir thomas elyot's latin-english dictionary (1538) explains 'bucolicum carmen, a poeme made of herdm

Burden
The choric line or lines that signal the end or the beginning of a stanza in a carol or hymn.

Burlesque
A work caricaturing another serious work. An example is samuel butler's hudibras.

Burns Stanza Or Meter
Six-line stanza with the rhyme scheme aaabab (where a is a tetrameter line, and b is a dimeter line)

Cadence
The ametrical rhythm of natural speech.

Caesura
A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such a

Canon
Someone's list of authors or works considered to be 'classic,' that is, central to the identity of a

Canto
Subdivision of an italian epic or long narrative poem, such as dante's divina commedia, first employ

Canzone
Hendecasyllabic lines in stanza form. William drummond of hawthornden adapted the canzone to english

Carol
A hymn or poem often sung, as at christmas, by a group, with an individual taking the changing stanz

Caroline
Literature of the reign of charles i (1625-42), especially the by the calvalier poets, who numbered

Carpe diem
Seize the day, live while you can, savour the moment, a subject typical of begging love poems such a

Catachresis
An eccentric metaphor.

Catalectic
A type of verse termed by george puttenham in 1589 'maimed' because it is missing a syllable in the

Catalogue Verse
Poems with lists that perform an encyclopedic purpose, lending high seriousness to a topic. Lewis ca

Caudate Sonnet
Codas or tails are added to the 14-line poem. An example is john milton's 'on the new forces of cons

Celtic Revival
Irish poets such as george russell (ae), james joyce, john m. Synge, and w. B. Yeats who drew on cel

Chanson
A medieval lyric.

Chant Royale
A complex french form of the ballade, having various forms.

Chiasmus
Repetition of any group of verse elements in reverse order.

Choka
Japanese form with alternating lines of five and seven syllables, ending with a couplet of seven-syl

Choree
A trochee.

Choriamb
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of long, short, short, and long syllables / ' ~ ~ ' /

Cinquain
A verse form of five lines with lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables.

Circumlocution
Speaking around a point rather than getting to it, such as s. T. Coleridge's 'twice five miles of fe

Clerihew
A form of light verse invented by edmund clerihew bentley, consisting of two couplets and having the

Cockney School Of Poetry
A mocking name for london romantic poets such as john keats and leigh hunt (from a scathing review i

Common Measure
A quatrain that rhymes abab and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines (each pair equi

Complaint
A lament or satiric attack on social evils, such as chaucer's 'complaint to his purse,' the opening

Conceit
A complicated intellectual metaphor. Petrarchan conceits drew on conventional sensory imagery popula