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

Litotes
A deliberate understatement.

Little Willy
A comic verse form, often a quatrain rhyming aabb but really identified by its content, the gruesome

Liverpool Poets
A 1960s group of popular writers from the west-england city of liverpool, including adrian henri, ro

Luc-bat
A vietnamese poetic form of syllablic couplets, alternating six and eight syllables, where the first

Lyric
Short poem in which the poet, the poet's persona, or a speaker expresses personal feelings, and ofte

Macaronic Verse
Poems that consist of expressions in more than one language. John skelton wrote several poems in thi

Madrigal
An italian short poem or part song suitable for singing by three or more voices, first appearing in

Maker
A medieval and early renaissance term for 'poet.'

Masculine Rhyme
Gendered expression for rhymes ending in a stressed syllable, such as 'hells' and 'bells.' the expre

Metaphor
A comparison that is made literally, either by a verb (for example, john keats' 'beauty is truth, tr

Metaphysical Poets
John donne (1572-1631) and his imitators, including george herbert, andrew marvell, abraham cowley,

Metonymy
A figure of speech in which the poet substitutes a word normally associated with something for the t

Metre
The rhythm of verse, reduceable to one of four kinds, accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and q

Mixed Metaphor
two awkwardly-yoked metaphors, such as 'kicking the spurs of zeal on the road to Abraham's bosom.'

Mock Epic
A poem amusingly subverting the conventions of the epic, more often to comment on a topic satiricall

Mock-Heroic
Treating something trivial with high seriousness, as in john philips' the splendid shilling.

Molossus
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of long, long, and long syllables / ' ' ' /.

Monometer
One foot

Monorhyme
The use of only one rhyme in a stanza. An example is william blake's 'silent, silent night.'

Motif
An image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and that is sometimes thought to

Muses
William bullokar's english dictionary (1616) explains them as 'the feyned goddesses of poetry, and m

Naga-Uta
Japanese form of indeterminate length that alternates lines of five and seven syllables and ends wit

Negative Capability
John keats, in a letter of october 27, 1818, suggested that a poet, possessing the power to eliminat

Neoclassicism
A 'new classicism,' as in the writings of early 18th-century writers like addison and pope who imita

Neologism
A newly-coined word, like lewis carroll's 'jabberwocky.'

Nonsense Verse
Lines that read like word-salad, where individually the terms may be recognizable but in their order

Objectification
A figure of speech where the poet treats an abstract thing or object as if it were a place. Edmund s

Objective Correlative
T. S. Eliot used this phrase to describe 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which sha

Occasional Poem
A poem written to describe or comment on a particular event or occasion. Examples are andrew marvell

Occupatio
A figure of rhetoric where a writer explains that he or she will not have time or space to say somet

Octameter
A verse containing eight feet. Algernon charles swinburne's 'march

Octave
An eight-line stanza or poem, of which there are several types

Octosyllabic
Having eight syllables.

Ode
A poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms. The regular pindaric or greek ode imitates

Onomatopeia
An instance where the sound of a word directly imitates its meaning (for example, 'choo-choo,' 'hiss

Ottava Rima
An italian stanza of eight 11-syllable lines, with the rhyme scheme abababcc, introduced by sir thom

Oxymoron
An expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as john milton's descr

Paeon
Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of three short and one long syllables

Palindromes
Thomas blount's english dictionary (1656) explains that 'palindromes (gr.) Are those sentences or ve

Palinode
An ode or song that retracts what the poet wrote in a previous poem

Panegyric
A poem in great praise of someone or something.

Pantoum
A french verse form of four quatrains that repeats entire lines in a strict pattern, 1234, 2546, 576

Pantun
Mayan antecedent of the pantoum, with a single quatrain, rhyming aabb, couplets that at first readin

Paradox
A self-contradictory phrase or sentence, such as 'the ascending rain' or alexander pope's descriptio

Paralipsis
A figure of thought where less information is supplied than appears to be called for by the circumst

Parallelism
Two or more expressions that share traits, whether metrical, lexical, figurative, or grammatical, an

Pararhyme
Edmund blunden's term for double consonance, where different vowels appear within identical consonan

Parataxis
Linking clauses just by sequencing them, often without conjunction(s) and only by means of associati

Parody
A not-uncomplimentary send-up of another work, such as geoffrey chaucer's 'sir thopas' in the canter

Paronomasia
Punning, a play of meaning by yoking similar-sounding words. See pun.

Pastiche
Work patched together from excerpts of other writers, or from passages clearly recognizable as imita

Pastoral
Following theocritus (3rd cent. B.c.), verse about those shepherds and their beloveds who lived the

Pathetic Fallacy
An expression that endows inanimate things with human feelings.

Pattern Poetry
Verse that creates the shape of its subject typographically on the page (and thus also called 'shape

PEN
Acronym for the association, poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists (1921-).

Pentameter
Five feet

Periphrasis
Using a wordy phrase to describe something for which one term exists.

Persona
The speaker of a poem, a dramatic character distinguished from the poet, such as robert browning's '

Personification
An anthropomorphic figure of speech where the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a non-human

Petrachan Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem with two sections, an octave (eight-line stanza rhyming abbaabba), and a sestet

Pherecratean
A classical greek and latin metrical pattern consisting of an iamb or a trochee, a dactyl, and a tro

Phonemic Alphabet
The twelve vowel sounds and twenty-two consonant sounds that make up spoken english, normally encode

Phonolexis
A term coined by philip davies roberts to describe 'meaning conveyed through phonemic connotation li

Pleonasm
Unnecessary verbiage, redundancy as in 'it was a dark and lightless night.'

Poem
Defined by samuel johnson in his great dictionary (1755) as 'the work of a poet

Poesy
The art and craft of making poems, or the poems themselves.

Poet Laureate
Apollo degreed that poets should receive laurels as a prize. The british crown created the post of p

Poetaster
A vile petty poet (samuel johnson, 1755).

Poetic Diction
A conventional subset of english vocabulary, phrasing, and grammatical usage judged appropriate for

Poetic License
The freedom to depart from correctness and grammaticality sometimes extended to poets by generous re

Poetry
A form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject. To read a gr

Poets Corner
An area in the south transept of westminster abbey that holds monuments (or graves) for such as geof

Polyptoton
Repetition of the same word in different forms, achieved by varying the case, adding affixes, etc.

Polysyndeton
A figure of speech where successive clauses or phrases are linked by one or more conjunctions.

Portmanteau Word
Lewis carroll's phrase for a neologism created by combining two existing words. His 'jabberwocky,' f

Poulters Measure
Couplets in which a twelve-syllable line rhymes with a fourteen-syllable line. Chapman uses this for

Prizes For Poetry
Examples include the bollingen, (british) arts council, queen's gold medal for poetry, newdigate pri

Proceleus Maticus
A classical greek and latin foot having four short syllables.

Prolepsis
Anticipation.

Prose Poem
Continuous, non-end-stopped writing that has other traits of poetry and is, from its context, associ

Prosopopoeia
Lending speech to something inanimate. See also personification.

Pun
An expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled identically) to deliver two or more m

Pure Poetry
Verse that aims to delight rather than to instruct the reader.

Purple Passage
Lines that stand out from a longer poem because of their vivid diction or figures of speech, and per

Pyrrhic
A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables.

Pythiambic
A classical greek and latin metrical form, dactylic hexameter and iambic trimeter couplets.

Quadruplet
A four-syllable foot.

Quantitative Metre
Lines whose rhythm depends on the duration or length of time a line takes to utter. That duration de

Quatrain
A four-line stanza, rhyming, abac or abcb (unbounded, or ballad), as in 'sir patrick spence' and sam

Quintain
A five-line stanza, such as a limerick or edmund waller's 'go lovely rose.' also called a cinquain.

Refrain
One or more lines repeated before or after the stanzas of a poem.

Reverdie
A medieval song celebrating the coming of spring, such as 'sumer is icumen in' and 'lenten ys come w

Reverse Sonnet
A comic form invented in wilfred owens' sonnet 'hand trembling towards hand,' which starts with the

Rhetorical Question
The poet asks a question without expecting to learn anything from the response, or to pose any diffi

Rhopalic verse
Poems whose lines start short and get longer and longer.

Rhyme
Normally end-rhyme, that is, lines of verse characterized by the consonance of terminal words or syl

Rhyme Royal
A stanza of seven ten-syllable lines, rhyming ababbcc, popularized by geoffrey chaucer in troilus an

Rhythm
An audible metrical pattern inside verse boundaries established by the pause.

Rich Rhyme
Rhymes identical in sound (or spelling) but semantically different, e.g., 'felicity was present

Rime Cou�e
Tail rhyme, a stanza in which a usually closing short line rhymes with a previous short line and is