S

 

saga From Old Norse and Icelandic: “narrative,” “story,” “history.” The noun saga derives from the verb sagja (“to say”) and means a tale or report. Saga was the goddess of poetry in Old Norse mythology, but the medieval sagas are tales in prose. They were written down between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, but are based on older oral traditions. They tell stories, often legendary, about heroes and historical events. The Icelandic sagas and the early Irish sagas are the pinnacles of this narrative oral literature. Sometimes embedded with alliterative verses, the sagas prefigure the historical novel.

 

SEE ALSO epic, narrative poetry.

 

Sapphic stanza, Sapphics This stanza pattern is named after Sappho (late seventh century B.C.E.), the ancient Greek poet born on the isle of Lesbos, known in The Palatine Anthology (tenth century) as the Tenth Muse. The Sapphic stanza may have been invented by Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus of Mytilene, but it was favored by Sappho, who used it for a significant portion of her work. The Sapphic stanza consists of four lines. It was written in quantitative meter and later adapted into qualitative, or accentual-syllabic, meter. Each of the first three lines has eleven syllables (hendecasyllabics) and five verse feet (two trochees, a dactyl, two trochees). There are sometimes substitutions in the fourth and final syllables of each line. The final short line, an adonic, has five syllables and two verse feet (a dactyl and a trochee or spondee):

 

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u

/ u | / u | / u u | / u | / u

/ u u | / u

 

Six centuries later, Catullus adapted Sappho’s poem “Phanetai moi” (“He appears to me”) into Latin in his poem number 51 (“Ille mi par . . .”). Horace transformed the form in his Odes (23–13 B.C.E.)—it was one of his two favorite meters—and provided a model for future poets. For example, William Cowper follows the Horatian model in “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” (ca. 1774):

 

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,

Scarce can endure delay of execution,

Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my

     Soul in a moment.

 

Damn’d below Judas: more adhorr’d than he was,

Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.

Twice betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,

     Deems the profanest.

 

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;

Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all

     Bolted against me.

 

Hard lot! encompass’d with a thousand dangers;

Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors;

I’m call’d, if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence

     Worse than Abiram’s.

 

Him the vindictive rod of angry justice

Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;

I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am

     Buried above ground.

 

The Sapphic pattern has its own history in English. Some English Renaissance poets (Richard Stanyhurst; Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke) attempted to approximate syllable length as opposed to stress, but most adapted the form to accentual-syllabic meter, which is native to English; Thomas Campion did so in “Rose-Cheeked Laura” (1602), which he “offered as an example of the English Sapphick.” In “Sapphics” (1866) Swinburne uses the pattern to depict Sappho herself. In 1919, William Faulkner adapted and condensed Swinburne’s twenty-stanza poem into six stanzas of his own devising, an imitation that he also called “Sapphics.” My anthology of Sapphics in English would include Isaac Watts, “The Day of Judgment” (1706); Fulke Greville, “Caelica 6” (ca. 1580); Thomas Hardy, “The Temporary the All” (1898); Louis MacNeice, “June Thunder” (1938); Louise Bogan, “Portrait” (1923); Hyam Plutzik, “I Am Disquieted When I See Many Hills” (1959); William Meredith, “Effort at Speech” (1970); James Merrill, “Farewell Performance” (1988); James Wright, “Erinna to Sappho” (1957); and Marilyn Hacker, “Cleis” (1991).

 

SEE ALSO adonic, dactyl, foot, hendecasyllabics, quatrain, trochee.

 

satire From the Latin term satura lanx, meaning “medley, dish of colorful fruits.” A literary composition, either in poetry or prose, that scorns, derides, or ridicules human weakness, stupidity, or vice. Satire was the only literary form invented by the Roman poets—Quintilian boasted, “Satire is altogether ours” in the first century (Institutio oratoria)—though it has antecedents in Athenian Old Comedy, represented by Aristophanes (ca. 450–ca. 388 B.C.E.). Rich and various, satire consists of loosely related scenes that treat a wide range of issues. It is a sarcastic, sometimes scathing genre, not for the faint-hearted.

There were two main lines of Roman satire. The Syrian Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara (fl. 290 B.C.E.) invented the Menippean satire, a parody form that blended prose with short verse interludes, which he used to skewer those with a different philosophical viewpoint. His work is lost. The Menippean satire was brought into Latin by Varro (67–16 B.C.E.), whose work also did not survive. The only extant Menippean satire is The Apocolocyntosis (Joke on the Death of Claudius, or Pumpkinification of Claudius), attributed to Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.), which parodies the deification of the drooling emperor.

The verse satirists, who represent the second line of Roman satire, specialized in invective against identifiable, often thinly disguised personalities. Gaius Lucilius (ca. 160s–103 B.C.E.) was the earliest Roman satirist, though his thirty books of satires survive in only about eleven hundred unconnected lines. Horace wrote that Lucilius “first had the courage / to write this kind of poetry and remove the glossy skin / in which people were parading before the world and concealing / their ugliness” (Satires, book 2, number 1). Lucilius and Horace called their satires Sermones (Conversations). As a term, satire was only later applied to their works. Horace’s two-volume Satires are dedicated to his pedestris—a pedestrian muse, one who goes afoot rather than looking down from on high. Satires, book 1, which consists of ten poems, was completed near 35 B.C.E.; Satires, book 2, which comprises eight poems, toward 30 B.C.E. These conversational moral tales and preachy anecdotes are written in prosy hexameters. Nonetheless, Horace’s humor was playful and urbane. His nature was more to laugh than to lacerate. The bitterly eloquent Juvenal (ca. 55–130) wrote sixteen poems in five books of satires: “It is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant / of the monstrous city, so steeled, that he can restrain his wrath,” he rhetorically asks, in his so-called Programmatic Satire (Satire 1). He said, “Indignation will drive me to verse,” and understood that the satirist is interested in “all human endeavors.”

The Romans bequeathed satire to other literatures. A satiric comedy became a poem or play that uses humor as its primary means of attack. The medieval Arab poets developed a genre of satirical poetry called hija. The Scottish flyting is a form of satirical name-calling. The French verse satirist Mathurin Régnier (1573–1613) boasted that satire had felt the tread of many poets, but was unvisited by French rhymers: “I enter it, following Horace close behind, / to trace the various humours of mankind” (Satire 14). He was followed by the strongest of all French satirists, Nicolas Boileau, called Despréaux (1636–1711).

The great era of satire in English literature was roughly from 1660 to 1800. One thinks especially of John Dryden, who provided the finest English version of Juvenal (1693) and created the mock epics Absalom and Achitophel (1681, 1682) and Mac Flecknoe (1682), as well as of Alexander Pope, who penned The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) and The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743). Jonathan Swift’s enraged indignation often acts as a kind of experimental laboratory that, as Northrop Frye points out, “shows us man as a venomous rodent, man as a noisome and clumsy pachyderm, the mind of man as a bear-pit, and the body of man as a compound of filth and ferocity.” Swift said, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Lord Byron announced, “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.” In “An Essay on Comedy” (1877), George Meredith recognized that “the satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage of bile.”

Satire is essentially moral. Its fundamental mode is earnest joking, improving society by attacking villains and fools. The editor of The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (1980) notes, “One can say gravely that satire postulates an ideal condition of man or decency, and then despairs of it; and enjoys the despair, masochistically. But the joke must not be lost—the joke of statement, of sound, rhythm, form, vocabulary, rhyme, and surprise. Without the joke everything goes; and we may be left only with complaint, invective, or denunciation; all of which may be poetry, but of another kind.”

 

SEE ALSO flyting, irony, mock epic.

 

scansion From the Latin word scandere, meaning “to climb” or “a climbing.” Scansion, the study of metrical patterns, refers to the division of verse lines into feet as well as to the organization of syllables within a foot. Metrical analysis documents the arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables in different lines; it groups those lines according to the number of feet within them, classifies stanzas by rhyme schemes and the number of lines per stanza, etc. Scansion doesn’t create rhythm; it reveals and visually represents it.

 

SEE ALSO foot, meter.

 

scop An Anglo-Saxon minstrel-poet, attached to the court of a chieftain or king, who both composed poems and sang or recited the traditional compositions of others. The earliest records of scops, who worked in preliterate societies, date to the fourth century, where they are referred to in early English poems. The scop was traditionally a harpist and poet-singer who had fully mastered the complex oral-formulaic materials of Old Germanic prosody. Only one poem definitely attributed to a specific scop has come down to us. This forty-two-line poem is recorded in The Exeter Book, a tenth-century compilation of Old English poetry, and traditionally called “Déor” after its reputed author.

 

Then I of myself / will make this known

That awhile I was held / the Héodenings’ scop,

To my duke most dear / and Déor was my name. (lines 35–37)

 

Robert Graves believed that the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry was based on the slow pull and push of the oar, and thus concluded that the function of the Nordic scop was twofold: the poet’s first task was as a “shaper” of charms to protect the king and thus ensure prosperity for the kingdom, but, secondarily, to persuade “a ship’s crew to pull rhythmically and uncomplainingly on their oars against the rough waves of the North Sea, by singing them ballads in time to the beat.” The scop is akin to the Celtic (Welsh) bard, the Gaelic (Irish) fili, and the Scandinavian skald.

 

SEE ALSO ballad, bard, fili, oral-formulaic method, skald.

 

sea shanties (chanteys, chanties) Probably from the French word chanter, meaning “to sing.” The work songs of sailors. The imperative is evident: singing enables, paces, and transforms work. These songs generally alternate between a solo passage sung by the leader, or chanteyman, and a refrain roared back in chorus. As Louise Bogan explains in “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry” (1953),

 

The variety of rhythm in sea chanties depends upon the variety of tasks on board a sailing ship, with the doing of which a sailor was confronted. Hauling up sail or pulling it down, coiling rope, pulling and pushing and climbing and lifting, all went to different rhythms; and these rhythms are preserved for us, fast or slow, smooth or rough, in sailors’ songs.

 

The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1972) points out that there are three main types of shanties, which correspond to the three main types of labor:

1. Short-haul or short-drag shanties are used when only a few strong pulls are required. The earliest known short-drag shantie is “Haul on the Bowline,” which goes at least as far back as the early sixteenth century.

2. Halyard shanties are timed to the massed pull and relaxed interval of long hauls (hoisting sail, catting the anchor, etc.). Such songs as “Wild Goose Shanty,” “Whiskey, Johnny,” “Blow, Boys, Blow,” and “Blow the Man Down,” which is still sung in the Bahamas, are halyard shanties.

3. Windlass or capstan shanties are sung to the processional beat of sea boots around the capstan (hoisting anchor, warping the ship into the dock, etc.). Some well-known capstan shanties are “Sally Brown,” “Shenandoah,” “A-Rovin’,” and “Rio Grande,” which is most commonly sung on outbound ships.

SEE ALSO oral poetry, work song.

 

sensibility Sensibility became a cultural phenomenon in the eighteenth century, a popular term and doctrine with aesthetic and moral overtones. It suggested both a capacity for sympathy, what Rousseau identified as his “susceptibility to tender feelings” (The Confessions, 1781), and an intense emotional response to beauty and sublimity, whether in art or nature. In moral philosophy, it was a particular reaction against Thomas Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan (1651) that human nature is innately selfish and human behavior driven by self-interest. The third Earl of Shaftesbury and others countered that human beings have an innate “benevolence” and sympathy for others. They placed a premium upon warm emotional responsiveness: “Dear Sensibility!” Laurence Sterne exclaims in A Sentimental Journey (1768), “Source unexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows.” Sensibility was valuable in the development of late eighteenth-century social consciousness during a time of burgeoning, self-interested commercialism, but over time it evolved from suggesting sensitiveness, “the ability to receive sensations,” into “refined or excessive sensitiveness in emotion and taste.” “It was, essentially, a social generalization of certain personal qualities,” Raymond Williams summarizes, “or, to put it another way, a personal appropriation of certain social qualities.” The idea overflowed into the realm of manners and the so-called cult of sensibility, highly exaggerated forms of sympathy. It became associated with virtue and breeding, cultivated taste and upper-class status. At its most self-indulgent extreme, sensibility overlapped strongly with what we would now call sentimentality, hence Jane Austen’s critique in Sense and Sensibility (1811), though the word has never had quite the same negative taint.

The age of sensibility is a name for the literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century, a forerunner to Romanticism and a period of flux, particularly centered in the 1760s and 1770s. This is the era of sentimental novels (the novel of sensibility) and sentimental comedies (the drama of sensibility) characterized by the pathos of sensitivity, overly refined emotions, acute perceptions and responses. There is a turn from the restraints of neoclassicism and new sympathy for the Middle Ages, for Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, for archaic or “primitive” poetry, manifested in an awakened interest in ballads and other folk poetry, hence the vogue for the Ossian poems and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Northrop Frye finds a new attention to the psychological view of literature as process rather than product, something more fragmentary, irregular, and unpredictable than the finished works of the Augustans, which helps account for the sudden emergence of a lyrical impulse in the age of sensibility, the era of Christopher Smart’s “A Song to David,” Thomas Chatterton’s elegies, Robert Burns’s songs, and William Blake’s lyrics. “The poetry of process is oracular, and the medium of the oracle is often in an ecstatic or trance-like state,” Frye writes. “Autonomous voices seem to speak through him, and as he is concerned to utter rather than to address, he is turned away from his listener, so to speak, in a state of rapt self-communion. The free association of words, in which sound is prior to sense, is often a literary way of representing insanity.”

The excess of feeling in this lyrical poetry can be dizzying. In the age of sensibility, Marshall Brown remarks, “intense feelings for nature and humanity were accompanied by . . . intense anxieties about the integrity of the self,” including the melancholy we find in Samuel Johnson and Thomas Gray, and the fear of madness—and the madness itself—we encounter in Smart, William Collins, and William Cowper, whose instabilities of selfhood vibrate into torrents of sorrow or rapture. In Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1747), Smart’s Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb, 1759–63), and Blake’s The Four Zoas (1807), the soul, God, and nature are brought into what Frye calls “a white-hot fusion of identity, an imaginative fiery furnace in which the reader may, if he chooses, make a fourth.”

In the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot formulated a doctrine of what he called “dissociation of sensibility,” a supposed split between thinking and feeling that he traced to the seventeenth century. The task of modern poetry, Eliot thought, was to reunify sensibility. As a critical term, sensibility now has a more limited usefulness. When we speak of a poet’s sensibility, we generally mean his or her characteristic way of responding to experience.

 

SEE ALSO neoclassicism, pathos, Romanticism, sentimentality, the sublime, taste.

 

sentimentality From the Medieval Latin word sentimentum, which derives from the Latin sentire, “to feel.” The word sentiment has been employed in a variety of ways to refer to an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling, and thus was used to denote both emotion and opinion. The adjective sentimental began to be popularly used in the eighteenth century. Raymond Williams quotes Lady Bradshaugh (1749)—“sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite . . . Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word . . . a sentimental man . . . a sentimental party . . . a sentimental walk”—and recognizes that the term encompasses both “a conscious openness to feelings” and “a conscious consumption of feelings.” It was the latter that made the word sentimental especially vulnerable to criticism.

In the nineteenth century, sentimentality took on negative connotations from which it never recovered. It is a deliberately modern, self-reflexive term, and generally suggests a disproportionate emotional response. George Meredith defined sentimentalists as those who “seek to enjoy Reality without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done” (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859), and Oscar Wilde said that “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it” (De Profundis, 1905). I. A. Richards brought the term into the twentieth-century critical discourse about poetry when he argued that “a response is sentimental if it is too great for the occasion” (Practical Criticism, 1929). Brian Wilke surveys ten basic handbooks on literature in his essay “What Is Sentimentality?” (1967) and concludes that all ten agree that the common keynote is the idea of disproportion or excess.

Sentimentality is frequently used as a term of condescension. “In some poems you’re taking the risk of sentiment brimming over into sentimentality,” an interviewer once told Philip Larkin, who replied, “Am I? I don’t understand the word sentimentality. It reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic: ‘A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.’ I think sentimentality is someone you don’t like feeling as much as you do.”

 

SEE ALSO pathos, sensibility, taste.

 

septenary, see “accentual-syllabic meter” in meter.

 

septet The seven-line stanza, of varying meter and rhyme, has been utilized by a large number of English poets from Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) and Lydgate (ca. 1370–ca. 1451) to William Morris (1834–1896) and John Masefield (1878–1967). The septet has an odd extra punch, a piercing last line, which moves past the symmetry of any even-numbered stanza. Here is a breathtaking stanza from Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in Time of Plague” (1600):

 

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

I am sick, I must die.

     Lord, have mercy on us!

 

The most historically interesting fixed form of the seven-line stanza is rhyme royal, an iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc, which was employed with great dignity by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1380s) and by Shakespeare in “The Rape of Lucrece” (1594). Something in the lucky number seven seems to lead to desperation or comedy.

 

SEE ALSO rhyme royal, rondelet.

 

sestet The subdivision or last six lines of an Italian sonnet, following the first eight lines, the octave. It is also applied (along with the terms sexain, sixain, sextain, sextet, and hexastich) to the different varieties of the six-line stanza, such as that of the sestina and also the so-called Venus and Adonis stanza (iambic pentameter, rhyming ababcc), named after Shakespeare’s poem. The sestet, which was first developed by Italian poets, is also called the sesta rima. It has an American lineage that runs from Anne Bradstreet’s “Prologue” (1650) and Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations (1682–1725) to Richard Wilbur’s “A Wood” (1969) and Charles Wright’s Sestets (2009).

The Spanish sextilla has six octosyllabic or shorter lines. It options two rhyme schemes: aabccb or abbacc. Robert Burns mastered the Scottish stanza, or Habbie stanza, a form found in medieval Provençal poems and in miracle plays of the Middle Ages, to such a degree that it came to be called the Burns stanza, or Burns meter. The Burns stanza intermingles two rhymes and meters: it rhymes aaabab; lines 1, 2, 3, and 5 are tetrameter, lines 4 and 6 are dimeter. Here are three central stanzas from “Epistle to John Lapraik, an Old Scottish Bard” (1785). Notice how the first three lines build to a crescendo, which is then punctuated by the punch of the fourth line and the epigrammatic cut of the sixth one.

 

What’s a’ your jargon o’ your schools,

Your Latin names for horns an’ stools;

If honest Nature made you fools,

               What sairs your Grammars?

Ye’d better taen up spades and shools,

               Or knappin-hammers.

 

A set o’ dull, conceited hashes,

Confuse their brains in colledge-classes!

They gang in stirks, and come out asses,

               Plain truth to speak;

An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus

               By dint o’ Greek!

 

Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,

That’s a’ the learning I desire;

Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire

               At pleugh or cart,

My Muse, tho’ hamely in attire,

               May touch the heart.

 

SEE ALSO sestina, sonnet, stanza.

 

sestina The sestina, an intricate verse form created and mastered by the Provençal poets, is a thirty-nine-line poem consisting of half a dozen six-line stanzas and one three-line envoi (“send-off”). The six end-words are repeated, in a prescribed order, as end-words in each of the subsequent stanzas. The concluding tercet brings together all the end-words; each line contains two of them, one in the middle and one at the end.

The twelfth-century Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel is credited with inventing the sestina, a form widely practiced by Dante (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1377), who followed the troubadours. Sir Philip Sidney put the form to good use in Arcadia (1590). The sestina has had particular fascination for Victorian and modern poets, perhaps because it generates a narrative even as it circles back on itself and recurs like a song. Ezra Pound compared it, in The Spirit of Romance (1910), to “a thin sheet of flame folding and infolding upon itself.”

The numerical scheme, which once may have had magical significance, has the precision and elegance of musical (or mathematical) form:

 

Stanza one: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Stanza two: 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3

Stanza three: 3, 6, 4, 1, 2, 5

Stanza four: 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4

Stanza five: 4, 5, 1, 3, 6, 2

Stanza six: 2, 4, 6, 5, 3, 1

Envoi: 1, 2; 3, 4; 5, 6

 

There are often variations on how the six words recur in the final tercet, such as 2, 5; 4, 3; 6, 1.

In this late nineteenth-century sestina, Edmund Gosse pays homage to Arnaut Daniel, who is cited in the epigraph as “the first among all others, great master of love [poetry]”:

 

Sestina

Fra tutti il primo Arnaldo Daniello

Gran maestro d’amor—Petrarch

In fair Provence, the land of lute and rose,

Arnaut, great master of the lore of love,

First wrought sestinas to win his lady’s heart,

Since she was deaf when simpler staves he sang,

And for her sake he broke the bonds of rhyme,

And in this subtler measure hid his woe.

 

“Harsh be my lines,” cried Arnaut, “harsh the woe

My lady, that enthorn’d and cruel rose,

Inflicts on him that made her live in rhyme!”

But through the metre spake the voice of Love,

And like a wild-wood nightingale he sang

Who thought in crabbed lays to ease his heart.

 

It is not told if her untoward heart

Was melted by her poet’s lyric woe,

Or if in vain so amorously he sang;

Perchance through cloud of dark conceits he rose

To nobler heights of philosophic love,

And crowned his later years with sterner rhyme.

 

This thing alone we know: the triple rhyme

Of him who bared his vast and passionate heart

To all the crossing flames of hate and love,

Wears in the midst of all its storms of woe,—

As some loud morn of March may bear a rose,—

The impress of a song that Arnaut sang.

 

“Smith of his mother-tongue,” the Frenchman sang

Of Lancelot and of Galahad, the rhyme

That beat so bloodlike at this core of rose,

It stirred the sweet Francesca’s gentle heart

To take that kiss that brought her so much woe

And sealed in fire her martyrdom of love.

 

And Dante, full of her immortal love,

Stayed his drear song, and softly, fondly sang

As though his voice broke with that weight of woe;

And to this day we think of Arnaut’s rhyme

Whenever pity at the laboring heart

On fair Francesca’s memory drops the rose.

 

Ah! sovereign Love, forgive this weaker rhyme!

The men of old who sang were great at heart,

Yet have we too known woe, and worn thy rose.

 

An anthology of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples might begin with Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa,” a rhyming double sestina with twelve twelve-line stanzas and a six-line envoi. It would include examples by Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden; by Elizabeth Bishop (“Sestina”), John Ashbery (“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”), Alan Ansen (“A Fit of Something Against Something”), Donald Justice (“Here in Katmandu”), Donald Hall (“Sestina”), Anthony Hecht (“The Book of Yolek”), Marilyn Hacker (“Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Poetry Reading”), and Deborah Digges (“Hall of Souls”). James Cummins adapts the form to American popular culture in his first book, The Whole Truth (1986), which consists of twenty-five sestinas revolving around the characters in the Perry Mason television series.

 

sexain, see sestet.

 

sextilla, see sestet.

 

shaman, shamanism In tribal societies, a shaman is a medium between the visible and invisible worlds, an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds. Shamans practice magic or sorcery for purposes of healing, divination, and control over natural events. They have close associations with poetry. Mircea Eliade views the shaman as a “proto-poet” and “specialist of the sacred” who masters “techniques of ecstasy.” In shamanic séances, the shaman goes into a trance and becomes possessed by a god or gods who speak through him or her. The shaman, who travels in supernatural worlds and speaks in an exalted or trancelike manner, embodies and enacts the idea of the poet as a prophet or seer. “It is likewise possible that the pre-ecstatic euphoria constituted one of the universal sources of lyric poetry,” Eliade speculates. “In preparing his trance, the shaman drums, summons his spirit helpers, speaks a ‘secret language’ or the ‘animal language,’ imitating the cries of beasts and especially the songs of birds. He ends by obtaining a ‘second state’ that provides the impetus for linguistic creation and the rhythms of lyric poetry.”

Nora Chadwick makes the case, in Poetry and Prophecy (1942), that the fundamental elements of the prophetic function of poetry operate in the same way all over the world:

 

Everywhere the gift of poetry is inseparable from divine inspiration. Everywhere this inspiration carries with it knowledge—whether of the past, in the form of history and genealogy; of the hidden present, in the form commonly of scientific information; and of the future, in the prophetic utterance in the narrower sense. Always this knowledge is uttered in poetry which is accompanied by music, whether of song or instrument. Music is everywhere the medium of communication with spirits. Invariably we find that the poet and seer attributes his inspiration to contact with supernatural powers, and his mood during prophetic utterance is exalted and remote from that of his normal existence. Generally we find that a recognized process is in vogue by which the prophetic mood can be induced at will. The lofty claims of the poet and seer are universally admitted, and he himself holds a high status wherever he is found.

 

Some researchers believe that the traditional shamans of northern and central Asia were the predecessors of the epic singers of ancient Greece. Ted Hughes called the shamanic flight “one of the main regeneration dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental poetic event.”

 

SEE ALSO inspiration, oral poetry, vatic.

 

shan-shui Rivers-and-mountains poetry. Originating in the early fifth century, this Chinese tradition represents, as David Hinton puts it in his anthology Mountain Home (2002), “the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history.” The poetry embodies a deep physical and spiritual sense of belonging to the wilderness. Hsieh Ling-yün (385–433) is the founder of the rivers-and-mountains tradition, whereas T’ao Ch’ien (365–427) is the founder of the fields-and-garden tradition. Yet T’ao Ch’ien wrote, “Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow; / broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.” The great T’ang dynasty poets all wove their consciousness into the wilderness. One thinks of Meng Hao-jan (689–740), Wang Wei (701–761), Li Po (701–762), and Tu Fu (712–770), who wrote, “The nation falls into ruins; rivers and mountains continue.”

 

SEE ALSO ecopoetry, nature poetry.

 

shicr From the Arabic verb sha^cara, meaning “to know,” “to understand,” and “to perceive.” The Arabic word for poetry. In An Introduction to Arab Poetics (1985), the poet Adonis explains, “We call the poet shā^cir (literally, ‘one who knows, understands, perceives’) in Arabic because he perceives and understands (yash^curu) that which others do not perceive and understand, that is he knows (ya^clamu) what others do not know.” In general, the term poetry refers to a special kind of speech regulated by rhyme and meter. The verb sha^cara has also come to have an additional meaning: “to feel.”

 

shloka, sloka From the Sanskrit root shru, meaning “to hear.” Shloka is sometimes translated as “poetry.” In the Upanishads, the word is employed to mean “union.” In classical Sanskrit literature, it is used for both “poem” (verse in any meter) and “fame.” Tradition has it that in post-Vedic literature, meaning after the most sacred writings of Hinduism in early Sanskrit (the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, the Upanishads) had been written, Valmiki uttered the first shloka, the famous opening section of the Ramayana (fifth to fourth century B.C.E.). This stanza, two sixteen-syllable lines, was composed in the common epic meter called anushtup (made up of four padas, or feet, each eight syllables long), which in turn came to be called the shloka meter.

Shloka is equated with Hindu prayer, in which it is heard as a kind of hymn chanted or sung in liturgy. It can also have a proverbial sense. The Kashmiri offshoot of shloka is shrukh (“wise sayings of a great man”).

 

short meter, short measure A variation of the common meter found in hymns. Whereas in ballad meter the four-line stanza follows a pattern of alternating stresses (4, 3, 4, 3), the short meter foreshortens the first tetrameter line (3, 3, 4, 3). It is usually iambic. The stanza rhymes abcb or abab. The form is similar to poulter’s measure, which consists of rhyming couplets that alternate iambic hexameter (twelve-syllable) and iambic heptameter (fourteen-syllable) lines. Emerson purposely employs the short measure of the hymnal in his quatrain “Poet” (1867):

 

Tŏ clóthe thĕ fíerў thóught

Ĭn símplĕ wórds sŭccéeds,

Fŏr stíll thĕ cráft ŏf génĭus ís

Tŏ másk ă kíng ĭn wéeds.

 

SEE ALSO ballad, hymn, long meter, poulter’s measure.

 

silvae A collection of encomiastic odes, epigrams, and other kinds of short verse. Silvae means “woods” or “forest” but also “raw material” and, metaphorically, a miscellaneous collection. Statius’s Silvae (ca. 89–96 C.E.), which sets the model, consists of thirty-two occasional poems that congratulate and thank friends, console mourners, admire monuments, describe memorable scenes. These rapid impromptu poems or “bits of raw material” created a vogue for deliberately rough, extemporaneous poems. Statius’s contemporary Quintilian considered it a fault that certain writers “run over the material first with as rapid a pen as possible, extempore, following the inspiration of the moment: this they call silva” (Institutio oratoria, first century). The improvisatory sketch appealed to Renaissance writers, such as Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini), who titled his verse lectures Silvae (1480–90), and Ben Jonson, whose note to The Underwood (1640) explains, “With the same leave, the ancients called that kind of body Sylva, or Hylë, in which there were works of divers nature, and matter congested; as the multitude call Timber-trees, promiscuously growing, a Wood, or Forest: so am I bold to entitle these lesser Poems, of later growth, by this of Underwood, out of the Analogy they hold to the Forest . . .”

Some examples of the poetical silvae as a collection of occasional poetry: Pierre de Ronsard’s Bocages (1554), Phineas Fletcher’s Silva Poetica (1633), Abraham Cowley’s Sylva, or divers copies (1636), Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648), and John Dryden’s Silvae: or, the second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1693). Alastair Fowler points out that the silvae has maintained a tenuous tradition in such works as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves (1817), Leigh Hunt’s Foliage; or, Poems Original and Translated (1818), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Underwoods (1887), Robert Lowell’s Notebook (1967–68), and Edwin Morgan’s New Divan (1977). “We tend to take for granted the idea of a collection of poems on various subjects and in different forms, without reflecting that such collections constitute a specific genre. It seems almost as if the genre were too dominant, too nonpareil, to have a name.”

 

SEE ALSO occasional poem.

 

simile The explicit comparison of one thing to another, using the word as or like—as when Robert Burns writes,

 

My love is like a red, red rose

     That’s newly sprung in June:

My love is like the melodie

     That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

 

The essence of simile is likeness and unlikeness, urging a comparison of two different things. A good simile depends on a kind of heterogeneity between the elements being compared. Similes are comparable to metaphors, but the difference between them is not merely grammatical, depending on the explicit use of as or like. It is a difference in significance. Metaphor asserts an identity. It says, “A poem is a meteor” (Wallace Stevens); it says A equals B, and in doing so relies on condensation and compression. By contrast, the simile is a form of analogical thinking. It says, “Poetry is made in a bed like love” (André Breton); it says A is like B, and thereby works by opening outward. There is a digressive impulse in similes that keeps extending to new things.

The simile asserts a likeness between unlike things, maintaining their comparability. It also draws attention to their differences, thus affirming a state of division. When Shakespeare asks, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (“Sonnet 18,” 1609), he draws attention to the artificial process of figuration. So does the Hebraist who asserts, in the Song of Songs (1:9), “I have compared thee, O my love, to a company / of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.” The reader participates in making meaning through simile, in establishing the nature of an unforeseen analogy, in evaluating the aptness of unexpected resemblance.

 

SEE ALSO analogy, figures of speech, metaphor, rhetoric, trope.

 

sincerity Sincerity, which Lionel Trilling defines as “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” was a negligible term in criticism until the second half of the eighteenth century, when it came into vogue with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The Romantic poets placed a high value on the uniqueness of individual experience. They made the expression of powerful emotion a crucial touchstone, a raison d’être for poetry itself. Romantic sincerity, like Romantic spontaneity, was an artful construction that gave the feeling of an utterly authentic relationship between the poet and his subject, without any intervening artifice. “There is nothing of the conventional craft of artificial writers,” Leigh Hunt said about Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819). “All flows out of sincerity and passion.”

There are two countermovements related to sincerity in the second half of the nineteenth century. On one hand, Victorian poets and critics gave greater moral weight to the idea of sincerity. Writing from the heart, the appearance of sincerity, became a measure of poetic integrity. The most genuine poetry corresponded to the poet’s deepest state of mind. Matthew Arnold spoke of “the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity.” On the other hand, as Nietzsche said, “Every profound spirit needs a mask,” and insincerity, the idea of a dramatic pose, also gained traction. Charles Baudelaire enshrined the idea of the dandy, a cultivated figure, and Robert Browning created the fictive speakers of the dramatic monologue, a type of poem that marginalizes the idea of poetic sincerity. The advantage of posing would culminate in Oscar Wilde’s aphorism “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” The modernist poets shifted the idea of sincerity away from self-expression, the honest transcription of feeling, toward verbal accuracy, artistic precision. Sincerity is reflected in making. Ezra Pound said, “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity.”

 

SEE ALSO decadence, dramatic monologue, impersonality, neoclassicism, persona, Romanticism, sensibility.

 

sirventes, serventes A type of satirical poem in Provençal poetry. This partisan genre, filled with praise and blame, was usually employed to satirize the vices and follies of the age. It was common for a troubadour to borrow the tune for a sirventes from a more popular chanso (“love song”), which was considered the superior genre. The poems were usually topical, often exhortational, and they attacked any subject but love. Bertran de Born (ca. 1140s–1215) was considered the master of the sirventes, or political song.

The double sirventes consists of a pair of formally matching antithetical lyrics. It takes the strophic back-and-forth of the tenson, a debate poem, and develops it into whole lyrics. The most celebrated example of the sirventes-tenson is the series of six exchanges between Sordello and Pierre Bremon between 1234 and 1240.

 

SEE ALSO chanso, planh, poetic contest, satire, tenson, troubadour.

 

skald, scald This Old Norse word for “poet” is generally applied to Norwegian or Icelandic court poets from the ninth to the thirteenth century. The most credible etymology suggests that the word skald derives from a lost Germanic verb, skeldan, “to abuse verbally.” Thus a skald may originally have meant “poet who abuses someone verbally.” The skalds (“verse smiths”) were proud of their craft and often compared themselves to artisans. They were experts at kennings (metaphoric compounds) and mastered complicated alliterative verse forms, such as the dróttkvætt (“lordly meter”). Skaldic poets were well-rewarded historians of their patrons, and much of their work had to do with praising their lords. The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid identified with the passionate social role of the skald: “I have been a singer after the fashion / Of my people—a poet of passion,” he wrote in “Skald’s Death” (1934), which is engraved on the cairn beside his memorial.

 

SEE ALSO kenning.

 

Skeltonics, Skeltonic verse A rough-and-tumble verse form named after its originator, John Skelton (1460–1529), who wrote in jumpy short lines with irregular rhythms. Skelton’s lines had two or three stresses and any number of syllables, and his lyrics rhymed in irregular groups. He liked wordplay, alliterating couplets, and parallel constructions. Here is how he described his own verse in “Colin Clout” (1522):

 

And if ye stand in doubt

Who brought this rhyme about,

My name is Colin Clout.

I purpose to shake out

All my connying bag.

Like a clerkly hag;

For though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rain beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.

 

James VI called Skelton’s lively, funny, doggerel-like poems “tumbling verse,” and the energetic short lines and fast, frequent rhymes do tumble down the page. Skelton’s “rude rayling” was praised by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and championed by such poets as W. H. Auden and Robert Graves, who asked, “What could be dafter / Than John Skelton’s laughter?” (“John Skelton,” 1918).

 

SEE ALSO doggerel, light verse, tumbling verse.

 

slam poetry A form of poetic boxing, a competition in which poets perform original work before an audience. Slam poetry returns poetry to its oral roots, though its subject matter is current and often focuses on social, racial, economic, and gender injustices. The poems are often memorized. They aren’t meant to be read on the page, but performed. The judges are selected from the audience, which tends to be vocal. The competitors perform alone or in teams. Poetic contests are ancient, but the structure of the contemporary slam was started by Marc Smith at the Green Mill on Lawrence and Broadway in Chicago, Illinois, in 1986. He called his series “The Uptown Poetry Slam.” The poetry slam quickly spread across the country.

 

SEE ALSO poetic contests, spoken word poetry.

 

slant rhyme, see near rhyme.

 

song A musical composition intended or adapted for singing. Song was originally inseparable from poetry, and poems were meant to be chanted and sung, sustained by oral tradition. Poetry is still considered song in many parts of the world, whether it is presented with or without musical accompaniment. The word lyric derives from the Greek lyra, or “musical instrument,” and the Greeks spoke of lyrics as ta mele, “poems to be sung.” Greek lyrics took the form of either monodies, sung by a single person, or choral odes, sung by choirs. Epic poems were considered aoidê (“singing”). The musical element is so intrinsic to poetry that one never forgets its origin in musical expression—in singing, chanting, and recitation to musical accompaniment.

Until the sixteenth century in Europe, poets were also composers and musicians. The poet was a performer—a bard, a skald, a scop, a troubadour. Heroic poems were sung (or chanted) and so were courtly love poems. There were professional and nonprofessional poets. One sang or listened to ballads, one shared hymns in church. Before the eighteenth century, writers or critics seemed to make little or no distinction between melodic lyrics, such as Thomas Campion’s ayres or the songs of William Shakespeare’s plays, and nonmusical written lyrics, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets. Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) called the language of his satires, which are often close to daily speech, “singing.” During the Renaissance, English writers first began to write their lyrics for readers rather than composing them for musical performance. The word song increasingly came to suggest a literary composition in verse form. Songs were still written for music, but the term song was also used metaphorically, as in Christopher Smart’s “A Song to David” (1763) or William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789), which are meant to be read.

 

SEE ALSO air, aoidos, ballad, bard, chanson, epic, folk song, lyric, oral poetry, scop, skald, troubadour.

 

songbook A collection of verses set to music. The Great American Songbook, for example, refers to the vast repertoire of pre–World War II pop music, which includes such standards as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911, Irving Berlin), “Someone to Watch Over Me” (1926, George and Ira Gershwin), “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (1929, Fats Waller), “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1936, Cole Porter), and “My Funny Valentine” (1937, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart).

There were various anthological canzonierei, or songbooks, in late medieval and Renaissance Italian poetry. These provided a lyrical prototype for Petrarch’s Il canzoniere (Songbook, 1374), which is also called in Latin Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Poetry), his own nickname for the collection, and in Italian Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes). Ever since Petrarch, the songbook has been used metaphorically to capture the oral power of “song” for the written lyric.

 

SEE ALSO ballad, canzone, chanson, madrigal, sestina, song, sonnet.

 

sonnet From the Italian word sonetto, meaning “a little sound” or “a little song.” The stateliness of this fourteen-line rhyming poem, invented in southern Italy around 1235, belies the word’s modest derivation. The sonnet has had a durable life ever since its inception. It is a small vessel capable of plunging tremendous depths.

The spaciousness and brevity of the fourteen-line poem suit the contours of rhetorical argument, especially when the subject is erotic love. The form becomes a medium for the poet to explore his or her capacity to bring together feeling and thought, the lyrical and the discursive. The meter of the sonnet tends to follow the prevalent meter of the language in which it is written: in English, iambic pentameter; in French, the alexandrine; in Italian, the hendecasyllable. The two main types of sonnet form in English are the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet, which consists of three quatrains and a couplet, usually rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, gg, and the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet, which consists of an octave (eight lines, rhyming abbaabba) and a sestet (six lines, rhyming cdecde). The volta, or turn, refers to the rhetorical division and shift between the opening eight lines and the concluding six.

The Petrarchan sonnet probably developed out of the Sicilian strambotto, a popular song form consisting of two quatrains and two tercets. The sonnet was widely practiced throughout the later Middle Ages by all the Italian lyric poets, especially the stilnovisti—Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante—who used it to reinvent the love poem as a medium of quasi-religious devotion to a beloved lady. Petrarch’s 317 sonnets to Laura are a kind of encyclopedia of passion. The Petrarchan sonnet invites an asymmetrical two-part division of the argument. Its rhyming is impacted and it tends to build an obsessive feeling in the octave, which is let loose in the sestet. “One of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan sonnet structure,” Paul Fussell asserts, “is the pattern of sexual pressure and release.”

Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey imported the Petrarchan form to England early in the sixteenth century. Surrey later established the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg. George Gascoigne described this new version of the sonnet in 1575: “Sonnets are of fourteene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve do ryme in staves of foure lynes by crosse metre, and the last two ryming together do conclude the whole.”

“SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS. Neuer before imprinted” appeared in 1609, and these 154 sonnets comprise a high-water mark of English poetry. The Shakespearean sonnet invites a more symmetrical division of thought into three equal quatrains and a summarizing couplet. It is well balanced, well suited to calculation. The form enables a precision of utterance and freedom of forensic argument. “The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling,” T. S. Eliot notes. It also offers more flexibility in rhyming, which is crucial since Italian is so much richer in rhyme than English. The poet using this logical structure can also create wild disturbances within the prescribed form. This seems to work especially well for closely reasoned and ultimately highly unreasonable and even obsessive subjects, like erotic love.

Over the centuries poets have proved ingenious at reinventing the formal chamber of the sonnet. The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser developed an interlacing version of the sonnet called the link, or Spenserian, sonnet. It interlinks rhymes and concludes with a binding couplet (abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee). The Miltonic sonnet retains the octave rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet, but doesn’t turn at the sestet and varies its rhyme scheme, thus opening up the form. Milton further extended the form in a tailed sonnet, composed of twenty lines. He turned the sonnet away from love to occasional and political subjects (“When the Assault Was Intended to the City,” 1642; “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” 1655).

The sonnet was virtually extinct after 1650 until the Romantic poets revitalized it. Leigh Hunt said, “Every mood of mind can be indulged in a sonnet; every kind of reader appealed to. You can make love in a sonnet, you can laugh in a sonnet, can narrate or describe, can rebuke, can admire, can pray.” How much poorer English poetry would be without Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818). So too in France the sonnet was revived by Gautier (1811–1872) and Baudelaire (1821–1867) and further developed by Mallarmé (1842–1898), Rimbaud (1854–1891), and Valéry (1871–1945). George Meredith lengthened the traditional sonnet to sixteen lines in his fifty-poem sequence Modern Love (1862). Gerard Manley Hopkins invented a form he called a curtal sonnet—literally, a sonnet cut short to ten and a half lines, such as “Pied Beauty” (1877). Hopkins also experimented with metrics in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (1886; “the longest sonnet ever made”), which employs eight-stress lines.

There is a sense of permanence and fragility, of spaciousness and constriction, about the sonnet form that has always had poets brooding over it, as in John Donne’s well-known lines from “The Canonization” (1633):

 

     We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;

     As well a well wrought urne becomes

The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes . . .

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti called the sonnet “a moment’s monument” (The House of Life, 1881). In a way, every great sonnet is a moment’s monument to the form itself. As Northrop Frye wrote about the Shakespearean sonnet, “The true father or shaping spirit of the poem is the form of the poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit of poetry.”

 

SEE ALSO alexandrine, courtly love, hendecasyllable, iambic pentameter, Petrarchism, sonnet cycle.

 

sonnet cycle The sonnet tends to be a compulsive form. As John Donne wryly put it, “The Spanish proverb informs me, that he is a fool which cannot make one sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.” The sonnet cycle (or sonnet sequence) consists of a series of sonnets on a particular theme addressed to a particular person. Love is often the obsessive theme of this petition for emotional recognition. The great advantage of the cycle is that it allows the poet to record every aspect and mood of the experience, to explore feeling in detail, and to analyze the progress of attachment, the ups and downs of the affair. Yet each individual sonnet maintains its integrity. Thus the cycle combines the rhetorical intensity of the short poem with the thematic scope of the long poem or story.

Some key early examples: Dante’s Vita nuova (1293), which has extensive prose links; Petrarch’s Canzoniere or Rime (1360), a sequence of 317 sonnets and 40 other poems in praise of one woman, Laura; Ronsard’s Amours (1552–84); Sidney’s quasi-narrative Astrophil and Stella (1591); Spenser’s Amoretti (1595); and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). There were no British sonnets before about 1530 and very few after 1650, until the Romantic revival of the form. Some key Romantic and post-Romantic examples of the sequence: Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822); Rossetti’s The House of Life (1881); Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850); Dylan Thomas’s ten-part “Altarwise by Owl-Light” (1936); W. H. Auden’s “Sonnets from China” (1938); and Seamus Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” (1979).

One specialized version of the sonnet sequence is the corona, or crown, of sonnets, which consists of seven interlocked poems. The final line of each lyric becomes the first line of the succeeding one, and the last line of the seventh sonnet becomes the first line of the opening poem. The whole is offered as a crown (a panegyric) to the one addressed. The repetitions and linkages within the larger circular structure are well suited to obsessive reiterations of supplication and praise.

 

SEE ALSO sonnet.

 

sound poetry Sound is crucial to poetry and thus, in one sense, all poetry is sound poetry, except, perhaps, deaf poetry. Sidney Lanier emphasized the idea of sound in poetry when he commenced his treatise The Science of English Verse (1880) with an “Investigation of Sound as Artistic Material”: “When formal poetry, or verse . . . is repeated aloud, it impresses itself upon the ear as verse only by means of certain relations existing among its component words considered purely as sounds, without reference to their associated ideas.”

Sound poetry generally refers to a type of poetry that aggressively foregrounds the sounds of words. It is performance oriented and seeks to override conventional denotative and syntactical values. It goes beyond the page so that sound alone dominates. Sound poetry has its roots in preliterate oral traditions, in tribal chants and magic spells. The more extreme that nonsense poetry becomes, repressing sense, the more it tends toward sound poetry. There is a mode of tribal poetry that uses instruments to mimic the human voice. Thus the media of poetry in tonal languages include drums, whistles, flutes, and horns. Whereas in American jazz, scat singers use their voices to create the equivalent of instrumental solos, in tribal poetries, musicians use their instruments to create the equivalent of human voices.

As a self-conscious avant-garde phenomenon, sound poetry dates to the early years of the twentieth century. The Russian futurists Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov isolated the phonic aspects of language in their manifesto “The Word as Such” (1913), which insists that “the element of sound lives a self-oriented life.” The Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti developed a poetic technique he called parole in libertà (“words in freedom”), which he used for his onomatopoetic Bombardamento di Adrianapoli (1913), to re-create the 1912 siege of Adrianople. Sound poetry was explicitly a Dadaist creation, and the movement radiated outward from Zurich and Berlin. Hugo Ball claimed to have invented it at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. The spontaneous desire to rescue language and return it to its origins helped motivate his “destruction of language.” He said, “I invented a new genre of poems, verse without words, or sound poems. I recited the following: ‘gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori . . .’ ” Ball called these hypnotic nonce words grammologues (“magical floating words”). There is a strong element of shock in the way the Dadaists used sound poetry to attack notions of reason, order, and control. The Dadaists Raoul Hausmann (1861–1971) and Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) both created their own versions of sound poems.

In 1921, Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the Dutch avant-garde movement De Stijl, published three “letter-sound images” and asserted, “To take away its past it is necessary to renew the alphabet according to its abstract sound values. This means at the same time the healing of our poetic auditory membranes, which are so weakened, that a long term phono-gymnastics is necessary!” As early as 1919, Arthur Pétronio (1897–1983) invented something he called verbophonie, which harmonized phonetic rhythms with instrumental sounds, and the French Lettrists of the 1940s created full-scale sonic texts, a “New Alphabet.” Since the 1950s, poets around the world have continued to experiment with sound compositions and soundscapes, often relying on technology to create startling new effects. Some examples: Henry Chopin’s audiopoems, Bernard Heidsieck’s poempartitions and biopsies, the text-sound compositions of the Swedish Fylkingen’s Group for Linguistic Arts, Bob Cobbing’s Concrete Sound, Herman Damen’s sonic genres verbosony and verbophony, Tera de Marez Oyens’s vocaphonies, Jackson Mac Low’s systematic chance operations. In the 1970s, the Four Horsemen, a group of Canadian poets, started using their voices as instruments to celebrate vocal sound. Sound poetry is performance poetry. “When did you start writing sound-poetry?” the interviewer asks in Edwin Morgan’s poem “Interview” (ca. 1981). The answer comically enacts sound poetry itself:

 

—Vindaberry am hookshma tintol ensa ar’er.

Vindashton hama haz temmi-bloozma töntek.

 

SEE ALSO abstract poetry, Dadaism, nonsense poetry, onomatopoeia, oral poetry, performance poetry, zaum.

 

spell An incantation or charm designed to produce magical effects. “It is exceedingly well / To give a common word the spell,” the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart writes, punning on the word spell. Tribal peoples everywhere have believed that the act of putting words in a certain rhythmic order has magical potency, a power released when the words are chanted aloud.

 

SEE ALSO chant, charm, incantation, oral poetry.

 

Spenserian stanza Edmund Spenser invented a nine-line pattern for his epic romance The Faerie Queene (1590–96). The Spenserian stanza consists of eight iambic pentameter lines with a hexameter (alexandrine) at the end. It rhymes ababbcbcc. The interweaving rhymes seem influenced by Chaucer’s use of rhyme royal (seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc) and the Monk’s Tale stanza (eight lines rhyming ababbcbc). It is also related to the eight-line or ottava rima stanza, which Ludovico Ariosto mastered in Orlando furioso (1516), but it goes one step further, since the last line has a conclusive or epigrammatic power. It is a stanza of great versatility and enables Spenser to be lusciously dreamy and vividly narrative; it is brisk enough for quickly sketched vignettes, slow enough for visual description and philosophic speculation.

 

Help then, O holy virgin, chief of nine,

Thy weaker novice to perform thy will;

Lay forth out of thine everlasting scrine [chest for records]

The antique rolls [records], which there lie hidden still,

Of faery knights and fairest Tanaquill,

Whom that most noble Briton prince so long

Sought through the world and suffered so much ill

That I must rue his undeservèd wrong.

O help thou my weak wit, and sharpen my dull tongue.

 

The Spenserian stanza was dropped in the eighteenth century, but revived by the Romantic poets. A good shortlist of the second flowering would include Wordsworth’s “Female Vagrant” (1798), Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1785–86), Scott’s “Vision of Don Roderick” (1811), Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819), and Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam” (1817) and “Adonais” (1821).

 

SEE ALSO Monk’s Tale stanza, ottava rima, rhyme royal, terza rima.

 

spirituals Sacred songs. The word spiritual, applied to religious songs, was initially used to distinguish “godly” songs from secular or “profane” ones. The spiritual developed from the folk hymns of dissenters in colonial America. It generally refers to two closely connected bodies of music: white spirituals and African American spirituals. It was around the time of the Great Revival (1800) that spiritual became the name for revival hymns or camp-meeting songs. The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1972) points out that “its special application to Negro religious song is of fairly recent date as a catch-all term for the ‘hallies,’ shouts, jubilees, carols, gospel songs, and hymns for regular services, prayer meetings, watches, and ‘rock’ services.”

White spirituals began with the doleful psalm-singing of the Puritans. The tradition was later enlivened by many splinter sects of Baptists and Methodists, who added marching and dancing rhythms, ballad tunes, and colorful lines suitable to frontier camp meetings. The Holiness Revival, which started around 1890, added jazzy, syncopated rhythms. The songs are accompanied by instruments, such as the banjo and the guitar, once considered profane.

African American spirituals developed as the music of American slaves of African descent. In form they exemplify African American hybridity. They are spiritually the substance of African American Christianity. They tell a story of suffering, endurance, and triumph, history and eternity. They seek absolute or ultimate justice. They use biblical stories to express the longing for delivery out of slavery:

 

Go down Moses,

Way down in Egypt land,

Tell ole Pharaoh,

To let my people go.

 

African American spirituals were not collected until after the Civil War. Three northerners, William F. Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, made the first systematic collection, Slave Songs of the United States (1867), which included some of the spirituals that are still best known, such as “Old ship of Zion,” “Lay this body down,” “Michael, row the boat ashore,” and “We will march through the valley.” Cornel West states that “the spirituals of American slaves of African descent constitute the first expression of American modern music. How ironic that a people on the dark side of modernity—dishonored, devalued and dehumanized by the practices of modern Europeans and Americans—created the fundamental music of American modernity.”

 

SEE ALSO blues.

 

spoken word poetry Poetry is an ancient oral art, but the spoken word movement developed in the late 1980s and early ’90s as a particular phenomenon. The term spoken word is a catch-all that includes any kind of oral art, including comedy routines and prose monologues, such as those by Spalding Gray. Spoken word poetry refers to any kind of poetry recited aloud: hip-hop, jazz poetry, the poetry performed at slams or traditional poetry readings. Perhaps its Ur form is performance poetry, which is kindred to performance art. Performance poems tend to have a visceral spontaneity, a highly vocal, in-your-face quality. They are not meant to be read on the page, or sung.

The spoken word movement was inspired by the countercultural vitality of the Beat poetry of the 1950s. Allen Ginsberg stated categorically, “The spoken-word movement comes out of the Beats, but with rhyme added.” Both movements disdain the academy. Spoken word poetry often carries a strong social critique, aggressive political commentary. It speaks up for those who are mostly unheard in society. The setting is a key part of the experience, which can have an element of the carnivalesque. Its great strength is that it is driven by the human voice.

 

SEE ALSO jazz poetry, oral poetry, performance poetry, poetic contest, slam poetry.

 

spondee A poetic foot consisting of two equally accented syllables, as in the words dáylíght and níghtfáll. The Greek term for two spondees is dispondee, which we recognize in the words hómemáde ártwórk. The word spondee derives from sponde (“solemn libation”), and the Greek meter (two equally long syllables) was originally used in chants accompanying libations. It was a meter for making an offering, performing a rite. In accentual-syllabic poetry, spondees create an emphatic stress, a hammer beat, but seldom control an entire rhythm in English. The first, third, and fifth lines are spondaic in this anonymous nursery rhyme:

 

Óne, twó

Buckle my shoe;

Thrée, fóur,

Shut the door;

Fíve, síx,

Pick up sticks . . .

 

Since stress is always relative in English, there may be no perfect spondee.

 

SEE ALSO foot, meter.

 

sprung rhythm Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a type of rhythm that depends solely on the number of stresses in a line. Sprung rhythm scans by counting accents and not syllables, like the accentual beat in Anglo-Saxon verse. It is a particular method of timing. Hopkins objected to the way that in most post-Renaissance English poetry, a stressed syllable is accompanied by a uniform number of unstressed ones. He thought this was musically deadening. “Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all?” Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges. “Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms.” Hopkins believed sprung rhythm could better capture the musical rhythms of speech than traditional meters could.

 

SEE ALSO counterpoint; also “pure accentual meter” in meter.

 

stanza The natural unit of the lyric: a group or sequence of lines arranged in a pattern. A stanzaic pattern is traditionally defined by the meter and rhyme scheme, considered repeatable throughout a work. A stanzaic poem uses white space to create temporal and visual pauses. The word stanza means “room” in Italian—“a station,” “a stopping place”—and each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place. “The Italian etymology,” Ernst Häublein points out in his study of the stanza, “implies that stanzas are subordinate units within the more comprehensive unity of the whole poem.” Each stanza has an identity, a structural place in the whole. As the line is a single unit of meaning, so the stanza comprises a larger rhythmic and thematic sequence. It is a basic division comparable to the paragraph in prose, but more discontinuous, more insistent as a separate melodic and rhetorical unit. In written poems stanzas are separated by white space, and this division on the printed page gives the poem a particular visual reality. The reader has to cross a space to get from one stanza to another. Stave is another name for stanza, which suggests an early association with song.

A stanza that consists of lines of the same length is called an isometric stanza. A stanza that consists of lines of varying length is called a heterometric stanza.

A stanza of uneven length and irregular pattern—of fluid form—is sometimes called quasi-stanzaic or a verse paragraph.

The monostich is a stanza consisting of just one line. After that, there is the couplet (two-line stanza), tercet (three-line stanza), quatrain (four-line), quintet (five-line), sestet (six-line), septet (seven-line), and octave (eight-line). There are stanzas named after individual poets, such as the Spenserian stanza (the nine-line pattern Spenser invented for The Faerie Queene, 1590–96) and the Omar Khayyám quatrain (the four-line stanza the Persian poet employed in the eleventh century for The Rubaiyat). Each stanza has its own distinctive features, its own music, and its own internal history, which informs and haunts later usage.

 

SEE ALSO couplet, heterometric stanza, isometric stanza, meter, monostich, octave, quatrain, quintet, rhyme, rubaiyat stanza, septet, sestet, Spenserian stanza, stichic, strophe, tercet, verse paragraph.

 

stave, see stanza.

 

stich, stichos From the Greek word stichos, meaning a “row” or “line.” A stich is a line of Greek or Latin verse. Half of a line is called a hemistich, a sole line (or a one-line poem) is called a monostich, and a couplet is called a distich.

 

SEE ALSO couplet, hemistich, line, monostich, stichic.

 

stichic A stichic poem is composed as a continuous sequence of lines without any division of those lines into regular stanzas. Contrasted to strophic organization, whose lines are patterned in stanzas, it is thus astrophic. Paradise Lost (Milton, 1667), The Prelude (Wordsworth, 1805, 1850), and Four Quartets (Eliot, 1943) are stichic; The Faerie Queene (Spenser, 1590–96), “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats, 1819), and “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (Williams, 1955) are strophic. If subdivided at all, the blocks of a stichic poem are called stanzas of uneven length, or verse paragraphs. The tendency toward stichic verse is particularly strong in narrative and descriptive poetry, in long poems with the wide sweep of prose, such as A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year (1994), John Ashbery’s Flow Chart (1991), and W. S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative (1998).

 

SEE ALSO descriptive poetry, narrative poetry, stanza, strophe, verse paragraph.

 

strict-meter poetry, free-meter poetry In the first half of the fourteenth century, Einion the Priest divided all Welsh meters into three categories: awdl, cywydd, and englyn. Revised by Dafydd ab Edmwnd in 1450, this arrangement of the “twenty-four metres” into three classes has defined “strict-meter” poetry. All forms that fell outside the twenty-four meters were considered free-meter poetry. The breakdown of the bardic orders also led to the rise of the free meters. There is a strong nationalistic dimension to the resurgence of strict-meter poetry in modern Welsh poetry.

 

SEE ALSO bard, cywydd.

 

strophe From the Greek: “turning.” A term for stanza or verse paragraph. A poem is traditionally considered strophic if its lines are arranged into stanzaic patterns, and astrophic or stichic when not. There is a strong tendency in some poetries to arrange poems into recognizable units of two, three, four, five, six, or more lines. European folk songs, for example, are strophic. The word strophe originally applied to the opening section (and every third succeeding section) of the Greek choral ode, which the chorus chanted while moving across the stage. This movement was followed by the antistrophe, an identical countermovement, and an epode, recited while the chorus was standing still.

 

SEE ALSO antistrophe, epode, ode, stanza, stichic, verse paragraph.

 

structure A structure is something built or constructed—a building, a bridge, a dam. Poetry borrows a term from architecture to account for the system of relations in a literary work. Structure is the developing or organizational means of a patterned work of art. The New Critics made the term one of the cornerstones of the attempt to differentiate the individual poem from a prose statement. Thus John Crowe Ransom advocated for a “structural understanding of poetry” and divided a poem into two constituent parts: “a central logic or understanding” and a “local texture” (“Criticism as Pure Speculation,” 1941).

The term structure is sometimes misconstrued as the equivalent of form. Its meaning wavers because it takes a spatial metaphor and applies it to a temporal work. Ellen Bryant Voigt argues that “structure is the way all the poem’s materials are organized, whether they are abstract or concrete, precise or suggestive, denoted or connoted, sensory or referential, singular or recurring.” She calls structure “the purposeful order in which materials are released to the reader.” Michael Theune defines structure as “the pattern of a poem’s turning” and thus focuses on the skeletal part of a poem’s structure.

A dramatic structure refers to the way that a play is organized, its unfolding plot. It has temporal divisions, a beginning, middle, and end. The New Critics applied the idea of dramatic structure to lyric poetry. Thus Robert Penn Warren describes dramatic structure as “a movement through action toward rest, through complication toward simplicity of effect” (“Pure and Impure Poetry,” 1942). This involves, as Warren himself recognized, the active participation of the reader. In Frame Analysis (1974), the sociologist Erving Goffman took the idea of dramatic structure and applied it to social situations in everyday life.

 

SEE ALSO form, sonnet, texture.

 

style The manner of linguistic expression in a work of literature, the way in which something is said or done, expressed, written. Style is a quality of distinctive features—the choice of words, the figures of speech, the rhetorical devices, etc.—that belong to an individual, a group, a school, or an era. In classical theories of rhetoric, styles were traditionally classified according to three main types: high (or grand), middle (or mean), low (or plain). The level of style was matched to the speaker and the occasion. In poetry, styles are often classified according to the distinctive features of an individual writer (Chaucerian, Miltonic), an influential text (biblical style), or a literary period or tradition (metaphysical, Georgian). In the end, style cannot be separated from meaning. It is the way a work carries itself.

 

SEE ALSO decorum, figures of speech, poetic diction, rhetoric.

 

the sublime The Oxford English Dictionary defines sublime as “set or raised aloft, high up.” The word derives from the Latin sublimis, a combination of sub (“up to”) and limen (“lintel,” the top piece of a door frame) and suggests nobility and majesty, the ultimate height, a soaring grandeur, as in a skyscraper or a mountain, or as in a dizzying feeling, a heroic deed, a spiritual attainment, a poetic expression—something boundless that takes us beyond ourselves, the transporting blow. “The essential claim of the sublime,” Thomas Weiskel asserts in The Romantic Sublime (1986), “is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human.” The sublime instills a feeling of awe in us, which can be terrifying. The Oxford English Dictionary also describes the effects of the sublime as crushing or engulfing, irresistible. The sublime is one of our large metaphors. As Weiskel puts it, “We cannot conceive of a literal sublime.”

In the third century, Longinus inaugurated the literary idea and tradition of the sublime in his treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime). For him, the sublime describes the heights in language and thought. It is accessed through rhetoric, the devices of speech and poetry. It is a style of “loftiness,” something we experience through words. “Sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in language,” he claims. “It is our nature to be elevated and exalted by true sublimity. Filled with joy and pride, we come to believe we have created what we have only heard.” The sublime is our “joining” with the great. Longinus raised the rhetorical and psychological issues that haunt the idea of the sublime, ancient and modern.

Longinus’s treatise was translated into French by Boileau (1674) and passed quickly into English. Alexander Pope claimed that Longinus “is himself the great Sublime he draws” (“An Essay on Criticism,” 1711). Edmund Burke took up the effects of the sublime in language in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), where he argues that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. He adds terror as a crucial component. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” There are subsequent philosophical investigations of the sublime in Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), Schopenhauer (the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, 1819), and Hegel (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1835). “In the European Enlightenment,” Harold Bloom explains, the literary idea of the sublime “was strangely transformed into a vision of the terror that could be perceived both in nature and in art, a terror uneasily allied with pleasurable sensations of augmented power, and even of narcissistic freedom, freedom in the shape of that wildness that Freud dubbed ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ the greatest of all narcissistic illusions.”

The Romantic poets were obsessed with sublimity; that is, with the idea of transcendence, with possible crossings between the self and nature, with the boundlessness of the universe. Each had a different idea of transcendence, as when Keats distinguished the true poetical character, which is selfless, from “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” a sublime suffused with the self. Wordsworth himself called the elevation of the sublime a “visionary gleam.” The Romantics transformed the sublime into a naturalistic key, internalizing it, which opened a space later entered by Freud, who was preoccupied with powerfully disruptive and uncanny moments.

The sublime has its own American genealogy and history. “How does one stand / To behold the sublime?” Wallace Stevens asks in “The American Sublime” (1936). In “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson takes up Longinus’s idea of the reader’s sublime when he declares that “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Irving Howe spoke of “a democratized sublime,” a space for schooling the spirit.

 

SEE ALSO picturesque, rhetoric, the uncanny.

 

surah, sura The Koran is organized by surahs (chapters) and verses. There are 114 individually named surahs. Each consists of any number of verses and, except for surah 9, begins with the invocation “In the name of God, the merciful, the beneficent.” The word surah is used exclusively to describe the Koran’s divisions.

 

Surrealism The convulsive phenomenon known as Dadaism was revitalized and transformed into the more durable movement of Surrealism in France in the 1920s. The term surréaliste was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to suggest a dramatic attempt to go beyond the limits of an agreed-upon “reality.” André Breton used the term Surrealism (“superrealism,” or “above reality”) in 1924 in the first of three manifestoes. The Surrealists were apostles of what Breton called “beloved imagination.” They hungered for the marvelous and believed in the revolutionary power of erotic desire and “mad love,” of dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations. They sought to free the mind from the shackles of rational logic and explored the subterranean depths of the unconscious. They cultivated a condition of lucid trance and experimented with automatic writing—that is, writing attempted without any conscious control, as under hypnosis. The Surrealists courted disorder and believed in the possibilities of chance, of emotion induced by free association and surprising juxtapositions. Their true goal was inner freedom.

The major Surrealists in poetry: André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, Benjamin Peret. Breton acknowledged that Surrealism was the “prehensile tail” of Romanticism. Surrealism dissolved as a cohesive movement in the late 1930s, but the United States benefited from the wartime presence of some of the leading Surrealist figures, such as Breton and Max Ernst. In a broad sense, Surrealism means a love of dreams and fantasies, a taste for strange marvels and black humor, an eagerness to take the vertiginous descent into the self in quest of the secret forces of the psyche, a faith in the value of chance encounters and free play, a belief in the liberating powers of eros, of beloved imagination.

 

SEE ALSO automatic writing, Dadaism, imagination, Romanticism.

 

sutra In Sanskrit, sutra literally means a “thread” (the word derives from a verbal root meaning “to sew”) or line that holds things together. It generally refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual. In Hinduism, the sutras (500–200 B.C.E.) are treatises that deal with Vedic rituals and customary laws. They provide concise surveys of past literature in mnemonic, aphoristic form. In Buddhism, the term sutra generally refers to the oral teachings of the Buddha. The Beat poets loosely adapted the word sutra to refer to rules that hold an idea together, as in Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) and “Sunflower Sutra” (1955).

 

syllable The smallest measurable unit of poetic sound. Verse is a monosyllabic word (composed of one syllable), poetry is a polysyllabic one (composed of multiple syllables). “English speech is carried on a stream of syllables, each one a little articulation of energy produced by the muscles that expel air out of the mouth, shaped by the vocal cords and the organs of the mouth,” Derek Altridge writes in Poetic Rhythm (1995).

The syllable is the sole constituent in pure syllabic meter. Syllabic verse is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese. It is less common in English, a stress-based language. Most traditional English poetry is thus accentual-syllabic; it counts both stresses and syllables. Pure syllabics, which counts only syllables, is rarer in English-language verse.

In English, syllabics is a numerical system the poet uses to structure the poem. It is a method of organization, a sort of game or puzzle, which has to do with counting. It is imposed but it doesn’t necessarily feel imposed. Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977) in England and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in America pioneered the use of syllabic verse in modern poetry. They played with the expectations of iambic verse. In our era, such poets as Thom Gunn and Richard Howard have created a feeling of ease and flexibility, a natural-sounding verse in syllabics.

 

SEE ALSO beat; also “pure syllabic meter” in meter.

 

symbol From the Greek verb symballein, meaning “to put together,” and the noun symbolon, meaning “mark,” “emblem,” “token,” or “sign.” In the classical world the symbolon was a half coin or half of a knucklebone carried by one person as a token of identity or a mark of obligation to someone holding the other half. It was a sign of agreement, a concrete object that represented a pledge. Each represented a whole. When the two halves were rejoined, they composed one coin or one knucklebone, a complete meaning.

Dr. Johnson defines a symbol as “that which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else.” Thus a dove is both a graceful bird and a universal symbol of peace. A rose is both a literal flower and the most commonly used floral symbol in the West. “It is the paragon of flowers in Western tradition,” as one dictionary of symbols explains—“a symbol of the heart, the centre and the cosmic wheel, and also of sacred, romantic, and sensual love.”

Words are arbitrary symbols of meaning. They are also textured entities. Specific words are symbols that go beyond the literal. In poetry, it is critical to remember that rose is first of all a one-syllable, four-letter noun with a specific sound that ovals the mouth when you say it aloud. It has an acoustic impact, as when Wordsworth seals it as a rhyme in his ode “Intimations” (1807): “The Rainbow comes and goes, / And lovely is the Rose . . .” The rose here is a word that stands for a literal flower, but it is also something more, like the transient rainbow. In a poem, the literal meaning and the literary symbol work together. We bring to our reading all the symbolic connotations and meanings available to us, but the symbol should first be understood in terms of how it works as a device within a poem itself.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974) summarizes that in literary usage, a symbol refers to “a manner of representation in which what is shown (normally referring to something material) means, by virtue of association, something more or something else (normally referring to something immaterial).” How a thing can be both itself and something else is one of the great mysteries of poetry. In poetry, a symbol offers a surplus of resonance, of significance, since a poem can have great suggestive power, like a dream. It can also have the strange precision of a dream, what Baudelaire termed “evocative bewitchment” and Yeats called “indefinable and yet precise emotions.” In “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900), Yeats called these lines by Burns, which he altered slightly in memory, “perfectly symbolical”:

 

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,

And Time is setting with me, O!

 

Yeats said,

 

Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when they are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing.

 

SEE ALSO allegory, symbolism.

 

symbolism A literary movement that thrived in France between the 1870s and ’90s. It was initially called idealism. The leading symbolist poets, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, along with the key figures Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, were at the forefront of the modern poetic tradition. The symbolist poets opposed all forms of naturalism and realism. They craved a poetry of suggestion rather than direct statement and treated everything in the external world as a condition of soul. They sought to repress or obfuscate one kind of reality, the quotidian world, in order to attain a more permanent reality, a world of ideal forms and essences. They believed that a magical suggestiveness (what Rimbaud termed “l’alchimie du verbe”) could best be achieved by synesthesia, fusing images and senses and bringing poetry as close as possible to music. Thus Verlaine’s poem “Art poétique” (1874) advocates “music before everything.” Walter Pater formulated a parallel doctrine in 1873 when he asserted, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

Baudelaire was one of the chief progenitors of the movement. His sonnet “Correspondances” (1857) envisioned nature as a “forest of symbols” and suggested a correspondence between the phenomenal world and the ideal one. He asserted in a prose piece that “everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural domain, is significant, reciprocal, converse, corresponding.” Rimbaud followed Baudelaire and anticipated the Surrealists when he posited, “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of the senses.” Correspondence was achieved through heightened concentration on the symbol, which had what Maeterlinck called a “force occulte.” In 1891, Mallarmé defined symbolism:

 

To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, gradually in order to reveal a state of the soul, or, inversely, to choose an object and from it identify a state of the soul, by a series of deciphering operations . . . There must always be enigma in poetry.

 

Enigma widens the space for daydreaming. It loosens the intellect and invites poetic reverie.

The symbolist movement reverberated around the globe and initiated poets into its mysteries. Some of the key figures it influenced: W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and George Russell (Æ) in the British Isles; Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke in Germany; Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Austria; Innokenty Annensky, Alexander Blok, and Andrey Bely in Russia; Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Jorge Guillén in Spain; Rubén Darío in Nicaragua; T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens in the United States. Whoever believes in the occult or spiritual power of the poetic word is an heir to the symbolists.

 

SEE ALSO decadence, modernism, modernismo, naturalism, symbol, synesthesia.

 

synecdoche, see metonymy, trope.

 

synesthesia A blending of sensations; the phenomenon of describing one sense in terms of another. The term synesthesia dates to only the late nineteenth century, but the device may be as old as literature itself. the Iliad (ca. eighth century B.C.E.) compares the voices of aged Trojans to the “lily-like” voices of cicadas; the Odyssey (ca. eighth century B.C.E.) evokes the “honey voice” of the Siren; the Bible refers to “seeing” a voice and “tasting” the word of God. Baudelaire popularized the notion of synesthesia with his idea that “the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond” (“Correspondances,” 1857). In “Voyelles” (“Vowels,” 1872), Rimbaud assigned colors to each of the vowels: “Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O—vowels, / Someday I will open your silent pregnancies . . .” Rimbaud’s lines exemplify the type of synesthesia known as audition colorée, wherein sounds are described as colors. Coleridge declares, in Biographia Literaria (1817), that “the poet must . . . understand and command what Bacon called the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially . . . the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound.”

 

SEE ALSO symbolism.

 

synthetic rhyme A rhyme that distorts a word, deleting, contracting, protracting, or otherwise wrenching letters into place to create a rhyme. This false rhyming, a weakness of bad poetry, is turned into a comic strength in light verse, as when Ogden Nash writes in “Spring Comes to Murray Hill” (1930), “I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue / And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?”

 

SEE ALSO light verse, rhyme.