accent A greater stress given to one syllable than another in pronouncing English, or to some words more than others in a sentence of single-syllable words. When we accent the first syllable of content, we mean subject matter; when we accent the second syllable of content, we mean we’re happy. English is a heavily stressed language, partly because a good part of its vocabulary derives from Anglo-Saxon, which derives from West Germanic dialects. Dictionaries provide a guide to relative stresses within multisyllabic words.
accentual meter An ordering principle by which the number of stresses, or accents, in each line makes a pattern for the poem; for example, a poem might have four stresses, or strong accents, in each line, or it might alternate lines of four stresses with lines of three stresses. Accentual meter doesn’t necessarily keep track of unstressed syllables in a line.
accentual-syllabic meter An ordering principle for poems that counts both the number of stresses, or accents, in the line and the number of syllables in the line; for example, iambic pentameter consists of lines of ten syllables divided up into five (penta) iambic feet with a stress on every second syllable (iambic).
alliteration The repetition of an initial consonant sound of words in near proximity in a poem; for example, the bl sounds in “. . . all their sparkles bleared and black and blind” (Thomas Hardy, “The Convergence of the Twain”).
anapest See metrical foot/feet.
anaphora A structuring technique that involves repetition of the initial word or phrase at the beginning of lines. It was much used by Walt Whitman to order his unrhymed poetry in Leaves of Grass (1855).
apostrophe A direct address to someone or something as a way of creating relationship and engagement in a poem, even if the person or thing addressed is not alive. For example, in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” John Keats speaks to the urn, and in “Ode to a Nightingale” he addresses the bird as “you.” Apostrophe in lyric can be addressed to a person, a thing, or even an idea.
assonance A sonic effect achieved by the repetition of a vowel sound within words in near proximity to one another; for example, the long a sounds in this line from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”: “with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze.” (See consonance for the equivalent sonic effect with consonant sounds.)
blank verse Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
closure The sense that a poem has reached a climax or resolution of its themes or sonic patterns, or both, at its conclusion.
colloquial speech Speech that is modeled on the ordinary way people speak (though in poetry it is a literary approximation of ordinary speech, which usually means it is more sonically dense than actual speech). When, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1799), the romantic poet William Wordsworth insisted that poetry should sound like “a man speaking to men,” he revolutionized the notion of how poems could sound and pushed poetry in English farther toward a colloquial model.
connotation The suggestive associations that a word can arouse in a reader, as contrasted with the word’s denotation, or precise dictionary meanings. Connotations can be particular to a culture or an individual—thus, being based in the reader’s reactions, they are not easy to control; but they enrich the meanings of words and poems.
consonance A sonic effect that links consonant sounds within a poem; for example, the r sounds in the opening lines of Theodore Roethke’s “Cuttings”: “This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / Cut stems struggling to put down feet, . . .”
couplet A two-line stanza in a poem.
dactyl See metrical foot/feet.
denotation The precise meaning of a word (as distinct from its connotation), best determined by consulting a dictionary.
diction The kind of language used in a poem; having to do with word choice and vocabulary.
dramatic situation/context The circumstances or setting of a poem, presented in relation to what is going on (who, what, where, when); comparable to the opening scenes of a play, in which someone is somewhere at a certain time doing or saying something.
duration The length of time a syllable is held (or can be held) when it is pronounced aloud. Thus, the two single-syllable words bit and doom have different durations, doom taking longer to say aloud. Duration is an element of rhythm; it is usually a result of the vowel within a syllable, as in the two monosyllables above.
elegy A type of poem concerned with death, grief, or loss.
ellipsis The omission or suppression of a word or phrase as represented by a punctuation mark, usually three dots (. . .).
end rhyme The matching of final sounds in words that occur at the ends of lines, as in these couplets that formt he opening of John Keats’s Endymion (1818):
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
end-stopped line A line of poetry that ends with a complete pause, which is often indicated by a punctuation mark. (See enjambed line for contrast.)
enjambed line A phrase or sentence that continues beyond the line’s end and reaches completion in the following line; for example:
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, . . .
from Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
Here the phrase “From sullen earth” completes the meaning of the preceding line. Also called a run-on line.
epigraph A quotation that precedes a poem and either creates a context for the poem or subtly interacts with the poem itself; often set toward the right margin, after the poem’s title.
figurative language Language that serves to compare or transform rather than to name, denote, or speak literally; includes metaphor, simile, and personification.
free verse Verse that is “free of” traditional metrical ordering principles; the poet determines the nature and length of each line and thus the overall arrangement of lines on the page. In English, free verse became popular early in the twentieth century, although certain poets such as Walt Whitman in his collection Leaves of Grass (1855) were clearly writing an early version of free verse. When, in 1918, Ezra Pound counseled young poets: “as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” he was urging them to write free verse with a more varied rhythmic structure than the simple tick-tock of iambic meter or a metronome.
haiku A Japanese poetic form consisting of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. In addition to the syllable structure, a haiku must make use of sensory language and, usually, contain a word indicating the season in which the poem is set. Haiku focuses on a single scene or moment.
heroic couplet A rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter.
iamb See metrical foot/feet.
iambic pentameter A line of accentual-syllabic verse consisting of ten syllables with stress on every second syllable.
image A word or several words that convey sensory experience (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). Unfortunately, in discussions of poetry the word image also often refers to figurative language (metaphors and similes). Thus, the potential confusion between sensory language and figurative language occasionally makes discussions of poems challenging.
imagery The language used in a poem to evoke sensory experience.
incantation The formulaic repetition of phrases or words for rhythmic effect. Incantation in a poem either intensifies a statement or alerts the reader to different possible meanings in the same phrase; for example:
What did I know? What did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
from Robert Hayden,
“Those Winter Sundays”
internal rhyme Rhyme that occurs within a line or adjacent lines of a poem rather than at the end of the lines; for example:
The grave cave ate will be . . .
from Sylvia Plath,
“Lady Lazarus”
list poem A structuring or ordering device in which a poem is modeled on a list of objects or events.
lyric A poem based in an individual point of view, likely to stress that viewpoint or perspective; often presented as being spoken by an “I,” but not always. By and large, the lyric attempts to dramatize an intense moment in the poet-speaker’s emotional, experiential, or imaginative life (or a combination of them all). It is a form of poem present (as song or recitation or written piece) in all cultures and throughout all human history (so far as we know). The English term lyric comes from the Greek, which referred to a poem sung or chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre (a stringed instrument). This meaning persists in English when we refer to the words of a song as its lyrics. Popular song and lyric poetry exist on a continuum—they are variations on the same self-expressive impulse. By and large, lyrics tend to focus on a single dominant emotion that constellates the poem’s language around a center.
lyric sequence An extended poem made up of individual lyrics that follow a narrative arc, but each poem in the sequence constellates around its own imaginative and emotional center. The narrative or thematic connection between the individual lyric units is assumed rather than spelled out as in a narrative poem. One effect of lyric sequence is to achieve the intensity of lyric (individual poems in the sequence) as well as the scope and extension through time available to narrative poems.
metaphor A basic form of figurative language in which one thing is said to be another thing (“A is not-A”—a logical impossibility); for example: “My heart is a fire engine.”
meter An ordering principle for the lines in some poems that provides an overall structure based on certain patterns. Meter is a regularizing of one aspect of a poem’s words to create a recurring, stable pattern that, among other things, frequently determines the length or relative length of each line. In English, the most common forms of meter make use of a recurring pattern of syllable and accent count (accentual-syllabic meter), or accent alone (accentual meter), or syllable count alone (syllabic meter).
metrical foot/feet In scansion or when composing in accentual-syllabic meter, the poetic line is imagined as a series of units called feet. A pattern of such feet constitutes an ordering principle in the poem. Thus, a line in a poem composed in iambic pentameter has five iambic feet. The most common metrical feet in English poetry are: iamb (an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one), trochee (an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one), anapest (two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable), dactyl (an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables), and spondee (two accented syllables).
mixed metaphor In figurative language, the comparison of more than two things at the same time. In the statement “My heart is like a fire engine swimming toward its destiny,” the heart is said to be a fire engine, but the verb swimming also indicates that the heart is a swimmer. Often, when more than two things are compared, the reader becomes confused or disoriented; thus, mixed metaphors are considered to be ineffective or even harmful to a poem. Of course, a series of metaphors (each of which is a one-to-one comparison) can be exhilarating (see Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks,” on here, or Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” section 6, on pg. 258).
monologue The thoughts of a single speaker presented as if spoken aloud.
narrative A poem structured as a series of actions unfolding in time and related by sequence, cause and effect, or action and reaction.
narrator The person who is telling a story or poem. A first-person narrator is usually expressed through the pronoun I, although it can also be we. A third-person narrator (he or she) tends to speak as if from outside the story as an observer but with the ability to communicate his or her own subjective responses.
near-rhyme (See off-rhyme.)
ode An extended lyric that praises a person, thing, event, or personified abstraction. Odes have been addressed to “Intellectual Beauty” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and to “Artichokes” (Pablo Neruda).
off-rhyme (also near-rhyme or slant rhyme) This occurs when two words have similar but not identical sounds, as in store and stare or fame and flume. People’s ability to hear off-rhyme varies; it is generally most effective when placed at the ends of lines, where it’s as likely to be recognized by eye as by ear.
parallelism A construction of syntax that involves a paired repetition of words or phrases. It is used as an ordering element in many poetries, including Hebrew poetry of the Old Testament—as in this example from the “Song of Songs” (here rendered in English), which combines figurative language with syntactical parallelism:
I am the rose of Sharon,
and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns,
so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons.
from “Song of Songs,” King James Version
paraphrase A restatement of one’s understanding, in one’s own words, of the plot or unfolding theme of a poem from beginning to end.
pastoral A poem about nature or the rural life that tends to stress its joys or benefits.
persona poem A poem in which the poet speaks in the voice of another person, historical or fictional.
personification A figure of speech in which nonhuman objects or creatures are given human qualities such as emotions or agency.
pitch An element of rhythm. (See also vowel pitch.)
point of view The perspective from which a poem’s events, characters, or details are presented.
prose poem A poem organized into sentences and paragraphs rather than individual lines. One could say it was invented by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in his 1869 collection Paris Spleen.
pun A play on words in which one word that sounds the same as another can mean two different things. Elizabethan love poetry relished puns relating to hunting deer, so that the beloved was dear/deer and heart/hart (a hart being an adult deer). If sustained, puns in poetry allow two levels of meaning to coexist at the same time.
quatrain A stanza of four lines.
rhyme A sound effect that announces itself to the reader when two words have the same final, stressed vowel sound and/or the same final consonant sound following it; for example, shame and fame or alarm and farm. Rhyme can appear at the ends of lines to reinforce a sense of pattern, or it can appear within lines that are near each other (see internal rhyme). If too many syllables are identical, it can undercut the pleasure of rhyme, as when following is rhymed with hollowing. (See also off-rhyme.)
rhyme scheme In a poem making use of end rhyme, the repeating pattern of the rhymes in each stanza or over the course of the entire poem.
rhythm A sense of pattern or recurrence; in poetry, an inclusive term for the complex sound patterns made by phrases and sentences. Meter, if present in a poem, is part of the far more complex phenomenon of rhythm, which also involves a great number of different elements of language, including among other things: duration, (vowel) pitch; such sound effects as assonance, consonance, alliteration; phrasing and pauses, syntax, punctuation, rhetorical devices and incantation. These elements operate not in isolation, but in relation to each other, creating the overall oral or sonic performance of the poem, that “sense of musical delight” Coleridge insisted was essential to poetry.
scansion A process by which a poem’s lines are analyzed in terms of a scheme consisting of metrical feet arranged in a pattern of accented and unaccented (stressed and unstressed) syllables.
sectioned poem A poem divided up into several sections in order to cover a theme or subject across a longer time period or from different points of view. The sections of such a poem can be imagined as brief lyric poems or partial poems that become units in a larger or more extensive poem whose unifying principles are looser than those of a conventional lyric (see further discussion, 110).
sestet The last six lines of a sonnet (which contains fourteen lines).
simile A form of figurative language in which two things being compared are linked by like or as; for example, “My love is like a red, red rose.”
slant rhyme See off-rhyme.
sonnet A traditional form of poetry consisting of fourteen lines, usually of rhymed iambic pentameter; brought from Italy into Elizabethan English society. The Shakespearean or English sonnet consists of three rhymed quatrains and a final rhymed couplet. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet consists of a grouping of eight lines (octave) followed by six lines (the sestet).
speaker The voice or person imagined to be speaking the poem. It may or may not be the poet in an autobiographical sense, but the identity of the poem’s speaker is central to its meaning(s).
spondee See metrical foot/feet.
stanza Derived from the Italian word for “room,” a stanza is a grouping of lines together into a unit.
stress See accent.
surrealism A literary and artistic movement founded in 1924 by the French poet André Breton; it sought to combine the nonrational elements of dream reality with the waking reality of daily life so as to create a “higher” reality, a “sur-reality.” Originally an avant-garde movement, it was so widely influential that the term surreal has become part of the everyday vocabulary of people who are not even familiar with its origins. Surrealism celebrates imagination and “the marvelous”: “The image is always marvelous” (André Breton, first Surrealist Manifesto).
syllabic meter A (rare) metrical principle by which a poem is ordered through a pattern of line length established by counting the syllables in each line. If a poet writing in syllabics desires an eight-syllable line pattern, then whenever the line length gets to eight syllables, the poet breaks the line and puts the next words on the following line.
symbol A symbol is present in a poem when a named object suggests meanings beyond its own. W. H. Auden said this about symbols: “A symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously recognized; i.e., an object or event which is felt to be more important than the reason can immediately explain is symbolic. Secondly, a symbolic correspondence is never one to one but always multiple, and different persons perceive different meanings” (The Enchafed Flood, here).
syntax The arrangement of word order in a sentence to create meaning. Syntax can be varied—the sequence of words can be rearranged, but only within a certain range in English. For example, “The man bit the dog” is simple English syntax (sentence subject, predicate/verb, object of verb). It can be varied to mean something almost the same: “The dog was bitten by the man.” But it can’t be varied too much: “The bit man dog the” contains the same words as our original sentence, but does not have meaning in English.
tercet A group of three lines.
tone The overall emotional weight or slant of the voice of the supposed speaker of a poem or of the poem itself as intuited by the reader; similar to a person’s tone of voice. Poems tend to display a consistent tone (e.g., cheerful, melancholy, angry) as a means of creating unity of effect, intimacy with the reader or listener, or emotional impact.
trochee See metrical foot/feet.
unity Relates to a reader’s expectation (and a poet’s aspiration) that the language and imagined events in a given poem will cohere and be related in some obvious or subtle way. The degree of unity varies from poem to poem (and the need for it from reader to reader), but it seems to be a presiding human longing in relation to poetry (which is the most unified and patterned language use we know, with the exception of the “language” of mathematics).
villanelle A fixed form of poetry consisting of five rhymed, three-line stanzas followed by a four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the first stanza recur throughout the poem as the end line of succeeding stanzas. Such famous villanelles as “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas indicate the form’s power to dramatize an obsessive theme until it achieves resolution or revelation.
voice A quality of language that gives the reader the sense that a consistent and coherent personality is presenting or speaking the words of the poem. Voice goes a long way toward making the poem feel cohesive and unified. It is often related to an emotional tone that unifies the words and images (e.g., sad, joyful, anxious), but it can also dramatize the speaker’s attitude (e.g., ironic, boastful, satiric).
vowel pitch The “highness” or “lowness” of vowel sounds as formed by forcing air up through an open throat; such sounds roughly correspond to higher and lower notes on a musical scale. The patterning and variation in vowel pitch constitute one element of a poem’s overall rhythmic effect.