iamb [I-am or I-amb] (iambus) A metrical unit (*foot) of verse, having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as in the word ‘beyond’ (or, in Greek and Latin *quantitative verse, one short syllable followed by one long syllable). Lines of poetry made up predominantly of iambs are referred to as iambics or as iambic verse, which is by far the most common kind of metrical verse in English. Its most important form is the 10-syllable iambic *pentameter, either rhymed (as in *heroic couplets, *sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in *blank verse:
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (Tennyson)
The iambic pentameter permits some variation in the placing of its five *stresses; thus it may often begin with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (a reversal called trochaic *inversion or *substitution) before resuming the regular iambic pattern:
Oft she rejects, but never once offends (Pope)
The 8-syllable iambic *tetrameter is another common English line:
Come live with me, and be my love (Marlowe)
Iambic tetrameters were also used in ancient Greek dramatic dialogue. The English iambic *hexameter or six-stress line is usually referred to as the *alexandrine. See also metre.
ibid. The commonly abbreviated form of ibidem (Latin, ‘in the same place’), a term widely used in scholarly footnotes and endnotes when these provide bibliographical references for quotations or facts cited. In these contexts, ‘ibid.’ means ‘in the same work already mentioned’, usually referring back to the immediately preceding note or to a previous reference to a work by a specified author, and followed by the relevant page number from that work. It does not automatically refer precisely to the same page as before: for this purpose, the customary Latin abbreviation is *loc. cit.
Ibsenite (Ibsenist) A defender, partisan supporter, or imitator of Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), a writer whose plays provoked international controversy when translated into English and other languages from 1877. In the English-speaking world the first leading Ibsenites were the Scottish drama critic William Archer, who collected his early translations in Henrik Ibsen’s Prose Dramas (1890–91), and the dramatist Bernard Shaw, whose polemical essay The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1890, rev. ed. 1913) has sometimes been accused of expounding Shaw’s own dramatic principles rather than Ibsen’s.
icon [I-kon] (iconic sign) In the *semiotics of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce, a sign that stands for its object mainly by resembling or sharing some features (e.g. shape) with it; such resemblance having a status called iconicity. A photograph or diagram of an object is iconic, but the signs of language (apart from a few *onomatopoeic words) have a merely conventional or *arbitrary relation to their objects: in Peirce’s terminology, they are not icons but *symbols. See also index.
ictus (plural -uses) The *stress or *accent that is placed on a syllable in a line of verse, as distinct from the stressed syllable itself. Adjective: ictal.
idiolect [id-i-oh-lekt] The particular variety of a language used by an individual speaker or writer, which may be marked by peculiarities of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Adjective: idiolectal or idiolectic. See also dialect.
idiom A phrase or grammatical construction that cannot be translated literally into another language because its meaning is not equivalent to that of its component words. Common examples, of which there are thousands in English, include follow suit, hell for leather, flat broke, on the wagon, well hung, etc. By extension, the term is sometimes applied more loosely to any style or manner of writing that is characteristic of a particular group or movement. Adjective: idiomatic.
idyll [id-il] (idyl) A short poem describing an incident of country life in terms of idealized innocence and contentment; or any such episode in a poem or prose work. The term is virtually synonymous with *pastoral poem, as in Theocritus’ Idylls (3rd century bce). The title of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1842–85), a sequence of Arthurian *romances, bears little relation to the usual meaning. Browning in Dramatic Idyls (1879–80) uses the term in another sense, as a short self-contained poem. Adjective: idyllic. See also bucolic poetry, eclogue.
illocutionary act An utterance that accomplishes something in the act of speaking. In the *speech act theory proposed by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (1962), an utterance involves not only the simple ‘locutionary’ act of producing a grammatical sentence, but also an ‘illocutionary force’ of effectiveness either as an affirmation or as a promise, a threat, a warning, a command, etc. The most explicit illocutionary acts are the *performatives, which accomplish the very deed to which they refer, when uttered by authorized speakers in certain conditions: ‘I arrest you in the name of the law’; ‘I hereby renounce the Devil and all his works’; ‘I promise to defend and uphold the constitution.’ See also perlocutionary.
imagery A rather vague critical term covering those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or *figurative reference to perceptible or ‘concrete’ objects, scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition. The imagery of a literary work thus comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental ‘pictures’, but may appeal to senses other than sight. The term has often been applied particularly to the figurative language used in a work, especially to its *metaphors and *similes. Images suggesting further meanings and associations in ways that go beyond the fairly simple identifications of metaphor and simile are often called *symbols. The critical emphasis on imagery in the mid-20th century, both in *New Criticism and in some influential studies of Shakespeare, tended to glorify the supposed concreteness of literary works by ignoring matters of structure, convention, and abstract argument: thus Shakespeare’s plays were read as clusters or patterns of ‘thematic imagery’ according to the predominance of particular kinds of image (of animals, of disease, etc.), without reference to the action or to the dramatic meaning of characters’ speeches. See also motif.
Imaginary, the See symbolic.
imagination The mind’s capacity to generate images of objects, states, or actions that have not been felt or experienced by the senses. In the discussion of psychology and art prior to *Romanticism, imagination was usually synonymous with *fancy, and commonly opposed to the faculty of reason, either as complementary to it or as contrary to it. S. T. Coleridge’s famous distinction between fancy and imagination in his Biographia Literaria (1817) emphasized the imagination’s vitally creative power of dissolving and uniting images into new forms, and of reconciling opposed qualities into a new unity. This freely creative and transforming power of the imagination was a central principle of Romanticism.
Further reading: Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (1988).
Imagism The doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves Imagists or Imagistes between 1912 and 1917. Led at first by Ezra Pound, and then—after his defection to *Vorticism—by Amy Lowell, the group rejected most 19th-century poetry as cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in the short *lyric poem. Influenced by the Japanese *haiku and partly by ancient Greek lyrics, the Imagists cultivated concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; they also preferred looser *cadences to traditional regular rhythms. Apart from Pound and Lowell, the group also included Richard Aldington, ‘H.D.’ (Hilda Doolittle), F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and William Carlos Williams. Imagist poems and manifestos appeared in the American magazine Poetry and the London journal The Egoist. Pound edited Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), while the three further anthologies (1915–17), all entitled Some Imagist Poets, were edited by Lowell. See also modernism.
Further reading: Andrew Thacker, The Imagist Poets (2007).
imperfect rhyme See half-rhyme.
implied author A term coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to designate that source of a work’s design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text, and imagined as a personality standing behind the work. As an imaginary entity, it is to be distinguished clearly from the real author, who may well have written other works implying a different kind of *persona or implied author behind them. The implied author is also to be distinguished from the *narrator, since the implied author stands at a remove from the narrative voice, as the personage assumed to be responsible for deciding what kind of narrator will be presented to the reader; in many works this distinction produces an effect of *irony at the narrator’s expense.
implied reader A term used by Wolfgang Iser and some other theorists of *reader-response criticism to denote the hypothetical figure of the reader to whom a given work is designed to address itself. Any *text may be said to presuppose an ‘ideal’ reader who has the particular attitudes (moral, cultural, etc.) appropriate to that text in order for it to achieve its full effect. This implied reader is to be distinguished from actual readers, who may be unable or unwilling to occupy the position of the implied reader: thus, most religious poetry presupposes a god-fearing implied reader, but many actual readers today are atheists. The implied reader is also not the same thing as the *narratee, who is a figure imagined within the text as listening to—or receiving a written narration from—the narrator (e.g. the Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’).
impressionism In the literary sense borrowed from French painting, a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes. Impressionism in literature is thus neither a school nor a movement but a kind of subjective tendency manifested in descriptive techniques. It is found in *Symbolist and *Imagist poetry, and in much modern verse, but also in many works of prose fiction since the late 19th century, as in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. Impressionistic criticism is the kind of *criticism that restricts itself to describing the critic’s own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the light of general principles. Walter Pater’s defence of such criticism, in the Preface to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was that ‘in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly’. The most common kind of impressionistic criticism is found in theatre and book reviews: ‘I laughed all night’; ‘I couldn’t put it down’.
Further reading: Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (2001).
in medias res [in med-i-ahs rayss] The Latin phrase meaning ‘into the middle of things’, applied to the common technique of storytelling by which the *narrator begins the story at some exciting point in the middle of the action, thereby gaining the reader’s interest before explaining preceding events by *analepses (‘flashbacks’) at some later stage. It was conventional to begin *epic poems in medias res, as Milton does in Paradise Lost. The technique is also common in plays and in prose fiction: for example, Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘A Dill Pickle’ (1920) begins in medias res with the sentence ‘And then, after six years, she saw him again.’ See also anachrony.
In Memoriam stanza A *stanza of four iambic *tetrameter lines rhyming abba, used by Tennyson in the sequence of lyrics making up his In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). This was the most notable English use of this *envelope stanza, although not the first. See also quatrain.
incantation The chanting or reciting of any form of words deemed to have magical power, usually in a brief rhyming spell with an insistent rhythm and other devices of repetition; or the form of words thus recited. Incantation is characteristic of magical charms, curses, prophecies, and the conjuring of spirits: a famous literary example is the witches’ chant, ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, in Macbeth. Poetry that resembles such chants may be called incantatory.
incremental repetition A modern term for a device of repetition commonly found in *ballads. It involves the repetition of lines or *stanzas with small but crucial changes made to a few words from one to the next, and has an effect of *narrative progression or suspense. It is found most often in passages of dialogue, as in the traditional Scottish ballad, ‘Lord Randal’:
‘What d’ ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your mother, my handsome young man?’
‘Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.’
‘What d’ ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ ye leave to your sister, my handsome young man?’
‘My gold and my silver; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.’
incunabula [ink-yu-nab-yu-lă] The collective term for books dating from the earliest (pre-1500) phase of the history of printing. Literally, it means ‘swaddling-clothes’, and is thus suggestive of the ‘infancy’ of the art of printing. The singular form incunabulum is only rarely found in reference to a particular book from that period. Adjective: incunabular.
indeterminacy 1. In *reader-response criticism, any element of a *text that requires the reader to decide on its meaning (see also ambiguity, crux, scriptible). 2. In *deconstruction, a principle of uncertainty invoked to deny the existence of any final or determinate meaning that could bring to an end the play of meanings between the elements of a text (see différance). To proclaim the ultimate indeterminacy of meaning need not mean that no decisions can be made about the meaning of anything (or at least it cannot be determined that it means this), only that there is no final arbiter of such decisions. Some deconstructionists, however, have the habit of calling the meanings of literary works ‘undecidable’. See also aporia.
index (plural -dices or -dexes) In the *semiotics of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce, a *sign that is connected to its object by a concrete relationship, usually of cause and effect. A finger or signpost pointing to an object or place is indexal; so, in more clearly causal ways, are many kinds of symptom, mark, or trace: scars, footprints, crumpled bedclothes, etc. Thus smoke may be seen as an index of fire. Peirce distinguished the index from two other kinds of sign: the *icon and the *symbol.
Index, the The name commonly given to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of the titles of those books that the Catholic Church forbade its followers to read, from the 16th century to 1966. A second list, the Index Expurgatorius, specified those passages that must be expurgated from certain works before they could be read by Catholics.
http://www.beaconforfreedom.org/about_database/index_librorum.html
• Beacon for Freedom of Expression: lists all the banned books from final (1948) edition of Index Librorum.
induction An older word for the *prologue or introduction to a work. The introductory episode of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for example, is called the induction.
inflection (inflexion) The modification of words according to their grammatical functions, usually by employing variant word-endings to indicate such qualities as tense, gender, case, and number (see also morphology). English uses inflection for the past tense of many verbs (usually with the ending -ed), for degrees of adjectives (-er and -est), for plurals (usually -es or -s), and other functions; but since the transition from *Old English to *Middle English it has been relatively ‘uninflected’ by comparison with the so-called inflected languages such as Latin, in which the use of inflection is far more extensive. In a second sense, the term is sometimes used to denote a change of pitch in the pronunciation of a word (see intonation).
inkhorn (ink-horn) A small portable container for carrying ink. The word was used by some 16th-century writers as a *metonym for book learning and thus pedantry. Accordingly an inkhorn term was a word or phrase derived from old books or from Latin rather than from the living English language, and a style ‘smelling of the inkhorn’ was similarly bookish or remote from spoken English.
inscape and instress Two terms coined by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) in a not wholly successful attempt to elucidate his poetic method and religious philosophy. Inscape is the unique quality or essential ‘whatness’ of a thing, while instress is the divine energy that both supports the inscape of all things and brings it alive to the senses of the observer.
intentional fallacy The name given by the American *New Critics W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley to the widespread assumption that an author’s declared or supposed intention in writing a work is the proper basis for deciding on the meaning and the value of that work. Where that assumption becomes a principle, it is known as intentionalism. In their 1946 essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (reprinted in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon, 1954), these critics argue that a literary work, once published, belongs in the public realm of language, which gives it an objective existence distinct from the author’s original idea of it: ‘The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.’ Thus any information or surmise we may have about the author’s intention cannot in itself determine the work’s meaning or value, since it still has to be verified against the work itself. Many other critics have pointed to the unreliability of authors as witnesses to the meanings of their own works, which often have significances wider than their intentions in composing them: as D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’ A similar principle is involved in theories of the *death of the author.
interior monologue The written representation of a character’s inner thoughts, impressions, and memories as if directly ‘overheard’ without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting *narrator. The term is often loosely used as a synonym for *stream of consciousness. However, some confusion arises about the relationship between these two terms when critics distinguish them: some take ‘stream of consciousness’ as the larger category, embracing all representations of intermingled thoughts and perceptions, within which interior monologue is a special case of ‘direct’ presentation; others take interior monologue as the larger category, within which stream of consciousness is a special technique emphasizing continuous ‘flow’ by abandoning strict logic, *syntax, and punctuation. The second of these alternatives permits us to apply the term ‘interior monologue’ to that large class of modern poems representing a character’s unspoken thoughts and impressions, as distinct from the spoken thoughts imagined in the *dramatic monologue: Browning’s ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (1842) is an early example. More often, though, the term refers to prose passages employing stream-of-consciousness techniques: the most celebrated instance in English is the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Joyce acknowledged Édouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers sont coupées (1888) as a precedent in the use of interior monologue. See also monologue.
interlude A short play, of a kind believed to have been performed by small companies of professional actors in the intervals of banquets and other entertainments before the emergence of the London theatres. This rather loose category includes several types of play that are regarded as transitional between the *morality play and Elizabethan comedy: some resemble the morality plays in *didactic intent and are sometimes called ‘moral interludes’, while others are closer to *farce. Interludes flourished in England from the end of the 15th century to the late 16th century. An early example is Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (1497). The foremost author of interludes was John Heywood, who wrote The Play of the Weather (1533) among other works.
internal rhyme A poetic device by which two or more words rhyme within the same line of verse, as in Kipling’s reactionary poem ‘The City of Brass’ (1909):
Men swift to see done, and outrun, their extremest commanding—
Of the tribe which describe with a jibe the perversions of Justice—
Panders avowed to the crowd whatsoever its lust is.
A special case of internal rhyme between words at the middle and the end of certain lines is *leonine rhyme. See also crossed rhyme.
interpolation A passage inserted into a text by some later writer, usually without the authority of the original author; or the act of introducing such additional material. For example, it was once believed by many critics that the obscene jokes of the drunken porter in Shakespeare’s Macbeth must have been interpolated by some inferior playwright.
intertextuality A term coined by Julia Kristeva to designate the various relationships that a given *text may have with other texts. These intertextual relationships include anagram, *allusion, adaptation, translation, *parody, *pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation. In the literary theories of *structuralism and *post-structuralism, texts are seen to refer to other texts (or to themselves as texts) rather than to an external reality. The term intertext has been used variously for a text drawing on other texts, for a text thus drawn upon, and for the relationship between both.
Further reading: Graham Allen, Intertextuality (2nd edn, 2011).
intonation The pattern of variation in pitch during a spoken utterance. Intonation has important expressive functions, indicating the speaker’s attitudes (of astonishment, sarcasm, etc.), but it also signals the grammatical status of an utterance, for instance by showing relations between clauses or by marking the difference between a simple statement and a question: in English, a simple assertion like We are going can be changed into a question simply by reversing its intonation from a lowering of pitch to a raising of pitch.
intrigue An older term for the *plot of a play or story, or for its most complicated portion. In another sense closer to modern usage, the term may also refer to the secret scheme (‘plot’ in the other sense, as conspiracy) that one character or group of characters devises in order to outwit others. Much European comedy of the 17th century is based on complex plots about plotters, and is sometimes called the comedy of intrigue, especially where intricacy of plot overshadows the development of character or of satiric theme.
intrusive narrator An *omniscient narrator who, in addition to reporting the events of a novel’s story, offers further comments on characters and events, and who sometimes reflects more generally upon the significance of the story. A device used frequently by the great *realist novelists of the 19th century, notably George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy, the intrusive narrator allows the novel to be used for general moral commentary on human life, sometimes in the form of brief digressive essays interrupting the narrative. An earlier example is the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
invective The harsh denunciation of some person or thing in abusive speech or writing, usually by a succession of insulting *epithets. Among many memorable examples in Shakespeare is Timon’s verbal assault upon his false friends in Timon of Athens:
Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,
Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,
You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies,
Cap-and-knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks!
Verb: inveigh. See also flyting, juvenalian satire, lampoon.
inversion The reversal of the normally expected order of words: or, in *prosody, the turning around of a metrical *foot. Inversion of word order (*syntax), also known in rhetoric as *hyperbaton, is a common form of *poetic licence allowing a poet to preserve the *rhyme scheme or the *metre of a verse line, or to place special emphasis on particular words. Common forms of inversion in English are the placing of an adjective after its noun (his fiddlers three), the placing of the grammatical subject after the verb (said she), and the placing of an adverb or adverbial phrase before its verb (sweetly blew the breeze). Stronger forms of inversion, where the grammatical object precedes the verb and even the subject, are found in *Latinate styles, notably Milton’s. In prosody, the term is applied to a kind of *substitution whereby one foot is replaced by another in which the positions of stressed and unstressed (or of long and short) syllables are exactly reversed: the most common type of inverted foot is the *trochee substituted for an *iamb at the beginning of a line.
invocation An appeal made by a poet to a *muse or deity for help in composing the poem. The invocation of a muse was a *convention in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, especially in the *epic; it was followed later by many poets of the *Renaissance and *neoclassical periods. Usually it is placed at the beginning of the poem, but may also appear in later positions, such as at the start of a new *canto. The invocation is one of the conventions ridiculed in *mock-epic poems: Byron begins the third Canto (1821) of Don Juan with the exclamation ‘Hail, Muse! et cetera’. In terms of *rhetoric, the invocation is a special variety of *apostrophe.
in-yer-face theatre A term coined by Aleks Sierz in his book In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001), to refer to a new wave of British drama of the 1990s that was notable for its provocative uses of obscene language, nudity, violence, and taboo subject-matter. This feature of new 1990s drama had been noted before, and referred to by theatre critics as ‘the new brutalism’ among other labels. The leading dramatists of this new wave were Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson, and its defining works included Kane’s Blasted (1995), Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), Neilson’s Penetrator (1993), Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (1995), Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), and Harry Gibson’s Trainspotting (1994; an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel). Although predominantly British, this school included some American playwrights, notably Tracy Letts (author of Killer Joe, 1994) and Phyllis Nagy (The Strip, 1995).
ionic [I-on-ik] A Greek metrical *foot consisting of two long syllables followed by two short syllables (known as the greater ionic or ionic a majore) or of two short syllables followed by two long syllables (the lesser ionic or ionic a minore). Associated with the early religious verse of the Ionians in Asia Minor (now Turkey), the *metre was used by several Greek *lyric poets, by the dramatist Euripides, and in Latin by Horace. It is hardly ever found in English as the basis for whole lines: the Epilogue to Robert Browning’s Asolando (1889) provides a rare example of the lesser ionic metre adapted to English stresses:
At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time
Irish Literary Renaissance (Irish Revival, Celtic Revival) The great period of modern Irish writing, mostly in the English language and to a significant extent written outside Ireland, from about 1885 to the death of William Butler Yeats in 1939. The twin highlights of this period are the poetic career of Yeats himself, indisputably the greatest poet in the English language in his time, and the spectacular talent of James Joyce, who made himself the master of modern English prose and a formidably original leader of international *modernism. The literary achievements in this period of the playwrights J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey are also noteworthy.
irony A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its *context so as to give it a very different significance. In various forms, irony appears in many kinds of literature, from the *tragedy of Sophocles to the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James, but is especially important in *satire, as in Voltaire and Swift. At its simplest, in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form, sarcasm; for the *figures of speech exploiting this discrepancy, see antiphrasis, litotes, meiosis. The more sustained structural irony in literature involves the use of a naïve or deluded hero or *unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers; literary irony thus flatters its readers’ intelligence at the expense of a character (or fictional narrator). A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic irony, in which the audience knows more about a character’s situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character’s expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character’s own statements; in *tragedies, this is called tragic irony. The term cosmic irony is sometimes used to denote a view of people as the dupes of a cruelly mocking Fate, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy. A writer whose works are characterized by an ironic tone may be called an ironist.
Further reading: Claire Colebrook, Irony (2003).
irregular ode See ode.
isometric Unvaried in *metre. The term is applied to *verse forms and *stanzas which employ only one kind of line, so they are consistent in line length and, allowing for accepted local variations, in metrical pattern. *Heroic poetry, *blank verse, and *sonnets are all expected to be isometric, as are poems written in rhyming *couplets, in *terza rima, and in certain stanza forms such as *rhyme royal, *ottava rima, and the *quatrain form known as long measure (see common measure). The opposite kind of poem or stanza in which lines of different lengths are found is called *heterometric. Noun: isometry.
Italian sonnet See sonnet.