obiter dicta The Latin phrase (‘things said in passing’) sometimes used to refer to the table-talk or incidental remarks made by a writer or other person, of the kind recalled in biographies.
objective correlative An external equivalent for an internal state of mind; thus any object, scene, event, or situation that may be said to stand for or evoke a given mood or emotion, as opposed to a direct subjective expression of it. The phrase was given its vogue in modern criticism by T. S. Eliot in the rather tangled argument of his essay ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ (1919), in which he asserts that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an ‘artistic failure’ because Hamlet’s emotion does not match the ‘facts’ of the play’s action. The term is symptomatic of Eliot’s preference—similar to that of *Imagism—for precise and definite poetic images evoking particular emotions, rather than the effusion of vague yearnings which Eliot and Ezra Pound criticized as a fault of 19th-century poetry.
Objectivism The doctrine of a small group of American poets in the 1930s led by William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, and including among its followers George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Charles Reznikoff. It derived most of its principles from those of *Imagism, such as precise evocation rather than subjective effusion, and it expressed admiration for the work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and other *modernist forerunners. An Objectivist movement was announced in 1931 with a special Objectivist issue of the Chicago magazine Poetry guest-edited by Zukofsky, in which he declared sincerity and ‘objectification’ to be the essential requirements of a poem. There followed in 1932 An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology edited again by Zukofsky, and in 1933 the foundation by Oppen of the Objectivist Press in New York City, which published Williams’s Collected Poems 1921–31 (1933) and Oppen’s own volume, Discrete Series (1934). The intended movement then petered out as Oppen took up Communist activism and abandoned poetry for the next 28 years. Although Williams and Zukofsky continued to exert an influence by example upon later poets, the Objectivist label quickly fell into disuse.
Further reading: Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007).
occasional verse Poetry written for or prompted by a special occasion, e.g. a wedding, funeral, anniversary, birth, military or sporting victory, or scientific achievement. Poetic forms especially associated with occasional verse are the *epithalamion, the *elegy, and the *ode. Occasional verse may be serious, like Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650) and Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’ (1871), or light, like William Cowper’s ‘On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’ (1789). Significant modern examples of occasional verse in English are W. B. Yeats’s ‘Easter, 1916’, and W. H. Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘August 1968’, and ‘Moon Landing’.
occupatio A rhetorical device (also known under the Greek name paralipsis) by which a speaker emphasizes something by pretending to pass over it: ‘I will not mention the time when…’ The device was favoured by Chaucer, who uses it frequently in his Canterbury Tales.
octameter [ok-tamm-ĕt-er] A metrical verse line of eight feet (see foot), or in most English verse a line of eight stresses. In English, octametric lines are rare on account of their unwieldy length, the best-known example of their use being in Edgar A. Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ (1845).
octave (octet) A group of eight verse lines forming the first part of a *sonnet (in its Italian or Petrarchan form); or a *stanza of eight lines. In the first and most frequently used sense, an octave usually rhymes abbaabba. In the second sense, it may also be called an octastich. The Spanish stanza form known as octavas reales is the equivalent of *ottava rima. See also huitain, ottava rima, triolet.
octavo [ok-tay-voh] A book size resulting from folding a printer’s sheet of paper three times to make eight leaves (i.e. sixteen pages): thus a size smaller than *quarto but bigger than *duodecimo.
octosyllabic [ok-toh-sĭ-lab-ik] Having eight syllables to the line. Octosyllabic verse in English is usually written in the form of iambic or trochaic *tetrameters. It appears in various forms including the *In Memoriam stanza, but is most commonly found in *couplets, both in light *Hudibrastic verse and in more serious works such as Wordsworth’s poem beginning
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight
In medieval French poetry, octosyllabic couplets were used in *lais, *fabliaux, and other kinds of poem.
ode An elaborately formal *lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity, always serious and elevated in tone. There are two different classical models: in Greek, the *epinicion or choral ode of Pindar devoted to public praise of athletes (5th century bce), and Horace’s more privately reflective odes in Latin (c.23–13bce). Pindar composed his odes for performance by a *chorus, using lines of varying length in a complex three-part structure of *strophe, *antistrophe, and *epode corresponding to the chorus’s dancing movements (see pindaric), whereas Horace wrote literary odes in regular *stanzas. Close English imitations of Pindar, such as Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754), are rare, but a looser irregular ode with varying lengths of strophes was introduced by Abraham Cowley’s ‘Pindarique Odes’ (1656) and followed by John Dryden, William Collins, William Wordsworth (in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807)), and S. T. Coleridge, among others; this irregular form of ode is sometimes called the Cowleyan ode. Odes in which the same form of stanza is repeated regularly (see homostrophic) are called Horatian odes: in English, these include the celebrated odes of John Keats, notably ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (both 1820). Adjective: odic.
Further reading: Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (1960).
OED The abbreviation widely used for the Oxford English Dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language, which has been published under that title since 1933 (it was formerly the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, abbreviated as NED and appearing in instalments from 1884). Apart from its sheer size, defining 414,825 words in twelve large volumes in its first full edition (1928), the significance of this work and of widespread references to it lies in its provision of 1.8 million quotations illustrating the first recorded written use of each word (subject, in many cases, to further discoveries) and later changes of usage or meaning. References are sometimes found to its Supplements, the first of these being issued in 1933, followed by a major four-volume replacement (1972–86); but these were subsequently incorporated into the enormous second edition of the OED published in twenty volumes in 1989 (defining 615,100 words with over 2.4 million quotations) and then in CD-ROM and online editions. This is commonly abbreviated as OED2. A third edition is in progress.
Further reading: Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003).
oeuvre [ervr] The French word for a work, often used to refer instead to the total body of works produced by a given writer. A chef d’oeuvre is a given writer’s principal work or masterpiece. See also canon, corpus.
off-Broadway A New York theatrical term applied since the 1950s to dramatic productions staged in cheaper venues (mostly found in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side) away from the main commercial theatres located on Broadway. An off-Broadway production was usually associated with the literary or at least relatively uncommercial kind of drama, but when it enjoyed increasing commercial success, the more experimental ‘fringe’ drama of the 1960s distanced itself from that taint by advertising itself as off-off-Broadway theatre.
Old Comedy The kind of *comedy produced in Athens during the 5th century bce, before the emergence of the *New Comedy. Old Comedy is distinguished by its festive, farcical mood, by its *lampooning of living persons in topical *satire, and by its prominent use of a *chorus in grotesque masks and costumes. Its leading exponent, and the only one whose plays have survived, was Aristophanes, author of The Clouds (423 bce) and The Frogs (405 bce).
Old English The early form of the English language spoken and written between the 5th and the 12th centuries. Popularly known as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a usage repudiated by most historians of the language, it evolved from a range of related Germanic dialects spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settling from northern Europe from the 5th century, further influenced by the arrival in northern and eastern England of Scandinavian settlers in the 9th and 10th centuries. In its written form, found from the late 6th century, it employed a slightly reduced and adapted version of the Roman alphabet. It is the language used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commissioned by King Alfred in 890 and updated until the 12th century, of the great prose writer Aelfric (late 10th century), and of the epic poem Beowulf, which is thought to have been composed in the 8th century. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066 and its establishment of a French-speaking ruling order, the language evolved into a new form that is now called *Middle English.
Further reading: Peter S. Baker, An Introduction to Old English, 3rd edn (2012).
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord
• Woruldhord: Old English and Anglo-Saxon resource at University of Oxford.
omniscient narrator [om-nish-ĕnt] An ‘all-knowing’ kind of *narrator very commonly found in works of fiction written as *third-person narratives. The omniscient narrator has a full knowledge of the story’s events and of the motives and unspoken thoughts of the various characters. He or she will also be capable of describing events happening simultaneously in different places—a capacity not normally available to the limited *point of view of *first-person narratives. See also intrusive narrator.
Onegin stanza A *stanza comprising 14 lines of iambic *tetrameter, employing a complex rhyme-scheme adapted from that of the English *sonnet, incorporating three different forms of *quatrain followed by a couplet, in the sequence ababccddeffegg, with the a, c, and e rhymes always feminine and the others masculine. The stanza was invented by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and exhibited at length in his verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1833). The most notable revival of the stanza in English is in Vikram Seth’s verse-novel The Golden Gate (1986).
onomatopoeia [on-ŏ-mat-ŏ-pee-ă] The use of words that seem to imitate the sounds they refer to (whack, fizz, crackle, hiss); or any combination of words in which the sound gives the impression of echoing the sense. This *figure of speech is often found in poetry, sometimes in prose. It relies more on conventional associations between verbal and non-verbal sounds than on the direct duplication of one by the other. Adjective: onomatopoeic.
op. cit. Abbreviated form of opere citato (Latin, ‘in the work cited’), a formula employed in scholarly footnotes and endnotes when referring to a quotation from a work of which the title has already been specified, this reference usually being preceded by the name of the work’s author. See also ibid., loc. cit.
open form A term popularized by the American poet Charles Olson, a leader of the *Black Mountain school of modern poetry, to indicate his preferred principle of verse composition, which should not follow regular structures of line and stanza but should reflect the energies and spontaneous processes of the poet’s encounter with the subject, and in particular the natural intervals of breathing. The result in terms of the poem’s layout and typography is commonly a spatial dispersal of lines and *strophes, even of words and syllables, across the page. His major statement of these principles, the essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) summarized Olson’s own practice, that of his poetic mentors Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and that of his co-thinker Robert Creeley, as ‘Projectivism’, although it is the term ‘open form’ that has been more widely adopted.
opuscule Any composition on a small scale, such as a *short story, an *epigram, *haiku, or one-act play.
oral tradition The passing on from one generation (and/or locality) to another of songs, chants, proverbs, and other verbal compositions within and between non-literate cultures; or the accumulated stock of works thus transmitted by word of mouth. *Ballads, *folktales, and other works emerging from an oral tradition will often be found in several different versions, because each performance is a fresh improvisation based around a ‘core’ of narrative incidents and *formulaic phrases. The state of dependence on the spoken word in oral cultures is known as orality.
oratory [o-ră-tri] The art of public speaking; or the exercise of this art in orations—formal speeches for public occasions. A literary style resembling public speech and its formal devices may be called oratorical. See also rhetoric.
orature A *portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o to denote imaginative works of the *oral tradition usually referred to as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.
organic form A concept that likens literary works to living organisms forming themselves by a process of ‘natural’ growth. The doctrine of organic form, promoted in the early 19th century by S. T. Coleridge and subsequently favoured by American *New Criticism, argues that in an artistic work the whole is more than the mere sum of its component parts, and that *form and *content fuse indivisibly in an ‘organic unity’. It rejects as ‘mechanical’ the *neoclassical concept of conformity to rules, along with the related assumption that form or style is an ‘ornament’ to a pre-existing content. It tends to be hostile to conceptions of *genre and *convention, as it is to the practice of *paraphrase. Carried to a dogmatic conclusion, its emphasis on unity condemns any literary analysis as a destructive abstraction; this attitude is sometimes referred to as organicism.
Ossianism The craze for Celtic *folklore and *myth that was prompted by the appearance of two *epic poems, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), supposedly composed by Ossian (i.e. Oisin, the legendary 3rd-century Gaelic warrior and *bard, son of Finn or Fingal) and ‘translated’ by James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolteacher. The supposed discovery of an ancient northern epic had a great imaginative impact in Europe after the translation of ‘Ossian’ into German (1768–9) and French (1777): Goethe, Herder, and Napoleon Bonaparte were among the leading Ossianic enthusiasts. Even after 1805, when investigators found the epics to be forgeries concocted around some genuine Gaelic folklore, Macpherson’s vision of the misty and melancholy Celtic world lived on in the Romantic imagination. See also romanticism, preromanticism.
Further reading: Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage (1988).
ostranenie See defamiliarization.
ottava rima [ot-ahv-ă-ree-mă] A form of verse *stanza consisting of eight lines rhyming abababcc, usually employed for *narrative verse but sometimes used in *lyric poems. In its original Italian form (‘eighth rhyme’), pioneered by Boccaccio in the 14th century and perfected by Ariosto in the 16th, it used *hendecasyllables; but the English version uses iambic *pentameters. It was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century, and later used by Byron in Don Juan (1819–24) as well as by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats.
Oulipian Belonging to or characteristic of the French experimental writers’ group calling itself OULIPO or OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) in the 1960s and thereafter. The group’s founders in 1960 included the lapsed *surrealist writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais, and they were joined by Jacques Roubaud (from 1966), Georges Perec (from 1967), and others, including some foreign members, notably the Italian author Italo Calvino (from 1973) and the American Harry Mathews, both then resident in Paris. The group’s central purpose was to explore the literary possibilities of artificial constraints and mathematical combinations, for instance in the use of *lipograms such as Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969), or in Queneau’s extraordinary sonnet sequence Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961), in which the lines could be recombined in an enormous number of possible permutations. Among the other major works of Oulipian experiment is Perec’s novel Vie mode d’emploi (1978; translated as Life: A User’s Manual). The group’s most important collective work was La littérature potentielle (1973). For an introductory anthology in English, consult Warren F. Motte (ed. and trans.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (1986).
• OULIPO: official site of the group, in French.
oxymoron [oksi-mor-on] (plural -mora) A *figure of speech that combines two usually contradictory terms in a compressed *paradox, as in the word bittersweet or the phrase living death. Oxymoronic phrases, like Milton’s ‘darkness visible’, were especially cultivated in 16th- and 17th-century poetry. Shakespeare has his Romeo utter several in one speech:
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create;
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!