Poetry terms

Ballad

poem that tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend and often a repeated refrain

Idyll

Short poem peaceful/ idealised countryside or heroic deed in distant past

Ode

Serious and thoughtful praise/ celebration of something

Sonnet

Love poem 14 lines

Dramatic monologue

a poem written in the voice of the fictional character and delivered to a fictional listener

elegy

a poem that laments the death of a person or one that is simply sad and thoughtful

Free verse

Poetry with either rhymed/unrhymed with no set meter

Lyric

Short non narrative poems expressing thoughts and feelings

Narrative

Tells a story

Pastoral

A poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful and idealised way

Cross rhyme

Alternating double rhymes abab

End rhyme

Occurs at the ends of lines

Eye rhyme

Words spelt he same but don’t actually rhyme e.g love and prove

Half rhymes/ conssance

Repition of the same constanants sounds

Internal rhyme

Occurs within lines

Caesura

Natural pause or break in the middle of a line

Enjambment

The continuation of a complete idea into a different line

Lineation

The organisation of the poem into lines

Refrain

A line or group of lines that are repeated normally for emphasis

Turn

A moment of disjunction or renewal for shift or development

Anaphora

Repetition of the same word or groups of words at the beginning of successive clauses

Antithesis

Figure of speech in which words and phrases with opposite meanings are balanced against each other

Archaic words

The use of old words

Allegory

Kind of extended metaphor in which the objects person and actions stand for another meaning

Allusion

When the author makes a brief reference to a historical or low brow literature

Apostrophe

When an absent being is addressed as if they were present or alive

Synedoche

Figure of speech in which a part is used to designate the whole or used designate a part

MODERNISM CONTEXT

• Experimentation and individualism

• Inner self and consciousness

• Sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual

• Stability and quietude of Victorian civilisation were rapidly becoming a thing of the past

• High brow/Low brow

• Conscious desire to overturn traditional models

• Relative, provisional truths

• Reality as a constructed fiction

• Response to war and anti -war

• Against art as a commercial commodity because this was evidence of mechanisation

• Revolt against the past

• Women achieved the vote and were demanding more, birth control became a possibility for the privledged, film and radio made communication faster, workers went on strike for better pay

• More of an incline to question your rulers are fascism was on the rise

• Inadequacies of the ruling elite post ww1 - many had loss their faith because of this

• Great change and social upheaval

• Aimlessness and apathy in modern soc

• Darwin on the origins of species by natural selection - showed humanity had evolved from primitive species and not god - science changing

• Felt change threatened to uproot English literary traditions

• Turn of the century = find liberation - neglect rationalism to affirm life

Make it ——

Make it new - Ezra pound

On or about ——- 1910 ——- ——— ————

On or about december 2010 human nature changed - virgina woolfe

These ——- I have —— against my ——-

These fragments I have shored against my ruins - T S Elliot

History is a —— from which I am trying to ——

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake - James joyce

Ennui

Mass urbanisation/ mass culture/ homeogonisation

Sterility/ inaction/ stasis

Minutiae

Fragmented

Fin de secile

Cultural disorientation, decadence and disillusionment