poetry

Structure

any element that gets repeated, be it in architecture, music, visual arts, or literary composition.

rhythm

the arrangement of stressed syllables within a line of verse.

meter

the regular arrangement of stressed syllables within a line of verse.

Free verse

the dominant contemporary mode in which the poet determines the line by following the inclination of her/his/their own ear. Eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart is often credited with initiating free verse in his poem to his cat Geoffry, “Jubilate Agno.” Whitman relied on it exclusively. The modernist Ezra Pound championed the free verse line.

Syllabic verse

the line is determined by counting syllables. It’s the basis of Japanese and Romantic language prosody.

Accentual

the line is determined by counting stresses. Nursery rhymes, Old English verse, and much modern poetry use this method.

Accentual-syllabic

the line is determined by counting both stresses and syllables. Historically, it’s the most prevalent mode in English poetry.

Prose poem

a poem composed in one or more paragraphs of prose. This form was pioneered by French poets, most notably Baudelaire (its originator) and Rimbaud.

feet

clusters of syllables usually with one heavily stressed syllable and one or more lightly stressed syllables. Makes up accentual-syllabic.

scan

dividing a line into feet with slashes (/) and putting a line (usually a slash) over strongly stressed syllable and a small “u” over unstressed syllables.

Iamb

light stress, heavy stress

Trochee

heavy stress, light stress

Anapest

light stress, light stress, heavy stress

Dactyl

heavy stress, light stress, light stress

Spondee

heavy stress, heavy stress

Pyrrhic

light stress, light stress.

monometer

line of one foot. dimeter; three feet is trimeter; four feet is tetrameter; five feet is pentameter; six feet is hexameter; seven feet is heptameter.

Iambic pentameter

the classic line in much English poetry. It’s Marlowe and Shakespeare’s line in their plays, Milton’s line in Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth’s line in The Prelude. Part of its versatility lies in the fact that the caesura or breath pause falls usually after the second or third foot, dividing the line into unequal parts. Therefore, it avoids being singsong.

permissible variations in iambic verse:

1) The iamb is replaced by a trochee. This variation is quite common in the first foot of a line.

2) The iamb is replaced by an anapest or by a dactyl.

3) There may be an extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line.

4) The initial lightly stressed syllable of the first iamb may be dropped so that the line begins with a strong stress. This variation is sometimes called “a beheaded iamb.”

5) Two iambs may be replaced by a pyrrhic foot followed by a spondee.

counterpoint

variation in meter; a way of emphasizing a particular phrase by making the meter run counter to itself.

Voice stress

is a pattern of stress that would be used in common speech.

Metrical stress

a pattern of stress that occurs in accentual-syllabic poetry, in which the meter makes us stress syllables that would usually be lightly stressed in an unmetrical context.

The Classical concept

conception that form precedes and determines content.

The Romantic Concept

conception that content precedes and determines form.

Stress in English is determined by four markers/indicators:

a) Volume

b) Elongated vowel

c) Pause

d) Change in pitch (up or down)

Caesura

a “breath pause” in the middle of a line, sometimes indicated by a mark of punctuation and sometimes not

Phanopoeia (Ezra Pound term)

poetry of image

Melopoeia (Ezra Pound term)

poetry of sound

Logopoeia (Ezra Pound term)

poetry of connotation

Reasons for form in poetry

a) Pattern helps make sense of the chaos that is our world.

b) Form can make poems “memorable” in that it can 1) elevate content and 2) make the poem easier to memorize.

c) Form sets up an expectation that the verse will fulfill and gives us pleasure in that fulfillment.

d) Form gives a poem its drive, its inertial momentum.

e) Form can enable, or bring out/underscore, content.

Negative capability:

a) In Keats’s words, negative capability is “when a man [any writer] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”

b) An aesthetic principle in which the writer represents the complexities of the world (goodness, evil, beauty, injustice, poverty, greed, envy, malice, etc.) and does not draw any evaluative conclusions but lets the reader reach their own conclusions from the facts/images/narratives that the writer presents.

c) Shakespeare’s plays were, for Keats, the great example of “negative capability.”

Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”

idea is that a poem is a form of communication in which one person writes to

another person instead of using the telephone.

Types of rhyme

End rhyme, internal rhyme, full rhyme, slant rhyme, vowel rhyme, consonantal rhyme,

masculine rhyme, feminine rhyme, polysyllabic rhyme, monosyllabic rhyme

Rhyme scheme

The indication of a pattern of end rhyme using lower-case letters of the alphabet: aa bb

abba, abab, cdcd, cde, etc

The uses of rhyme

a) It can be used for emphasis of one sort or another.

b) It can be used to draw connections between one word or concept and another.

c) A rhyme connects two words that point to a similar concept OR two words/concepts that oppose each other.

d) Rhyme can imply order in a chaotic world, but not always.

e) Rhyme aids in the memorization of a poem, i.e. it is a “mnemonic.”

Rules for effective rhyming:

a) Rhyme different parts of speech

b) Use slant rhyme because it widens exponentially the lexicon of available rhyming words. In general, English (as opposed to Romance languages) is rhyme-poor.

c) Try to rhyme monosyllabic with polysyllabic words and create unusual/fresh rhymes.

Blank verse

poetry that is not rhymed, though usually in iambic pentameter. It is termed “blank” because it is absent, or “blank of,” rhyme.

Sonics

the use of sound in a poem.

Alliteration

the repetition of a sound at the start of words.

Consonance

the repetition of consonants across words.

Assonance

the repetition of vowels across words.

Closure

a term used to indicate the strategy by which a poem achieves a sense of ending. Formally, it often occurs by breaking a pattern established in the body of a poem.

Tricolon

a syntactical grouping that puts clusters of three elements/objects/parallel phrases together. E.g. “government for the people, by the people, and of the people”

Mimesis

the aesthetic theory that art/writing imitates or “holds up a mirror” to life and should give us a realistic view of the world. This view of art was dramatically challenged by Modernism (see below).

Modernism

posits that art/writing creates its own universe and is not intended to imitate life, e.g. “abstract expressionism” presents no realistic images but arranges, colors, shapes, pattern, and textures on canvas or in sculpture to generate a response from the viewer.

Persona poem

A poem in which the author adopts a voice that is not her/his/their own

In propria persona

A Latin phrase that indicates that a writer is speaking “in her/his/their own voice”

Dramatic monologue

a poem that is a direct address spoken aloud to someone whose presence is implied by certain moments in the poem, even though the other person may not be named explicitly. An example is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” which is a persona poem in the voice of a duke who addresses an envoy to a count, whose daughter the speaker would like to marry.

Apostrophe

direct address of a “you” in a poem

Parataxis

syntax that drops coordinating conjunctions. An example of this figure of speech is the Latin phrase attributed to Julius Caesar “Veni, Vidi, Vinci.” The translation is “I came, I saw, I conquered.” These three short sentences are separated solely by commas, no conjunctions.

Line break

the word we use to indicate the place where a line of verse ends.

End-stopped lines

in which the thought or phrase is concluded in the line, and one does not necessarily have to turn to the next line to comprehend what’s being said. Often, but not always, end-stopped lines will end with a mark of punctuation.

Enjambed lines

in which one has to proceed to the next line to understand what’s being said. We speak of “enjambments.”

Isometric lines

lines of the same length

Sonnet

A 14-line poem. It can be in meter (often iambic pentameter) and rhyme or in free verse. The sonnet was invented by Petrarch, an Italian poet in the 14th century, who used it to write love poems. It was imported into English by the poet Surrey, who translated Petrarch in the mid-sixteenth century.

organized into an 8-line unit, called an “octave,” followed by a 6-line unit, called a sestet. There is usually some “turn” or volta in the sonnet at the start of the sestet.

Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet

Octave rhymed abbaabba; sestet has more variation in rhyme scheme but is sometimes

cdecde.

Shakespearean sonnet

named after the famous playwright who has produced probably

the most famous sonnet sequence in English):

Three quatrains rhymed abab, followed by a couplet (ff); has a strong volta in the couplet but often a secondary volta in the third quatrain.

Connotation

an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.

Denotation

the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.

Epigraph

Short, explanatory material (often italicized) between the title and the body of the poem

Sestina

Six stanzas of six lines with six repeated end words. Please remember the “spiraling pattern” that we use to generate those six end words from stanza to stanza. Sestina ends with an envoi (or “goodbye”) of three lines, which incorporates the six end words, usually two to a line.

It is the form of obsession, par excellence.

Simile

a comparison between unlike things, using “like” or “as”

Metaphor

a comparison between unlike things, not using “like” or “as.” Metaphor asserts identity. One thing is another thing. There are two parts to metaphor. The “vehicle” is the figurative language. The “tenor” is the thing described. For instance, in the sentence “The sky’s door opens at dawn,” the ‘door’ language is the “vehicle.” The “tenor” of the metaphor is sunrise.

Personification

the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

Chiasmus

any pattern that reverses two elements of syntax, image, phrasing, sound, etc. so that AB becomes BA.

Paradox

a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

Some major points from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

a) Eliot sees poetry as having an impersonal quality in which the poet acts as a “chemical catalyst” who takes a situation/emotion and recasts it into words/images/sound to evoke that original situation and turns it into another “chemical substance,” which is the poem.

b) Eliot stresses the necessity of reading and becoming familiar with past writers (tradition) if one is to grow as a poet.

c) Eliot asserts that present literary practice can alter the way we regard the writing of the past (paradoxically that the present can alter the past). Contemporary writing will often build on something from the past and make that past style more important in the arc of the literary tradition. For example, Eliot loved John Donne’s “metaphysical poetry” and borrowed its spirit and scientific tropes with the effect that Donne, who had once been categorized as a minor poet, is now viewed as a major writer.

d) The “critic” has an important role, and the act of interpretation (of criticism) is a natural part of the way we read.

Some characteristics of “modernism”

a) Poet/writer creates own world, does not attempt to be “realistic”

b) Fragment is emphasized over connected whole

c) Collage predominates

d) Obscurity can happen but is not necessarily regarded as a fault

e) Writer asks more of the reader

f) Writer welcomes the multiplicity of meanings that words can convey and stresses the plurality of possible interpretations

Imagism

poems that use image as their primary driving force

Objectivism

poems that focus on, and describe, objects as a way of viewing the world and conveying meaning. W.C. Williams says famously, “No ideas but in things.”

Villanelle

know all the intricate structures of this form based on two repetons

Villanelle, through its repetitions of two lines over and over, can sometimes have a “didactic” quality as if the poet is trying to teach the self, or us, something. That thing is often a difficult lesson and has to be repeated. Contrariwise, the villanelle is often songlike. Often, the villanelle is used to shape and contain very emotionally charged material. It is an “emphatic form.”

Repeton

a repeated line

Sounds

Dante says that there are two kinds of sounds: “buttered” and “shaggy”

Epiphanic

a word used to describe a piece of writing or poetry that ends with some revelation of character or experience (called an “epiphany” after the gift of the Wisemen in the bible)

Duende

a term used by the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca to denote a “dark” force that can animate art, writing, and performance and gives it a particular intensity. Lorca variously says that duende is “music of the dark notes,” that it arises from the ground and enters us through the soles of our feet, and that it is a “dancing with death.” Death is often present, explicitly or implicitly, in the poetry of duende. This presence of death paradoxically makes life more vibrant for the poet.

Ballad Form (sometimes called “Old Fourteeners” because it has 14 stresses to the quatrain)

a) Quatrains rhymed abcb (usually) with a stress pattern of 4/3/4/3 (usually)

b) Communal form with oral roots

c) Tells a story and often is sensational, melodramatic

d) Can be used for social critique

e) Emily Dickinson uses this form almost exclusively and subverts/expands it

f) Most hymns in Christian churches use ballad form

Pantoum

A Malaysian verse form adapted by French poets and occasionally imitated in English. It comprises a series of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The second and fourth lines of the final stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza.

Ghazal

Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poet’s.

Radif

repeated word or phrase in the ghazal

Qafia or Qafiya

rhyme before the radif

Ars poetica

a poem that focuses on the writing of poetry itself and what that act means to the poet

Prose poem factors:

a) Can be used to address common/more mundane subject matter and widens the scope of much traditional poetry

b) Can also capture dreamlike moments/experience effectively and be used to convey a surreal vision

c) May or may not employ an overt narrative

d) Depends on varying the sentence rhythm and syntax as its dynamic, driving force

Free verse

poetry in which the length of the line is determined by the poet’s ear and has no set pattern

Gravitas

Latin for “weight.” We say that a line or a poem has gravitas, meaning that it is resonant and/or emotionally impactful.

Denise Levertov

idea that the line break in free verse acts as an extra set of “punctuation” in that it encodes pauses and emphases not found in prose. Line breaks are a kind of “musical score.” She also says that free verse seems to be able to capture the way we think more effectively than metered verse. Free verse has a more open approach to “closure” (how poems find their endings). Levertov makes the distinction between “private” (obscure information in a poem) and “personal” (autobiographical material, but presented in a way that the reader can understand). The former is to be avoided, she says; the latter is acceptable.

Anaphora

repetition of word or phrase at start of line or sentence as a structural device in free verse

Epiphora

repetition of word or phrase at the end of line or sentence as a structural device in free verse

Elegy

a lament for the dead that has two basic movements, the expression of grief for the lost person and some offering of consolation to the grieving poet. Sometimes, the “consolation” will be markedly absent. Natural images, such as flowers, trees or other plants, will often be present in an elegy as an element of consolation. It’s as if the poet says to us, Look at the natural world and the seasons that will bring back new life with the spring.

Poetic ambiguity

the use of a phrase that can be interpreted with several different (often radically different) meanings to charge a poem with a kind of simultaneous explosion of meaning/connotation.

Acrostic

a form of verse in which the first letters of each line (read downwards or upwards) spells out a simple message or statement that the poet would like to convey. Here’s a quick example by yours truly:

Litotes

Greek for understatement

Hyperbole

Greek for overstatement

Nonce form

a form that a poet invents and that is not widely used by other poets.

Pastoral poetry

is verse that contains images of the natural world.

Pathetic fallacy

the attributing of human emotions to objects or events in the natural world. For instance, in the phrase “a raging storm,” human anger is projected onto wind and rain.

Locus amoenus

a Latin phrase meaning “a walled place” and indicating the natural world as a place of shelter, apart from the ills of the human world. For instance, in the book of Genesis in the bible, the Garden of Eden is a good example of a locus amoenus.

Transcendentalism

the literary movement (part of American romanticism) in which the poet/writer looks to nature as a means of getting in touch with a deeper/better self.

Ode

a song of praise. There are two types of odes in classical (Greek and Latin) poetry. The Pindaric Ode consists of stanzas in which the lines are of unequal length. Usually, the Pindaric Ode has three stanzas, each of which addresses a different aspect of the thing praised: the strophe, the anti-strophe, and the epode. Often, the strophe and anti-strophe would express some “opposition” or binary in content, that the epode would resolve/synthesize. The Horatian Ode is written in quatrains with isometric lines (lines of equal length). The ode started as a vehicle to praise patrons, kings, queens, rulers, but the contemporary ode (best exemplified in the poetry of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda) praises common objects/occurrences around us.

Carpe Diem

a Latin phrase meaning “Seize the Day.” It refers to a type of poetry, popular from the Elizabethan era onwards, in which the poet urges the reader to enjoy the pleasures of the present life before one grows old and dies.