Poetry I
A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause.
Cesura
A rhyming sequence that ends on an unstressed syllable; or, the rhyming of one or more unstressed syllables, such as “dicing” and “enticing.”
Feminine ending
The phenomenon of writers who write in an acquired language, or in multiple languages, within the same text.
Translingual
A comparison of two things not in terms of likeness
Metaphor
A metrical foot containing three syllables, the first two of which are unstressed and the latter of which is stressed
Anapest
A line that is metrically incomplete, missing the final syllable or syllables of its expected pattern.
Catalexis
It blends a third-person narrator's voice with a character's internal thoughts and subjective feelings, without using direct quotation marks or tags like "he thought"
Free indirect discourse
A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent a whole (ex. in Dunbar, Ethiopia stands in for Africa)
Synechdoche
A poetic unit of three lines (3-line stanza), rhymed or unrhymed (ex. AAA BBB)
Tercet
A pair of metrical feet that is taken as a single unit.
Dipody
The coming-of-age novel that traces a trajectory from youth to adulthood, innocence to experience
Bildungsroman
An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often the meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature.
Allegory
The poet Edmund Blunden’s term for double consonance, where different vowels appear within identical consonant pairs. (ex. “groined/groaned”)
A poetic form that catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, usually female. French for “coat-of-arms” or “shield.”
Blason
A literary device by which the audience’s or reader’s understanding of events or individuals in a work surpasses that of its characters.
Dramatic Irony
The use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. then), place (e.g. here), or person (e.g. you) relative to the context of the utterance
Deixis
A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines (iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter)
Common meter
A poem about a sexual encounter that is terminating at dawn. It later refers to songs sung at dawn. Post coitum omnes tristes.
Aubade
A literary form that describes how texts reference or draw upon one another, creating layers of meaning
Intertextuality
Two elements placed on either side of each other (“larceny – legacy”) that encode one in the other
Apposition