Poetry Vocabulary

Forms and Types

100

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length.

What is a couplet?

200

A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Ai’s “Killing Floor.”

What is a dramatic monologue?

300

A long narrative poem in which a heroic protagonist engages in an action of great mythic or historical significance. Notable English examples include Beowulf, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (which follows the virtuous exploits of 12 knights in the service of the mythical King Arthur), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which dramatizes Satan’s fall from Heaven and humankind’s subsequent alienation from God in the Garden of Eden.

What is an Epic?

400

A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points.

What is slam poetry?

500

A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally a “little song,” this type of poetry traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding lines. There are many different types.

What is a sonnet?

Rhythm and Meter

100

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in this meter, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and Elinor Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car.”

What is common measure?

200

Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns. Poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” are written predominantly in this verse.

What is blank verse?

300

A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The words “unite” and “provide” are both this way. It is the most common meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech. In Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking” it is the vehicle for the “natural,” colloquial speech pattern:

What is Iamb?

400

The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. These words conventionally share all sounds following the word’s last stressed syllable.

What is rhyme?

500

An audible pattern in verse established by the intervals between stressed syllables.

What is rhythm?

Schools and Periods

100

A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of this aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. This poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality.

What is beat poetry?

200

A group of 17th-century poets whose works are marked by philosophical exploration, colloquial diction, ingenious conceits, irony, and metrically flexible lines. Topics of interest often included love, religion, and morality, which the metaphysical poets considered through unusual comparisons, frequently employing unexpected similes and metaphors in displays of wit. The inclusion of contemporary scientific advancements were also typical. John Donne is the foremost figure, along with George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan.

What are the metaphysical poets?

300

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, this project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors.

What is modernism?

400

A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic.

What is Romanticism?

500

A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation that began in New York’s African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s. The movement was key to developing a new sense of Black identity and aesthetics as writers, visual artists, and musicians articulated new modes of African-American experience and experimented with artistic forms, modernist techniques, and folk culture.

What is the Harlem Renaissance?

Techniques and Figures of Speech

100

An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often its meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are two major examples in English.

What is an allegory?

200

A basic model from which copies are made; a prototype. According to psychologist Carl Jung, these emerge in literature from the “collective unconscious” of the human race. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, explores them as the symbolic patterns that recur within the world of literature itself. In both approaches, these themes include birth, death, sibling rivalry, and the individual versus society. They may also be images or characters, such as the hero, the lover, the wanderer, or the matriarch.

What is an archetype?

300

Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture (“But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first”; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”).

What is chiasmus?

400

From the French coller, meaning to paste or glue. In visual arts, a technique that involves juxtaposing photographs, cuttings, newspapers, or other media on a surface. Widely seen as a hallmark of Modernist art, it was first developed in the early 20th century by Pablo Picasso and other Cubists. Avant-garde groups such as the Dadaists and Surrealists also used the form to create new visual and language-based work. Tristan Tzara famously advocated a “cut-up” method of composition, involving cutting out words from a newspaper and drawing them randomly from a hat to create a poem. This technique in language-based work can now mean any composition that includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition. An early example is T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which includes newspaper clippings, music lyrics, nursery rhymes, and overheard speech.

What is collage?

500

Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, this is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.

What is the volta?

Theory and Criticism

100

A theoretical approach to analyzing the literature produced in countries that were once colonies, especially of European powers such as Britain, France, and Spain. This theory also looks at the broader interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized by dealing with issues such as identity (including gender, race, and class), language, representation, and history.

What is postcolonial theory?

200

A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. This criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it.

What is reader-response theory?

300

A critical approach influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on the unconscious and human behavior. Freud believed that the existence of three competing impulses in the psyche—the ego, id, and superego—and the conflict inherent in child-parent relations structured human responses to the world. Initially, this literary theory consisted of applying psychoanalysis to either the author or the main character of a work, seeking unconscious or latent meaning underneath the manifest language and analyzing the symbols contained in a given work.

What is psychoanalytic theory?

400

An extension of feminism’s critique of male power and ideology, this theory combines elements of other theoretical models such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction to interrogate the role of gender in the writing, interpretation, and dissemination of literary texts. Originally concerned with the politics of women’s authorship and representations of women in literature, it has recently begun to examine ideas of gender and sexuality across a wide range of disciplines including film studies, geography, and even economics.

What is feminist theory?

500

A type of literary criticism based on the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. In its simplest form, this criticism attempts to show the relationship between literature and the social—mainly economic—conditions under which it was produced. Originally, these critics focused on literary representations of workers and working classes. For later Marxists, however, literature became a document of a kind of knowledge and a record of the historical conditions that produced that knowledge. Like cultural criticism, this literary criticism offers critiques of the “canon” and focuses on the ways in which culture and power intersect; for these critics, literature both reproduces existing power relations and offers a space where they can be contested and redefined.

What is Marxism?