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92 Cards in this Set
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- Back
- 3rd side (hint)
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Epic
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a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several "books" on a great and serious subject
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Spenser's "The Faerie Queene", Milton's "Paradise Lost"
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Dramatic
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poetry, monologue, or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet
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Tennyson's Ulysses; Browning's My Last Duchess
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Lyric
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originally, a song preformed in ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a lyre; now used to denote a fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker
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most poems in the Norton Anthology
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Accentual meter
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the oldest form of meter; a line divided in two by a heavy caesura, each half dominated by the two strongly stressed syllables; often alliterative
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Caedmon's hymn; Piers Plowman; Seamus Heaney's trans. of Beowulf
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alliteration
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the repetition of speech sounds in a sequence of nearby words; important in native Saxon meter
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Langland's Piers Plowman
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accentual-syllabic meter
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a metrical structure that emerged in the fourteenth century; its basic unit is the foot
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basically every poem since 14th cent.
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foot
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combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables
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basically every poem since 14th cent.
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iambic
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an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable; noun: iamb
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Shakespeare; dominant rhythm between the Renaissance and the advent of free verse in the last century
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trochaic
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a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable; noun: trochee
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the word "London"
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anapestic
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two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable; noun: anapest
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the word "Tennessee"
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dactylic
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a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables; noun: dactyl
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"Leningrad"
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rising meter
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constituted by iambs and anapests, which have strong stress on the last syllable
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"It was the BEST of TIMES, it was the WORST of TIMES."
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falling meter
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constituted by trochees and dactyles, which have strong stress on the first syllable
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"WOman much MISSED, how you CALL to me, CALL to me..."-The Voice, Thomas Hardy
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spondaic
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two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses; noun: spondee
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"Of PEBbles which the WAVES DRAW BACK, and FLING"-Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold; "draw back" is the spondee
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pyrrhic
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two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables; noun: pyrrhic
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monometer
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poetic lines (not necessarily a whole poem) constituted by one foot only
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"Thus I
Pass by And die, As one, Unknown, And gone:" -Robert Herrick |
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dimeter
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poetic lines constituted by two feet
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"Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volleyed and thundered" -Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" |
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trimeter
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poetic lines constituted by three feet
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Shelley's "To a Skylark"
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tetrameter
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poetic lines constituted by four feet
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Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
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pentameter
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poetic lines constituted by five feet
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Shakespeare's sonnets, Chaucer's prologue
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hexameter
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poetic lines constituted by six feet
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"Day by day thy shadow shines in heaven beholden." -trochaic hexameter in Swinburne's "The Last Oracle"
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alexandrine
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a line written in iambic hexameter; probably named after 12th century French poem, the Roman d'Alexandre; often used to terminate a stanza of shorter lines
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"In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too." -Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain"
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heptameter
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poetic lines constituted by seven feet
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fourteneer
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a line of iambic heptameter; named so because of the total number of syllables
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"I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o'beer"-Rudyard Kipling's "Tommy"
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octameter
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poetic line constituted by eight feet
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base meter
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overall metrical structure of a poem; if followed invariably creates the music of a metronome
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end-stopped line
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a line that ends in a caesura
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"To the land vaguely realizing westward,/But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,/Such as she was such as she would become."--Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright"
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enjambment
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a line that grammatically continues onto the next line; also, a run-on line
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"She was our land more than a hundred years/Before we were her people. She was ours/In Massachussets, in Virginia..."
-Frost's "The Gift Outright" |
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sprung rhythm
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a base meter that attempts to convey strength through stressed syllables at the beginning of every foot; pioneered by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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syllabic meter
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a base meter that measures only the number of syllables in a line, without regard to stress; a line of this meter is called a "syllabic"
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"I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle./Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in/it after all, a place for the genuine."-Marianne Moore's "Poetry"
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haiku
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a type of syllabic meter originating in Japan that consists of three lines of seventeen syllables (divided 5, 7, 5)
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"Good Friday. At three,/a swarm of bees sets its heart/on an apple tree."-Paul Muldoon's "Hopewell Haiku"
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quantitative meter
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a metrical structure based on the syllable's "quantity," or length and duration; mostly in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin poetry
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end rhyme
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rhymes appearing at the end of a line
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"It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed..."-Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"
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internal rhyme
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rhyme occurring within a line
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"And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." -Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"
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assonance
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the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds
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"Crushed. Why do men then now nOt reck his rOd?"-Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"
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onomatopoeia
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a combination of words whose sound resembles the sound it denotes; also called "echoism"
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"ooze of oil"--Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"
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masculine rhyme
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rhyme that consists of a single stressed syllable
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foil/oil; rod/trod/shod; etc.
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feminine rhyme
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rhyme that consists of words in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable
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chiming/rhyming; crying/lying; etc.
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perfect rhyme
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rhyme in which the correspondence of rhyming sounds is exact; also called "full" or "true" rhyme
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foil/oil; rod/trod/shod; chiming/rhyming
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imperfect rhyme
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a general term for a number of non-perfect rhymes, where the correspondence of rhyming sounds is not exact
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vowel rhyme; off-rhyme; pararhyme; monorhyme, etc
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off-rhyme
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a rhyme in which the vowel sound and/or the concluding consonants differ from what is expected of a perfect rhyme; also called half, near, or slant rhyme
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gone/alone; room/storm; firm/room; be/fly
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vowel rhyme
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rhyme where words only have a vowel sound in common
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boughs/towns; green/leaves; starry/barley; clime/eyes/light, all from Thomas' "Fern Hill"
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pararhyme
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rhyme in which stressed vowel sounds differ but are flanked by identical or similar consonants; Wilfred Owen was the first to employ this regularly
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loads/lids/lads, from Owens' "Miners"
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monorhyme
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a poem of no predetermined meter, line length, or number of syllables, the sole requirement being its one rhyme
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"Lifting her arms to soap her hair/Her pretty breasts respond--and there/The movement of that buoyant pair/Is like a spell to make me swear/Twenty odd years have turned to air"-Dick Davis' "Monorhyme for the Shower"
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blank verse
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a poem consisting of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter; imitates most closely natural human speech
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standard meter for Elizabethan poetic drama, including Shakespeare
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dramatic monologues
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a poem, often in blank verse, in which a single speaker (who is not the poet) addresses a dramatically defined listener in a specific situation; often divided into verse paragraphs
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Browning's "My Last Duchess"; Tennyson's "Ulysses"
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couplet
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two lines of verse, usually coupled by rhyme; the principal unit of English poetry since rhyme entered the language
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Chaucer's "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales
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closed couplets
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couplets that are also self-contained syntactic units
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"Seven years thou'wert lent to me, and I thee pay,/Exacted by thy fate, on the just day."-Ben Jonson's "On My First Son"
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heroic couplets
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couplets in iambic pentameter that are self-contained syntactically and contain end rhymes; used in epic poems or plays
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Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"; Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe"
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tercet
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a stanza of three lines traditionally linked with a single rhyme
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"Whenas in silks my Julia goes,/Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows/That liquefaction of her clothes."-Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes"
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terza rima
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a variant of the tercet, in which the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the next; most associated with Dante
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"O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,/Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,/
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,/Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,/Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed"-Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" |
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quatrain
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a stanza of four lines, rhymed or unrhymed; the most common of all English stanzaic forms
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ballad stanza
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a stanza of four lines alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, rhyming abcb; most common form of quatrain
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"The Wedding Guest he beat his breast,/Yet he cannot choose but hear;/And thus spake on that ancient man,/The bright-eyed Mariner." --Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
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common meter
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a ballad stanza when applied to hymns
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long meter
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a variant of the ballad stanza, in which all lines are tetrameter
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short meter
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a variant of the ballad stanza in which line 1 is shortened to trimeter, to be like lines 2 and 4
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heroic quatrain
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a four-line stanza of iambic pentameter, rhyming abab
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"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,/The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,/The plowman homeward plots his weary way,/And leaves the world to darkness and to me."-Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
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rhyme royal
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a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc
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"A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,/Loitered about that vacancy, a bird/Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:/That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,/Were axioms to him, who'd never heard/Of any world where promises were kept,/Or one could weep because another wept." -Auden's "The Shield of Achilles"
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ottava rima
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an eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc; an Italian form introduced to English by Sir Thomas Wyatt
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"His mother was a learned lady, famed/For every branch of every science known--/In every Christian language ever named,/With virtues equaled by her wit alone:/She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,/And even the good with inward envy groan,/Finding themselves so very much exceeded,/In their own way, by all the things that she did." -Lord Byron's "Don Juan"
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Spenserian stanza
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a nine-line stanza with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last an iambic hexameter (an alexandrine), rhyming ababbcbcc
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"His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;/Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,/And back returneth, meager, barefoot, wan,/Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:/The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze,/Imprisoned in black, purgatorial rails:/Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,/He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails/To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails." -Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes"
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sonnet
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a poem of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter linked by an intricate rhyme scheme; used by almost every notable poet in the English language
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Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt"
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octave
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an eight-line unit
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sestet
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a six-line unit
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Italian sonnet
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a sonnet divided into an octave and a sestet, with a rhyme scheme abbaabba cdecde; sometimes called the Petrarchan sonnet
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Shelley's "Ozymandias"
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English sonnet
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a sonnet divided into three quatrains, with a turn at the end of line 12 and a concluding couplet often of a summary or epigrammatic character; rhyme scheme ababcdcdefef gg; also called the Shakespearean sonnet
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Shakespeare's sonnets
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Spenserian sonnet
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a sonnet divided into three quatrains and a couplet; includes two couplet links, one between each quatrain; rhyme scheme ababbcbccdcdee
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turn
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an abrupt change in the direction of argument or narrative; heavily featured toward the end of English sonnets
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Shakespeare's sonnets
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curtal sonnet
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a curtailed or shortened sonnt
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villanelle
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a poem consisting of five tercets rhyming aba followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa, with the first line of the initial tercet recurring as the last line of the second and fourth tercets and the third line of initial tercet recurring as the last line of the third and fifth tercets, these two refrains being again repeated as the last two lines of the poem; a French verse form derived from an Italian folk song
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Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"; Bishop's "One Art"
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sestina
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a poem composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoy, or concluding stanza, that incorporates lines or words used before; the words (not rhymes) end each line as follows:
1: A B C D E F 2: F A E B D C 3: C F D A B E 4: E C B F A D 5: D E A C F B 6: B D F E C A envoy: E C A or A C E |
Bishop's "Sestina"
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canzone
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a verse form often consisting of five twelve-line stanzas and a five-line envoy
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Agha Shahid Ali's "Lenox Hill"
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pantoum
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a verse form consisting of any number of quatrains, lines 2 and 4 of which are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next quatrain; rhyme scheme of abab/bcbc and so on
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Donald Justice's "Pantoum of the Great Depression"
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limerick
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a humorous five-line stanza; traditionally, the first and fifth lines ended with the same word
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There once was a man from Nantucket/Who kept all his cash in a bucket;/But his daughter named Nan/Ran away with a man,/And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
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clerihew
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a short comic or nonsensical poem about a famous person, consisting of two rhymed couplets with lines of unequal length; invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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"John Milton/Never stayed in a Hilton/Hotel,/Which is just as well." -selection from W.H. Auden's "Academic Graffiti"
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Skeltonic verse
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a composite verse form with short lines of anything from three to seven syllables containing two or three (or more) stresses, exploiting a single rhyme until inspiration and language run out; named after John Skelton
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"What can it avail/To drive forth a snail,/Or to make a sail/Of an herring's tail;/To rhyme or to rail,/To write or to indict,..." -John Skelton's "Colin Clout"
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poulter's measure
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an older composite form consisting in alternating lines of iambic hexameter and iambic heptameter
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Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth I, Sidney; since lost its popularity
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elegy
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a formal lament for a deceased person
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Pindaric ode
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a long lyrical poem of elevated style and elaborate stanzaic structure with a three-part structure
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rarely attempted in English
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irregular Pindaric ode
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a long lyrical and celebratory poem with sections of varying length, line length, and rhyme scheme
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Dryden's "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day", Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
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Horatian ode
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a long lyrical poem that celebrates someone or something; consists of a repeated stanza form of the poet's choosing
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Marvell's "An Horatian Ode (Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
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prose poetry
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a piece that may have many or all of the features of a lyric, but is arranged on the page as prose
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"The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone." -selections from Hill's "Mercian Hymns"
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concrete poetry
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a loosely defined avant-garde form that relies on typographic structure and generally cannot be "voiced"
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Mahon's "The Window," which is the word "wood" repeated and arranged to form the shape of a window
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sound poetry
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a more abstract form of concrete poetry based on "invented" words; sounds disconnected from meaning
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metaphysical poets
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a loose group of British 17th century British lyric poets who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns; called such later by Samuel Johnson
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John Donne; Andrew Marvell
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Augustan poets
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considered a neoclassical school; a group of English poets who imitated the classical forms in most respects; heavy use of the heroic couplet and epic formats, but often to humorous ends
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Alexander Pope
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Romanticism
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an influential late-18th early-19th century movement that stressed imagination, emotion (esp. the sublime), and freedom from classical forms; emphasized the role of nature as a model and subject matter for art
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Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats
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Pastoralism
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originally a hellenic form, but revived in the 16th and 17th centuries; romanticized rural subjects and the archetype of the shepherd
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Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and later, William Wordsworth
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Symbolism
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believed that art should attempt to capture absolute truths that could only be indirectly accessed; originally a French movement that used metaphor and symbolism; thought to have heralded modernism
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imagists
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a group of early 20th century poets in England and America who favored clear and precise imagery and non-elevated language
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Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
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Beat poets
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a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950's; rejected conservative American culture and embraced alternate forms of sexuality and drug experimentation
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Ginsberg, Kerouac, Boroughs
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Confessionalists
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a group of American poets who were writing predominately in the 1950's and 60's; emphasized autobiographical inspiration for poetry
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Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell
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Cavalier poets
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a 17th century school of English poets who were generally supportive of Charles I; their poetry is light in style and secular
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Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew
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