Glossary

A lament or satiric attack on social evils, such as Chaucer's "Complaint to his Purse," the opening of the Wakefield Master's "Second Shepherd's Play," or Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint." Not to be confused with a poet's grumbling about weather or writing, such as Ezra Pound's "Ancient Music" or Chaucer's "The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne."

(Italian)

A complicated intellectual metaphor. Petrarchan conceits drew on conventional sensory imagery popularized by the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74). Metaphysical conceits were characterized by esoteric, abstract associations and surprising effects. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits in ways that fused the sensory and the abstract. Examples are John Donne's use of the compass in "The Ecstasy" and of alchemy in "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day."

Verse that emphasizes non-linguistic elements in its meaning, such as typeface that gives a visual image of the topic (eye, optic, or visual = poetry), an arrangement of words or syllables that signals the poem must be said rather than read (ear poetry), and the division of the poem by different speakers, showing that it is intended for performance (action poetry). An examples include George Herbert's "Easter Wings" (eye poetry), Louis Zukofsky's "Julia's Will" (ear poetry), and the whole of W. H. Auden's For the Time Being, but especially his hilariously miserable Herod (action poetry).

Vividly sensational self-revelatory verse, a literary movement led by American poets from Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

Those words, things, or ideas with which a word often keeps company but which it does not actually denote. A word's semantic field consists largely of its lexical associations, that is, its more or less frequent collocations.

Sometimes just a resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial or head rhyme like alliteration, but also refined to mean shared consonants, whether in sequence ("bud" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab").

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, words that carry the content of a sentence; these are also called lexical or open-class words. They contrast with function (or grammatical, or closed-class) words, such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns, which can be found in almost any utterance, no matter what it is about.

A common way of doing something, such as a poetic form, or a common topic like the "carpe diem" or "ubi sunt" themes, or making lists (see Catalogue verse), or a regularly-used figure of speech.

(Latin, "crown")

A sonnet sequence where the last line in one sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet, and the final line in the sequence repeats the first line of the first sonnet. An example is the seven sonnets that open John Donne's holy sonnets.

Verse memory aids for children learning how to count, such as "One, two, buckle my shoe, / Three, four, open the door."

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed" when they form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in 17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, and holding a complete thought.

Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of long, short, and long syllables

see Sonnet.