Glossary

A figure of speech where the poet treats an abstract thing or object as if it were a place. Edmund Spenser's House of Holiness in the first book of the Faerie Queene is an example.

T. S. Eliot used this phrase to describe "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that Particular emotion" that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader ("Hamlet and His Problems", 1919).

A poem written to describe or comment on a particular event or occasion. Examples are Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode" and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

A figure of rhetoric where a writer explains that he or she will not have time or space to say something but then goes on to say that thing anyway, possibly at length.

A verse containing eight feet. Algernon Charles Swinburne's "March: an Ode," Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's," and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" are among the few examples of an English poem written in octometers.

An eight-line stanza or poem, of which there are several types:

• ababbcbc: Chaucer's stanzaic form in The Monk's Tale
• abbacddc, or abbaabba: the brace octave (for example, W. B. Yeats' "Two Songs from a Play")
• abababcc: see Ottava rima
• abaaabab: see Triolet

See also Sonnet.

Having eight syllables.

A poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms.

• The regular Pindaric or Greek ode imitates the passionate manner of Pindar (ca. 552-442 B.C.) and consists of a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode.
• In English the Pindaric odes are termed irregular, Cowleyan, or just English. In 1706 William Congreve wrote that "The Character of these late Pindariques, is a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts, express'd in a like parcel of irregular Stanza's." Examples include William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."
• Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, civil manner. Examples include Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" and William Collins' "Ode to Evening."
• The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final 5-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict metre. For example, Swinburne's "Sapphics" and Ezra Pound's "Apparuit."

(Greek ‘name-making’)

An instance where the sound of a word directly imitates its meaning (for example, "choo-choo," "hiss"), sometimes termed echoism.

An Italian stanza of eight 11-syllable lines, with the rhyme scheme abababcc, introduced by Sir Thomas Wyatt and by W. B. Yeats in "Among School Children" and "Sailing to Byzantium," and adapted by Lord Byron as ten-syllable lines in his Don Juan and Beppo.

See Hyperbole.

An expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as John Milton's description of Hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost.