Glossary

See Sonnet.

Unnecessary verbiage, redundancy as in "It was a dark and lightless night."

A conventional subset of English vocabulary, phrasing, and grammatical usage judged appropriate for verse through its continuous usage by approved poets from the 18th century on and including effects like periphrasis and Latinate terminology. See Aureate language.

Defined by Samuel Johnson in his great dictionary (1755) as "The work of a poet; a metrical composition."

The art and craft of making poems, or the poems themselves.

"A vile petty poet" (Samuel Johnson, 1755).

The freedom to depart from correctness and grammaticality sometimes extended to poets by generous readers who believed that the poets knew better but needed such effects to be true to their subject.

Apollo degreed that poets should receive laurels as a prize. The British crown created the post of Poet Laureate in 1688 and awarded it to poets for life.

A form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject. To read a great poem is to bring out the perfect marriage of its sound and thought in a silent or voiced performance. At least from the time of Aristotle's Poetics, drama was conceived of as a species of poetry.

An area in the south transept of Westminster Abbey that holds monuments (or graves) for such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Michael Drayton, Samuel Butler, Aphra Behn, John Gay, Lord Byron, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden.

Repetition of the same word in different forms, achieved by varying the case, adding affixes, etc.

A figure of speech where successive clauses or phrases are linked by one or more conjunctions.

Lewis Carroll's phrase for a neologism created by combining two existing words. His "Jabberwocky," for example, fuses "lithe" and a term like "slight" or "slimy" to produce "slithy" in the line "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves."

Couplets in which a twelve-syllable line rhymes with a fourteen-syllable line. Chapman uses this form in his translation of Homer. Hymn writers split the couplet into a quatrain (6 6 8 6), as did ballad writers (8 6 8 6). Limericks can be scanned as Poulter's Measure.

Examples include the Bollingen, (British) Arts Council, Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Newdigate Prize (Oxford), Poetry Society of America, Pulitzer Prize, and the Whitbread Literary Award. Prizes are no guarantee of quality.

Continuous, non-end-stopped writing that has other traits of poetry and is, from its context, associated with poems.

A Classical Greek and Latin foot having four short syllables.

Anticipation.

See Metre.

(Greek ‘making a person’)

Lending speech to something inanimate. See also Personification.

See Epithalamion.

An expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time. For example, "When Professor Fudge asked his graduate students to bring a really good lay to the next class, their collective opinion of the scholar went up a notch."

Verse that aims to delight rather than to instruct the reader.

Lines that stand out from a longer poem because of their vivid diction or figures of speech, and perhaps because of the agitated flush that rises in the face of someone trying to recite it.

A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables.