Glossary

Lines whose rhythm arises by the number of its syllables. Examples include Thomas Nashe's "Adieu, farewell earth's bliss," Robert Bridges' "Cheddar Pinks," Marianne Moore's "Poetry" (whose stanzas consist of lines regularly having -- in sequence -- 19, 22, 7 or 11, 5, 8, and 13 syllables), and Dylan Thomas' "Poem in October."

A vowel preceded by from zero to three consonants ("awl" ... "strand"), and followed by from zero to four consonants ("too" ... "sixths").

(Greek, ‘to throw together’)

Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a pointer to) a thing, or what is abstract, otherworldly, or numinous. Samuel Johnson (1755) termed it "A type; that which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else." A word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol, as a thing in the world (to which a word, of course, may point), has a concreteness not shared by language and points to something, often what transcends ordinary experience. Any tree, for example, arguably symbolizes tree-ness, a Platonic form. Any image or action termed a Jungian archetype is also symbolic in that it manifests something in the collective unconscious of human beings. Writers often use symbols when they believe in a transcendental reality. A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must manifest or reveal yet something else transcendental. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry (3rd edn., 1960), however, say that "The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted" (556).

Late 19th-century French writers, including Mallarmé and Valéry, whose verse dealt with transcendental phenomena or with images and actions whose meaning was associative rather than referential.

The contraction of two syllables into one, for metrical purposes, by changing two adjacent syllables into a diphthong. Paul Fussell gives as an example the first line of John Milton's Paradise Lost, "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit," in which "the ie in disobedience changes to what is called a y-glide, and the word becomes disobed-yence" (26). See also Elision.

The elision of an unstressed syllable so as to keep to a strict accentual-syllabic metre. This can be managed by dropping either a consonant ("ever" to "e'er") or a vowel ("the apple" to "th'apple").

(Greek, ‘yoke’)

Using different types of feet (e.g., iambic and trochaic) in the same verse.

(Greek, "a receiving together")

A figure of speech where the part stands for the whole (for example, "I've got wheels" for "I have a car"). One expression that combines synecdoche and metonymy (in which a word normally associated with something is substituted for the term usually naming that thing) is "boob tube," meaning "television."

A blending of different senses in describing something.