Glossary

Sophisticated light verse of a kind appealing to "polite society." Poets writing in this vein include Charles Stuart Calverley, Frederick Locker Lampson, and John Betjeman.

(French, ‘free verse’)

See Free verse.

As a mass noun, poetry in general (but in a non-judgmental sense); and, as a regular noun, a line of poetry.

A group of verse lines that make up a discourse unit, the first verse of which is sometimes indented, like a paragraph in prose.

Verse written in the reign of Victoria, from 1837 to 1901.

An Italian verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas (tercets) and a final quatrain, possessing only two rhymes, repeating the first and third lines of the first stanza alternately in the following stanzas, and combining those two refrain lines into the final couplet in the quatrain. Examples are W. E. Henley's "A Dainty Thing's the Villanelle," John Davidson's "Battle," Oscar Wilde's "Theocritus," Eugene O'Neill's "Villanelle of Ye Young Poet's First Villanelle to his Ladye and Ye Difficulties Thereof," E. A. Robinson's "The House on the Hill," and Dylan Thomas' "Do not Go Gentle into that Good Night."

A medieval French poetic form, consisting of short lines in stanzas with only two rhymes, where the final rhyme of one stanza becomes the main rhyme of the next.

Consonants are voiced when the vocal cords move (/b/) and unvoiced when they remain still (/p/).