Part V
Appendixes
In this part . . .
We finish this book with a few appendixes that you can turn to as a resource. You’ll find a glossary of the major terms you encounter most often when you hear poetry being discussed, including concise definitions of those terms that you know but couldn’t really define if your life depended on it. We also lay out the panoramic of poetry in a timeline sprawling across recorded history. We follow that with a resource section, telling you about books, Web sites, organizations, poetry events nationwide, and much more related to poetry.
Appendix A
accent: See stress.
allegory: A story in which all the characters and events symbolize truths about human life. Allegories make sense on at least two levels: a literal level and a symbolic level (which may be very different from the literal level).
alliteration: Repeated sounds in a passage of verse. The word alliteration often means repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of neighboring words (as in doggy diner). It also is used to mean the general repetition of a consonant sound, as in the repeated m sounds in Tennyson’s famous lines from “Come Down, O Maid”:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
allusion: A reference to something — a person, place, or historical event — outside the poem, usually as an illustration of the poet’s point or as a metaphor.
analogy: A close, extended comparison between two things.
anapest: See meter.
Anglo-Saxon: Another term for Old English.
antihero: A hero who displays qualities that are different from or opposite to those you’d expect to find in a hero. See also hero.
apostrophe: Direct address to something you wouldn’t ordinarily address, such as an abstraction (“Oh, love!”) or an object in nature (“Oh, trees! Oh, rocks!”). Apostrophe is often a way to bring new life to things with which we are normally silent. It’s a way to quickly become intimate with unexpected things.
archetype: This word can refer to the first, the original, or the model of a particular thing, character, or poet, as in “Odysseus is the archetype of the hero figure.” It can also refer to a pattern running throughout a huge body of thought or poetry, as in, “This character is the archetype of the faithful lover in French troubadour poetry.”
art ballad: See ballad.
assonance: Repetition of a sound; usually used to denote repetition or abundance of vowel sounds.
automatic writing: A practice in which the poet attempts to write but without conscious control. The aim is to give the subconscious freer rein, to loosen up the way the poet normally writes, producing (everyone hopes) new associations and new, unpredictable situations. Automatic writing is a practice central to the poetry of many Surrealist, Symbolist, and chance poets.
ballad: One of the most enduring forms of lyric poetry. Ballads are short, narrative songs, often with refrains. Folk ballads are anonymous ballads passed on orally. Art ballads are written by contemporary poets in imitation or reminiscence of the folk ballad.
blank verse: Poetry in iambic pentameter (see meter) that does not rhyme. (It isn’t the same as free verse, which isn’t supposed to be written in any meter at all.) A good example of blank verse is “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
caesura: The heaviest pause in a line of verse.
canon: The established or accepted list of the “best” pieces of art, painting, or poetry. Who establishes them? Well, lots of people — but usually scholars in the universities. Canons can help guide you to what’s good, and they’re a good way to introduce yourself to excellent poetry. But the other nice thing about them is that you can ignore them and make up your own canon — the pieces of art you think are best.
catalog poem: A poem based on a catalog or list. Two famous examples are Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
chance poetry: See open-form poetry.
chapbook: A small book of poems, often published by a small press or self-published by the poet.
classical poetry: This term can refer to Greek and Roman poetry written between 600 B.C. and A.D. 200; poetry written in imitation of those writers; or any very famous or exemplary poetry. Many other cultures have “classical” periods. For example, Chinese poetry of the T’ang Dynasty, or other dynasties famous for the excellence of their verse, is known as classical.
comedy: A genre in which people mess up a lot but come out all right in the end. Comedy is really a celebration of how human beings, despite their foibles, manage to keep going in this crazy world.
conceit: A kind of metaphor in which two things thought to be very dissimilar are compared — as, for example, democracy and a wrecking crane. In Renaissance poetry, such as that of John Donne, conceits were often elaborate or extended.
concrete poetry: Poetry written to resemble the physical shape of its subject, as in a Coke-bottle-shaped poem about a Coke bottle.
convention: A widespread general agreement on how to do something. Poetry is full of such things. You could call rhyme a convention.
couplet: A pair of lines. Usually, but not always, a pair of lines written in the same form. Rhymed iambic pentameter couplets are called heroic couplets.
dactyl: See meter.
Dark Ages: A period of European history and culture extending from the fall of Rome in A.D. 476 to around A.D. 1000.
diction: Groups of words of the same social register, as in high diction (extremely formal or pretentious language) or low diction (slang or informal language). This term is also used to mean “word choice” in general.
dissonance: A combination of sounds that is displeasing to the ear.
dramatic monologue: A passage of verse written as if meant to be spoken by a single speaker on a stage. During a dramatic monologue, the speaker usually narrates events in his real or psychic life, thereby implying or revealing secrets about his viewpoint or psychological makeup. Also called soliloquy.
dramatic poetry: Poetry that’s either meant to be put on as a play with actors, or poetry that could potentially be performed that way. Dramatic poetry has all the hallmarks of the drama, including plot, setting, character, and dialogue.
elegy: A poem of lamentation or sorrow. Poems that have these elements in them are often called elegiac.
end rhyme: See rhyme.
enjambment: The practice of running a phrase or sentence over the end of one line and into the next without a punctuated pause.
Enlightenment: A period of European art and history (about 1660–1798) characterized by a renewed interest in human reason (alongside or instead of such institutions as tradition or religion), clarity of thought and statement, and proportion.
epic poetry: Traditionally, poetry on a grand scale, which tells the story of the establishment of a nation or community, with an epic hero who carries that community’s values into battle against anything that threatens it. The hero may descend into hell, battle monsters, or contend with evil forces.
epigram: A very unified, sharply pointed poem, often quite short.
epitaph: A poem either written on a tombstone or gravesite or written as though it were meant for such a place.
exact rhyme: See rhyme.
extended metaphor: A single, detailed, dominating metaphor that continues for a considerable way through a passage of poetry.
figure of speech: Any special use of language, including metaphor, simile, analogy, or pun. Figures of speech usually are not meant to be taken literally but imply more and other than what they say on the surface.
folk ballad: See ballad.
foot: A single rhythmical unit. See also meter.
free verse: Poetry in which the poet avoids repetition of the same line length, meter, or rhyme scheme from line to line. Individual lines, or short passages, may have these features, but the poem as a whole is constructed to avoid them. See also blank verse and open-form poetry.
genre: A kind of artwork or poetry, as in comedy, lyric, tragedy, satire, and so forth.
ghazal: A verse form practiced in Arabic and Persian poetry, as well as poetry in several of the languages of India. Ghazals became popular in English-language poetry in the late 1960s.
Global Period: The present period of literature and culture. The Global Period began around 1989, with the fall of communism in Europe.
haiku: A traditional verse form originally practiced in Japan and China. It was brought into American and European poetry in the 20th century and now is one of the most familiar of verse forms. As practiced in Western poetry, a haiku is composed of three lines, the first having five syllables, the second having seven, and the third having five. Haiku traditionally begin with a natural scene tied to a season.
hamartia: See tragedy.
Harlem Renaissance: An African American art and literary movement that flourished in the 1920s.
hero: The central figure in an epic, tragedy, or other tale. The hero usually undergoes or performs most of the important events in the tale. He causes the big changes that drive the story; his accomplishments have far-reaching meanings for the surrounding cast of characters. Not all heroes are successful or even clearly good. Heroes who don’t act the way you’d expect heroes to act are often called antiheroes.
heroic couplet: See couplet.
high diction: See diction.
iamb: See meter.
image: Either (a) a vivid picture evoked through language, or (b) a particularly vivid evocation of the senses, especially sight.
internal rhyme: See rhyme.
inversion: In poetry, inversion is the practice of writing phrases or sentences out of their normal syntactical order. Compare “He isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio” to “Leonardo DiCaprio he isn’t.” The second sentence is an inversion. Older poetry accepted inversion as a normal part of poetic expression. More recent poets use inversions for the sake of emphasis and surprise.
irony: Two kinds of irony are referred to most often. Verbal irony is the practice of saying one thing when you mean another. Such forms of irony include understatement, overstatement, litotes (created by negating a negative), and sarcasm. A second kind of irony is situational irony, which refers to events that happen at variance with or contrary to your expectations.
light verse: Poetry that is playful or humorous and usually rhymed. Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker are two poets who wrote excellent light verse.
line: A row of words considered as a unit in poetry.
litotes: See irony.
low diction: See diction.
lyric poetry: Short, usually songlike or personal poetry, as contrasted with the longer, communal poetry of the epic.
lyrics: The words to a song. Song lyrics have been one of the major sources of world poetry.
metaphor: An implicit comparison between two things, as in “My love is a red, red rose” (as opposed to the comparison in Robert Burns’s line, “O my love’s like a red, red rose,” in which the comparison is a simile because it uses like to make the comparison explicit). Metaphors are more intimate and more ambiguous than similes. Poets often speak of A in terms of B; it’s one of the driving engines of all poetry — encouraging readers to think of familiar things in new and unfamiliar ways.
meter: The patterned repetition of strong and weak stresses in a line of verse. Much of English poetry is written in lines that string together one or more feet (individual rhythmical units). Feet are the individual building blocks of meter. Here are the most common feet, the rhythms they represent, and an example of that rhythm.
anapest: duh-duh-DUH, as in, Get away!
dactyl: DUH-duh-duh, as in, honestly
iamb: duh-DUH, as in alas!
trochee: DUH-duh, as in pizza
To build a line of verse, as mentioned, poets can string together repetitions of one of these feet. Such repetitions are named as follows:
one foot: monometer
two feet: dimeter
three feet: trimeter
four feet: tetrameter
five feet: pentameter
six feet: hexameter
Thus, iambic pentameter is a string of five iambs, as in Christopher Marlowe’s line from Dr. Faustus:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
Duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH-duh-DUH
metonymy: The practice of replacing the name of the thing with the name of something associated with it, as when we say “the suits” when we mean “the executives.”
Middle Ages: The historical period in Europe coming between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, from about 1000 to about 1450.
Modern Period: The Modern Period in literature began roughly around 1910, when George V became King of England, and ended when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
music: A catch-all term to cover the sum of all the sounds and rhythms in a piece of poetry; everything in a poem that strikes the ears.
myth: A story (fictional or true) told to set forth or explain the universe, history, or some enduring truth about human experience.
narrative poetry: Poetry that tells a story.
occasional poetry: Poetry written to observe an occasion or a meaningful happening in personal or national life, such as births, deaths, weddings, coronations, inaugurations, even the beginnings of seasons.
Old English: The earliest kind of English, spoken from at least A.D. 600 until about A.D. 1066.
onomatopoeia: The naming of a thing by imitating a sound associated with that thing. Onomatopoeic words include moo, splash, blurt, zoom, and bang.
open-form poetry: If you think of poems that are metered or rhymed as closed forms, you may call poems that reject those kinds of organization open. In open poetry (including chance poetry, Surrealism, and free verse), any of a wide variety of experimental techniques are used to blast open the possibilities of words on the printed page. The term also refers to the open use of language, theme, or subject.
oral poetry: Poetry that is primarily spoken rather than written. Also, poetry that is written but meant to recall the informality, rhythms, and surprises of oral verse.
overstatement: See irony.
oxymoron: A phrase that contains a contradiction but nevertheless makes sense, as in “aggressive modesty” or “quiet violence.”
paradox: An apparently contradictory state that is nevertheless true to life. When the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus writes, “I hate and yet I love,” it seems contradictory, yet few of us will accuse him of lying.
parody: A poem that imitates or makes fun of another poem or a kind of poetry. Parodies take on the form of the poem they are ridiculing. So if you wanted to ridicule Shakespeare, you might write in mock-Elizabethan English.
periods: Spans of time in literary history. Scholars speak of periods as having characteristics that make them easy to group together. You may say, for example, that the Medieval Period (about 1000–1450) is characterized by religious belief, whereas the Postmodern Period (1945 to the present) is less so. Why do people make these distinctions? To help them make sense of the poetry and history of the past. Although they are arbitrary, periods can be very helpful in giving you a context for the poetry you read.
persona: (a) The identity assumed by a writer in a literary work; (b) a word sometimes used as a synonym for speaker; (c) a speaker with an especially complicated or involved personality or mental state. See also speaker.
personification: The act of treating a nonhuman entity as though it were human. You can personify concrete things (such as your car), natural events (such as the weather), or abstractions (such as love). When poets personify, they are creating a metaphor, a comparison between the thing personified (a car) and various human characteristics (the propensity to break down or disappoint).
pose: A very pronounced attitude struck by a character or speaker. A pose can be sincere but exaggerated, or it can be struck out of pretense.
Postmodern Period: A period beginning in 1945 and extending until about 1989 and the fall of communism in Europe. The word postmodern also denotes a kind of attitude toward art and history, one that seeks to create new, open ways of writing and thinking.
Pre-Homeric Period: The time preceding the Homeric era, which is reckoned to have begun about 1000 B.C. That’s a long time, covering the very earliest existing poetry (about 3000 B.C.) and much of the poetry of the Egyptians.
prose poetry: Prose that is written employing the musical, rhythmic, and symbolic resources of poetry.
renaissance: Any vigorous rebirth of learning or artistic activity.
Renaissance Period: A literary and historic period extending from about 1450 to 1680. The Renaissance began and ended at different times in different European countries.
rhyme: The repetition of like sounds in a passage of poetry. The most familiar kind of rhyme is end rhyme, the repetition of the same (or nearly the same) sound at the end of consecutive lines, but there are several other varieties of rhyme, including
internal rhyme: Rhyme that occurs within lines, as in this line from William Blake’s “The Tyger”: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
sight rhyme: Rhyme based on words that look as though they should rhyme perfectly, but in fact do not, as in
the turkey bone
says the turkey’s gone
slant, squint, or virtual rhyme: Various names for rhymes that are inexact or distant.
vowel rhyme: Repetition of sounds based only on the vowel sounds in the rhyming words.
rhythm: The naturally occurring patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in a passage of poetry. Different from meter, which is a repeated pattern of stresses.
romance: A genre of literature in which the characters and events are extremely fanciful or far from reality. Medieval romances may concern the activities of knights and dragons, whereas Shakespeare’s romances, such as The Tempest, concern magic and the marvelous.
romantic: (a) Any aspect of literature having to do with the genre of romance; (b) any aspect having to do with love or amorous activity.
Romantic Period: A literary period (about 1798–1832) that saw an explosion of poetic activity across Europe.
sarcasm: See irony.
satire: A genre in which a social behavior, whether of individuals or groups, is held up to public ridicule in an attempt to correct that behavior.
scansion: The act of scanning (or examining) a line of verse for its weak and strong accents.
setting: The time, place, and physical environment in which a story takes place.
sight rhyme: See rhyme.
simile: An explicit comparison of two things, often using the words like or as. See also metaphor.
situation: (a) The circumstances or state of affairs at a given moment in a poem or story; (b) the circumstances a character finds himself in at a given moment.
situational irony: See irony.
slant rhyme: See rhyme.
soliloquy: See dramatic monologue.
sonnet: A poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter and usually rhymed. The two most familiar kinds of sonnet are the Italian (or Petrarchan) and the English (or Shakespearean).
speaker: The imaginary person who “speaks” the words in a poem. Some poems feature speakers as full-fledged characters with names and histories. But for the sake of discussion, people imagine all poems as having speakers. See also persona.
spondee: A metrical foot in which both syllables are long, as in “charmed lives.”
squint rhyme: See rhyme.
stanza: A group of poetic lines that seem to belong together. In most traditional, rhymed verse, all stanzas have a predictable or regular form. In free verse, any sequential group of lines that appear to stand together may be considered a stanza.
stress: The emphasis or push given to a syllable in a word or a word in a line.
Surrealism: See open-form poetry.
syllabic poetry: In some poems, the number of syllables is the main structural element. For example, poets may write a poem in which each line has three syllables. Or poets can create a stanza in which the lines have different but fixed lengths.
symbol: Something that stands for something else, which in turn brings with it an intense world of meaning. In Christian religious symbolism, for example, the cross stands for the death of Jesus Christ, an intensely meaningful event.
symbolism: The sum total of a poem’s symbols and their meanings; the way a particular symbol is connected to its meaning.
Symbolism: A poetic movement that began in France and Germany in the late 19th century and spread later to England, the United States, and beyond.
synecdoche: A figure of speech in which the poet names something by substituting a part of that thing for the whole, for example, when we call a runner “Legs.”
tanka: A classical Japanese poetic form. As practiced by English-language poets, the tanka is a syllabic stanza with 5 lines, with syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7. Many poets think of the tanka as a haiku (5-7-5) with two added 7-syllable lines.
tone: This word usually refers to the attitude of the speaker or the poet toward the subject of the poem. Thus, a poem’s tone may be sincere, angry, ironic, jubilant, doubtful, or sad. Tone is also used to mean the attitude of the speaker or the poet toward the audience or the general emotional weather of the poem.
tragedy: A genre in which an admirable person is undone. Most tragedies contain the following characteristics:
A tragic protagonist or tragic hero to whom most of the important events of the tragedy occur.
A calamitous fall from good fortune by the tragic protagonist, usually ending in his or her destruction. Usually this fall is brought about by an error in the protagonist’s judgment or character (called the hamartia or tragic flaw). This hamartia is
• An ending in which the protagonist’s entire family line or nation is destroyed, to be succeeded by others who have learned from the protagonist’s fall.
• Usually related to the protagonist’s hubris or excessive pride.
• Ironically the best and most admirable thing about the protagonist.
tragic flaw: See tragedy.
trochee: See meter.
understatement: See irony.
verbal irony: See irony.
verse: (a) A line of poetry; (b) poetry in general. See also light verse.
Victorian Period: The historic and literary period occurring during the same time as the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837–1901).
virtual rhyme: See rhyme.
visual rhythm: (a) The effect produced by the alternation of lines of varying length; (b) the total effect of the shape of a poem.
voice: The impression of a personality behind a piece of writing. Although the term voice is often used as synonymous with the word style, it’s actually the impression that style leaves of the stylist’s character.
vowel rhyme: See rhyme.