A Selective List of Useful Literary Terms for Studying
Poetry
Note: The following definitions have been culled from Kip Wheeler’s extensive online dictionary of Literary Terms at http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms.html
ABSTRACT
DICTION / ABSTRACT IMAGERY: Language
that describes qualities that cannot be perceived with the five senses. For
instance, calling something pleasant or pleasing is abstract,
while calling something yellow or sour is concrete. The word domesticity
is abstract, but the word sweat is concrete. The preference for
abstract or concrete imagery varies from century to century. Philip Sidney
praised concrete imagery in poetry in his 1595 treatise, Apologie
for Poetrie. A century later, Neoclassical
thought tended to value the generality of abstract thought. In the early 1800s,
the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley once again preferred
concreteness. In the 20th century, the distinction between concrete and abstract
has been a subject of some debate. Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme
attempted to create a theory of concrete poetry. T. S. Eliot added to this
school of thought with his theory of the "objective correlative."
Contrast with concrete diction / concrete imagery.
ACATALECTIC: A
"normal" line of poetry with the expected number of syllables in each
line, as opposed to a catalectic line (which is missing an
expected syllable) or a hypercatalectic line (which has one or
more extra syllables than would normally be expected, perhaps due to anacrusis).
See discussion under catalectic.
ALLITERATION: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to
others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound. For instance, the
phrase "buckets of big
blue berries" alliterates with the
consonant b. Coleridge describes the sacred river Alph in Kubla Khan
as "Five miles
meandering with a mazy motion,"
which alliterates with the consonant m. The line
"apt alliteration's
artful aid" alliterates with the
vowel sound a. One of Dryden's couplets in Absalom and Achitophel reads, "In pious times, ere priestcraft
did begin, / Before polygamy was made a sin." It alliterates with the letter p. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
employs the technique: "I
lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear
of summer grass." Most
frequently, the alliteration involves the sounds at the beginning of words in
close proximity to each other. Alliteration is an example of a rhetorical scheme. Alliteration in
which the first letters of words are the same (as opposed to consonants
alliterating in the middles or ends of words) is more specifically called head rhyme,
which is a bit of a misnomer since it doesn't actually involve rhyme in a
technical sense. If alliteration also involves changes in the intervening
vowels between repeated consonants, the technique is called consonance.
See alliterative
verse, alliterative
prose, assonance,
and consonance.
See also alliterative
revival and sound symbolism.
ANACRUSIS: The addition
of an extra unstressed syllable or two at the start of a line of verse--but
these additions are not considered part of the regular metrical count. Deutsch
points out an example of anacrusis in the last line of this stanza by Blake,
where the article the is an unstressed addition:
Innocence doth like a rose
Bloom on every maiden's cheek;
Honour twines around her brows,
The jewel health adorns her neck. (qtd. in Deutsche 14)
ANAPODOTON: Deliberately creating a sentence fragment by the
omission of a clause: "If only you came with me!" If only students
knew what anapodoton was! Good writers never
use sentence fragments? Ah, but they can. And they do. When appropriate. Anapodoton is an example of a rhetorical scheme.
ANASTROPHE: Inverted order of words or events as a
rhetorical scheme.
Anastrophe is specifically a type of hyperbaton
in which the adjective appears after the noun when we expect to find the
adjective before the noun. For example, Shakespeare speaks of "Figures pedantical" (LLL 5.2.407). Faulkner describes
"The old bear . . . not even a mortal
but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time. T. S. Eliot
writes of "Time present and time past," and so on. Particularly
clever anastrophe can become a trope when it
alters meaning in unusual ways. For instance, T. S. Eliot writes of
"arms that wrap about a shawl" rather than "shawls that wrap
about an arm" in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
See also hyperbaton.
Natalie Dorsch's poem, "Just Because,"
makes use of extended anastrophe in a clever way to show how delightfully
confused the speaker is after a romantic interlude:
I walked up the
door,
shut the stairs,
said my shoes,
took off my prayers,
turned off my bed,
got into the light,
all because
you kissed me goodnight.
Here, she makes
use of anastrophe in nearly every line.
Alternatively, we
can use the term anastrophe as a reference to entire narratives in which
the sequence of events are chopped into sections and then "shuffled"
or "scrambled" into an unusual narrative order. An example of this
type of anastrophe might be the sequence of events in Quentin Tarentino's film Pulp Fiction or Kurt Vonnegut's
novel Slaughterhouse Five. Contrast with periodic
sentence.
ANTHIMERIA: Artfully using a different part of speech to act as
another in violation of the normal rules of grammar. This switch might involve
treating a verb like a noun, or a noun like a verb, or an adjective like a
verb, and so on. Thus, in 1960s pop culture, Nancy Sinatra's song "These
Boots Are Made for Walkin'" has a speaker who
tells the implied audience, "You keep lying when you ought to be truthing. . . . You keep saming when you ought to be changing." In a more literary vein, e. e. cummings might speak of how
"he sang his didn't, he danced his did." A
television advertisement might exhort its listeners to "Gift him with Sports Illustrated magazine for Christmas" (as
opposed to give him Sports Illustrated for Christmas).
Rabelais might state, "I am going in search of the great perhaps" and when the priest Angelo is doing an
effective job of controlling the city, we hear that "Lord Angelo dukes it well" in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (III, iii),
and so on. Anthimeria allows poets to step into an
extra-verbal realm to suggest and hint at that which cannot be put easily in
words without a loss of verbal magic. Linguists more generally call this device
"form shift."
ANTITHESIS (plural: antitheses): Using
opposite phrases in close conjunction. Examples might be, "I burn and I
freeze," or "Her character is white as sunlight, black as
midnight." The best antitheses express their contrary ideas in a balanced
sentence. It can be a contrast of opposites: "Evil men fear authority;
good men cherish it." Alternatively, it can be a contrast of degree:
"One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind."
APORIA (Greek:
"impassable path"): The deliberate act of talking about how one is
unable to talk about something. For instance, "I can't tell you how often
writers use aporia." The term dubitatio refers to a subtype of aporia in which a speaker or writer pauses and
deliberately reveals his doubt or uncertainty (genuine or feigned) about an
issue. The aporia in the case of dubitatio is both that pause and the act of
intentionally discussing that ambiguous reaction. This rhetorical ploy can make
the audience feel sympathy for the speaker's dilemma, or it can help
characterize the speaker as one who is open-minded and sincerely struggling
with the same issues the audience faces.
More
recently, literary deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida have high-jacked or
modified the rhetorical term aporia,
and they use it to suggest a "gap" or a lacuna that exists between
what the text attempts to say and what it is forced to mean due to the
constraints of language. Aporia is an example
of a rhetorical trope.
ARCHAISM: A word,
expression, spelling, or phrase that is out of date in the common speech of an
era, but still deliberately used by a writer, poet, or playwright for artistic
purposes. For instance, two archaic words (reproduced here in italics) appear
in these lines from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard
loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
Until
fairly recently, it was still common to find poets using "I ween," "steed," and "gramercy" in
their poems, even though they wouldn't use these terms in normal daily speech.
Artists might choose an archaism over a more familiar word because it is more
suitable for meter, for rhyme, for alliteration, or for its associations with
the past. It also might be attractive as a quick way to defamiliarize
an everyday phrase or object.
Note
that for Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, the use of thy and thine is not particularly archaic, but for John
Updike in the twentieth century, the use of thy and thine is definitely archaic. Spenser, an avid
Chaucer fan, used archaisms to imitate fourteenth-century Chaucerian spelling
and language in his fifteenth-century poem, The Faerie Queen. The
translators of the King James Version of the Bible (1611) revived archaisms to
give weight and dignity to sonorous passages. Later in the seventeenth century,
Milton employed Latinate archaisms in Paradise Lost, even going so far
as to imitate the periodic
sentence structure preferred by classical Roman poets, even though
Latin was a dead language by his day. Coleridge, Keats, William Morris, and
Tennyson also used archaisms for creating pseudo-medieval effects in specific
poems, such as Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1842-1885). This
tendency in nineteenth-century poetry mirrors the growth of romanticized
pseudo-medieval visual art among the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites. An
extended example of deliberate archaisms appears in Keats's The Eve of
Saint Mark (c. 1819). In one section, the character Bertha reads from a
legend of "Holy Mark," and Keats shifts to archaisms to reproduce the
imaginary text in language imitating that of the fourteenth century:
Approuchen thee full dolourouse
For sooth to sain from everich
house
Be it in city or village
Wol come the Phantom and image
Of ilka gent and ilka carle
Whom coldé Deathé hath in parle. . . .
Archaisms
are more rare in modern and postmodern poetry.
ASSONANCE: Repeating
identical or similar vowels (especially in stressed syllabes)
in nearby words. Assonance in final vowels of lines can often lead to half-rhyme.Deutsche notes that assonance is a common technique
in the poetry of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomasp, and
more generally in popular ballads; an example appears in the second and fourth
lines of this stanza from "Fair Annie":
Bind up, bind up your yellow hair,
And tie it on your neck;
And see you look as maiden-like
As the day that first we met. (qtd in Deutsche 140).
If
combined with consonnance, assonance can create
actual full rhyme.
ASYNDETON: The artistic elimination of conjunctions in a
sentence to create a particular effect.
BALLAD: In common parlance, song hits, folk music, and
folktales or any song that tells a story are loosely called ballads. In more
exact literary terminology, a ballad is a narrative poem consisting of
quatrains of iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter.
Common traits of the ballad are that (a) the beginning is often abrupt,
(b) the story is told through dialogue and action (c) the language
is simple or "folksy," (d) the theme is often tragic--though
comic ballads do exist, and (e) the ballad contains a refrain repeated
several times. One of the most important anthologies of ballads is
F. J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Famous
medieval and Renaissance examples include "
CATACHRESIS (Grk.
"misuse"): A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied
metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole,
synaesthesia,
and metonymy.
The results in each case are so unique that it is hard to state a general
figure of speech that embodies all of the possible results. It is far easier to
give examples. For instance, Hamlet says of Gertrude, "I will speak
daggers to her." A man can speak words, but no one can literally speak
daggers. In spite of that impossibility, readers know Shakespeare means Hamlet
will address Gertrude in a painful, contemptuous way. In pop culture from the
1980s, the performer Meatloaf tells a disappointed lover, "There ain't no Coup de Ville
hiding the bottom of a crackerjack box." The image of a luxury car hidden
as a prize in the bottom of a tiny cardboard candybox
emphasizes how unlikely or impossible it is his hopeful lover will find such a
fantastic treasure in someone as cheap, common, and unworthy as the speaker in
these lyrics. Sometimes the catachresis results from stacking one impossibility on top of another. Consider these
examples:
Catachresis
often results from hyperbole
and synaesthesia.
As
A
special subtype of catachresis is abusio, a mixed metaphor that results when two
metaphors collide. For instance, one
Purists of languages often scrowl
at abusio with good reason. Too commonly abusio
is the result of sloppy writing, such as the history student who wrote
"the dreadful hand of totalitarianism watches all that goes on around it
and growls at its enemies." (It would have been better to stick with a
single metaphor and state "the eye of totalitarianism watches all that
goes on around it and glares at its enemies." We should leave out the
mixed imagery of watchful hands growling at people; it's just stupid and
inconsistent.) However, when used intentionally for a subtle effect, abusio and catachresis can be powerful tools
for originality.
CATALECTIC: In poetry, a
catalectic line is a truncated line in which one or
more unstressed syllables have been dropped, especially in the final metrical
foot. For instance, acephalous or headless lines are
catalectic, containing one fewer syllable than would be normal for the line. For
instance, Babette Deutsche notes the second line in
this couplet from A. E. Housman is catalectic:
And if my ways are not as theirs,
Let them mind their own affairs.
On
the other hand, in trochaic verse, the final syllable tends to be the truncated
one, as Deutsche notes about the first two lines of Shelley's stanza:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory--
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the senses they quicken.
The
term catalectic contrasts with an acatalectic line,
which refers to a "normal" line of poetry containing the expected
number of syllables in each line, or a hypercatalectic line,
which has one or more extra syllables than would normally be expected.
CHIVALRY: An idealized code of military and social behavior for the aristocracy in the late medieval period.
The word "chivalry" comes from Old French cheval (horse), and chivalry
literally means "horsemanship." Normally, only rich nobility could
afford the expensive armor, weaponry, and warhorses
necessary for mounted combat, so the act of becoming a knight was symbolically
indicated by giving the knight silver spurs. The right to knighthood in the
late medieval period was inherited through the father, but it could also be
granted by the king or a lord as a reward for services.
The
tenets of chivalry attempted to civilize the brutal activity of warfare. The
chivalric ideals involve sparing non-combatants such as women, children, and
helpless prisoners; the protection of the church; honesty in word and bravery
in deeds; loyalty to one's liege; dignified behavior;
and single-combat between noble opponents who had a quarrel. Other matters
associated with chivalry include gentlemanly contests in arms supervised by
witnesses and heralds, behaving according to the manners of polite society, courtly love, brotherhood
in arms, and feudalism. See knight
for additional information.
This
code became of great popular interest to British readers in the 1800s, leading
to a surge of historical novels, poems, and paintings dealing with medieval
matters. Examples of this nineteenth-century fascination include the Pre-Raphaelite
Movement, William Morris's revival of medieval handcrafts, Scott's
novels such as Ivanhoe, and the earnestly sympathetic (though
unrealistic) depiction of knighthood in Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
In Tennyson's poem Guinevere, King Arthur describes the ideals of
knighthood thus:
I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her.
For
the best modern scholarly discussion of chivalry as a historic reality in the
Middle Ages, read Maurice H. Keen's Chivalry (Yale University Press,
1984).
CHORUS: (1) A group of singers who stand
alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical
performance. (2) The song or refrain that this group of
singers sings. In ancient
CLICHÉ: A hackneyed or trite phrase that has become
overused. Clichés are considered bad writing and bad literature. Click
here to download a PDF handout for more information. Cliché rhymes
are rhymes that are considered trite or predictable. Cliché rhymes in poetry
include love and dove, moon and June, trees and breeze. Sometimes, to
avoid cliché rhymes, poets will go to hyperbolic lengths, such as the trisyllabic rhymes in Lord Byron's Don Juan.
COLLOQUIALISM: A word or phrase used everyday in plain and relaxed
speech, but rarely found in formal writing.
COMMON
MEASURE: Also called common meter,
common measure consists of closed poetic quatrains rhyming ABAB or ABCB, in which the lines of iambic tetrameter (eight
syllables) alternate with lines of iambic trimeter
(six syllables). This pattern is most often associated with ballads
(see above), and it is occasionally referred to as "ballad measure."
Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are in loose common measure using slant
rhyme, for instance:
Much Madness is divinest Sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--the starkest Madness--
'Tis the Majority
A
fun and simple test to recognize common measure in poetry is to take a stanza
and try singing it aloud to a well-known tune written in common meter, such as
"Gilligan's Isle," "Amazing Grace," or "House of the
Rising Sun." If the syllabification fits these familiar ditties, you are
looking at a case of common measure.
CONCEIT (also called a metaphysical conceit): An
elaborate or unusual comparison--especially one using unlikely metaphors,
simile, hyperbole, and contradiction. Before the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the term conceit was a synonym for "thought" and
roughly equivalent to "idea" or "concept." It gradually
came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary
terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an
extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors,
similes,
imagery,
hyperbole,
and oxymora.
One of the most famous conceits is John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning," a poem in which Donne compares two souls in love to the points
on a geometer's compass. Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly in his
poetry. In Richard II, Shakespeare compares two kings competing for
power to two buckets in a well, for instance.
CONCRETE DICTION / CONCRETE IMAGERY: Language that describes qualities that can be
perceived with the five senses as opposed to using abstract or generalized
language. For instance, calling a fruit "pleasant" or
"good" is abstract, while calling a fruit "cool" or
"sweet" is concrete. The preference for abstract or concrete
imagery varies from century to century. Philip Sidney praised concrete imagery
in poetry in his 1595 treatise, Apologie
for Poetrie. A century later, Neoclassical
thought tended to value the generality of abstract thought. In the early 1800s,
the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley once again preferred
concreteness. In the 20th century, the distinction between concrete and
abstract has been a subject of some debate. Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme attempted to create a theory of concrete poetry. T. S.
Eliot added to this school of thought with his theory of the "objective
correlative."
CONNOTATION:
The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal,
strict definition found in a dictionary. For instance, the terms civil war,
revolution and rebellion have the same denotation; they all refer
to an attempt at social or political change. However, civil war carries
historical connotations for Americans beyond that of revolution or rebellion.
Likewise, revolution is often applied more generally to scientific or
theoretical changes, and it does not necessarily connote violence. Rebellion,
for many English speakers connotes an improper uprising against a legitimate
authority (thus we speak about "rebellious teenagers" rather than
"revolutionary teenagers"). In the same way, the words house
and home both refer to a domicile, but home connotes certain
singular emotional qualities and personal possession in a way that house
doesn't. I might own four houses I rent to others, but I might call none
of these my home, for example. Much of poetry involves the poet using
connotative diction
that suggests meanings beyond "what the words simply say."
CONSONANCE:
A special type of alliteration
in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the
intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match
each other but the vowels differ. As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, examples include linger, longer,
and languor or rider, reader,
raider, and ruder. Do not confuse consonance
with a consonant
(see below).
CONVENTION: A common feature that has become traditional or
expected within a specific genre
(category) of literature or film. In Harlequin romances, it is conventional to
focus on a male and female character who struggle through misunderstandings and
difficulties until they fall in love. In western films of the early
twentieth-century, for instance, it has been conventional for protagonists to
wear white hats and antagonists to wear black hats. The wandering knight-errant who travels from place to place, seeking adventure
while suffering from the effects of hunger and the elements, is a convention in
medieval romances. It is a convention for an English sonnet
to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme, abab, cdcd, efef, gg, and so on. The use of a chorus
and the unities
are dramatic conventions of Greek tragedy, while, the aside,
and the soliloquy
are conventions in Elizabethan tragedy. Conventions are often referred to as
poetic, literary, or dramatic, depending upon whether the convention appears in
a poem, short story or novel, or a play.
ELLIPSIS (plural, ellipses): (1) In its oldest sense as a rhetorical device, ellipsis
refers to the artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause. For
instance, an author might write, "The American soldiers killed eight
civilians, and the French eight." The writer of the sentence has left out
the word soldiers after French, and the word civilians
after eight. However, both words are implied by the previous clause,
so a reader has no trouble following the author's thought. See schemes. An
ellipsis is similar to an eclipsis, but differs in that an eclipsis has a word or words missing that may not
be implied by a previous clause. (2) In its more modern sense, ellipsis refers
to a punctuation mark indicated by three periods to indicate material missing
from a quotation . . . like so. This mark is
common in MLA format for indicating partial quotations.
END RHYME: Rhyme in
which the last word at the end of each verse is the word that rhymes. This contrasts
with internal
rhyme, in which a word in the middle of each line of verse rhymes,
or so-called head
rhyme, in which the beginning consonant in a word alliterates with
another beginning consonant in a different word.
EUPHONY (from Greek "good sound"): Attempting to
group words together harmoniously, so that the consonants permit an easy and
pleasing flow of sound when spoken, as opposed to cacophony,
when the poet intentionally mixes jarring or harsh sounds together in groups
that make the phrasing either difficult to speak aloud or grating to the ear.
Here is an example of euphony from John Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes
(1820):
And lucent syrops, tinct
with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd
FIGURATIVE
LANGUAGE: A deviation from what
speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in
order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Perhaps the two most common
figurative devices are the simile--a
comparison between two distinctly different things using "like" or
"as" ("My love's like a red, red
rose")--and the metaphor--a
figure of speech in which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without
the use of "like" or "as." These are both examples of
tropes. Any figure of speech that results in a change of meaning is called a trope.
Any figure of speech that creates its effect in patterns of words or letters in
a sentence, rather than twisting the meaning of words, is called a scheme.
HENDIADYS: As Arthur
Quinn defines the term in Figures of Speech, hendiadys is a peculiar
type of polysyndeton involving "the combination
of addition, substitution, and usually arrangement; the addition of a
conjunction between a word (noun, adjective, verb) and its modifier (adjective,
adverb, infinitive), the substitution of this word's grammatical form for that
of its modifier, and usually rearrangement so that the modifier follows the
word" (Quinn 102). This process sounds complicated, but it is a very simple
way of artificially splitting a single idea into multiple subdivisions by
sticking the word and in an unusual spot in a sentence. Some examples
will help in understanding. For instance, medieval chroniclers might write
"by length of time and
siege" instead of writing "by a long siege." Instead of talking about "the furious
sound" of an idiot's impassioned speech signifying nothing, Macbeth might
talk about its "sound
and fury." Quinn suggests that if
Christ meant to say, "I am the true and living way," Christ might
spruce the phrase up by saying "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." In Genesis, when God announces to Eve that he
will "greatly multiply
thy sorrow and thy conception," the
King James translators are using hendiadys to refer to a single thing--the pain
of childbirth--as a list of two items. Instead of simply saying God has a
powerful and glorious kingdom, Matthew states, "For thine is
the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen" (Matt. 6:13). In Hamlet, we read how
one character states, "But
in the gross and scope of my opinion, / This bodes
some strange eruption to our state"
(Hamlet 1.1.68). We would expect to read something like, "in the
scope of my gross opinion" in normal speech of the day. Likewise, Cymbeline
mentions "The heaviness
and the guilt within my bosom" when
we would expect to hear of "the heavy guilt within my bosom" (Cym.5.2.1).
HYPERBATON: A generic term for changing the normal or expected
order of words--including anastrophe,
tmesis, hypallage, and other figures of speech. E.g.,"One ad does not a survey make." The term
comes from the Greek for "overstepping" because one or more words
"overstep" their normal position and appear elsewhere. For instance,
IDIOM: In its loosest sense, the word idiom is often
used as a synonym for dialect
or idiolect.
In its more scholarly and narrow sense, an idiom or idiomatic
expression refers to a construction or expression in one language that
cannot be matched or directly translated word-for-word in another language. For
instance, the English expression, "She has a bee in her bonnet,"
meaning "she is obsessed," cannot be literally translated into
another language word for word. It's a non-literal idiomatic expression, akin
to "She is green with envy." In the same way, the Spanish phrase,
"Me gustan los arboles,"
is usually translated as, "I like the trees," but if we were to pull
the phrase apart and read it word for word, it would make no sense in
analytical English (i.e., "To me pleases the trees").
IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes
the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of
literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem,
whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Imagery is not
limited to visual imagery; it also includes auditory (sound), tactile (touch),
thermal (heat and cold), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and kinesthetic sensation (movement). Cf. imagism,
below.
MEIOSIS: Understatement, the opposite of exaggeration:
"I was somewhat worried when the psychopath ran toward me with a
chainsaw." (i.e., I was terrified). Litotes (especially
popular in Old
English poetry) is a type of meiosis in which the writer uses a statement
in the negative to create the effect: "You know, Einstein is not a bad
mathematician." (i.e., Einstein is a good mathematician.) "That pustulant wart is somewhat unbeautiful" (i.e., That pustulant wart is ugly).
Litotes is recognizable in English by negatives like not, no,
non- and un-.)
METAPHOR: A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to
imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. When we speak of
"the ladder of success," we imply that being successful is much like
climbing a ladder to a higher and better position. Another example comes from
an old television add from the 1980s urging teenagers not to try drugs. The
camera would focus on a close-up of a pair of eggs and a voice would state
"This is your brain." In the next sequence, the eggs would be cracked
and thrown onto a hot skillet, where the eggs would bubble, burn, and seeth. The voice would state, "This is your brain on
drugs." The point of the comparison is fairly clear. Another example is
how Martin Luther wrote, "A mighty fortress is our God, / A bulwark never
failing." (Mighty fortress and bulwark are the two metaphors
for God in these lines.)
A
metaphor is an example of a rhetorical trope, and
such metaphors have a long history of critical discussion. Aristotle, for
instance, claimed "the greatest thing by far is to have a command of
metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius,
for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances" (qtd in Deutsche 84). Often, a metaphor suggests something
symbolic in its imagery. For instance, Wordsworth uses a metaphor when he
states of
If
we break down a metaphorical statement into its component parts, the real-world
subject (first item) in a metaphoric statement is known as the tenor.
The second item (often an imaginary one or at least not present in a literal
sense) to which the tenor refers is called the vehicle.
For example, consider the metaphorical statement, "Susan is a viper in her
cruel treacheries." Here, Susan is the tenor in the metaphor, and
viper is the vehicle in the same metaphor. The tenor, Susan,
is literally present or literally exists. The vehicle, the
hypothetical or imagined viper, is not necessarily physically present.
An
unusual metaphor that requires some explanation on the writer's part is often
called a metaphysical
conceit. If the metaphorical connection is merely implied rather than
directly stated, such as talking about "the ladder of success," the
term is a subdued metaphor. The combination of two different metaphors into a
single, awkward image is called a "mixed metaphor" or abusio. See also tenor,
vehicle,
subdued
metaphor, and telescoped metaphor.
METER: A recognizable though varying pattern of
stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress. Compositions
written in meter are said to be in verse. There are many possible
patterns of verse. Each unit of stress and unstressed syllables is called a
"foot." The following examples are culled from M. H. Abrams' Glossary
of Literary Terms, seventh edition, which has more information. You can
also
click here to download a PDF handout giving examples of particular types of
feet, or click
here for a longer PDF handout discussing meter and scansion.
Iambic (the noun is "iamb" or
"iambus"): a lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily
stressed syllable.
Example: "The cúrfew
tólls the knéll of párting dáy." (Thomas Gray,
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.")
Anapestic (the noun is "anapest")
two light syllables followed by a stressed syllable: "The Assyrian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld." (Lord Byron, "The Destruction of
Sennacherib.")
Trochaic (the noun is "trochee")
a stressed followed by a light syllable: "Thére they áre,
my fífty men and wómen."
Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"):
a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables: "Éve,
with her básket, was / Déep
in the bélls and grass."
Iambs and
anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called "rising
meter"; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning with
lower stress at the end, are called "falling meter." Additionally, if
a line ends in a standard iamb, with a final stressed syllable, it is said to
have a masculine ending. If a line ends in a lightly stressed syllable, it is
said to be feminine. To hear the difference, read the following examples aloud
and listen to the final stress:
Masculine
Ending:
"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature
was stirring, not even a mouse."
Feminine
Ending:
"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the
housing,
Not a creature
was stirring, not even a mousing."
We name a metric
line according to the number of "feet"
in it. If a line has four feet, it is tetrameter. If a line has five
feet, it is pentameter. Six feet, hexameter,
and so on. English verse tends to be pentameter, French verse
tetrameter, and Greek verse, hexameter. When scanning a line, we might, for
instance, describe the line as "iambic pentameter" (having five feet,
with each foot tending to be a light syllable followed by heavy syllable), or
"trochaic tetrameter" (having four feet, with each foot tending to be
a long syllable followed by a short syllable). Here is a complete list of the
various verse structures:
METONYMY: Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to
embody a more general idea. The term metonym also
applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea. Some
examples of metonymy are using the metonym crown in
reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating "the pen is mightier than the sword" to suggest
that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world
than military force. One of my former students wrote in an argumentative essay,
"If we cannot strike offenders in the heart, let us strike them in the
wallet," implying by her metonym that if we cannot make criminals regret
their actions out of their guilty consciences, we can make them regret their actions through financial punishment. We use
metonymy in everyday speech when we refer to the entire movie-making industry
as the L. A. suburb "Hollywood" or the advertising industry as
the street "Madison Avenue" (and when we refer to businessmen working
there as "suits.") Journalists use metonymy to refer to the collective
decisions of the
ONOMATOPOEIA: The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they
represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, buzz, click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin
to the noise they represent. A higher level of onomatopoeia is the use of imitative
sounds throughout a sentence to create an auditory effect. For instance,
Tennyson writes in The Princess about "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees." All the /m/ and /z/
sounds ultimately create that whispering, murmuring effect Tennyson describes.
In similar ways, poets delight in choosing sounds that match their
subject-matter, such as using many clicking k's and c's when describing a rapier duel (to imitate the clack
of metal on metal), or using many /s/ sounds when
describing a serpent, and so on. Robert Browning liked squishy sounds when
describing squishy phenomena, and scratchy sounds when describing the auditory
effect of lighting a match, such as in his poem "Meeting at Night": "As I gain the cove with pushing
prow, / And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. / a
tap at the pane, the quick sharp, scratch / and blue spurt of a lighted
match."
OXYMORON (plural oxymora, also called paradox):
Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.
Simple or joking examples include such oxymora as jumbo shrimp, sophisticated
rednecks, and military intelligence. The richest literary oxymora
seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are
sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, "without laws, we can have no
freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous
oxymoron: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of oxymora in
his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For
Aye." Click here for more
examples of oxymora.
PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a
manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to
reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that
"without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times
before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of paradoxes in
his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For
Aye." Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" notes "And all
men kill the thing they love."
PARALLELISM: When the writer establishes similar
patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred
tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." The previous
sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following
sentence does not use parallelism: "King Alfred tried to make clear
laws that had precision and were equitable."
If the writer
uses two parallel structures, the result is isocolon
parallelism: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
If there are
three structures, it is tricolon parallelism:
"That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall
not perish from the earth." Or, as one student wrote, "Her purpose
was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to startle the
complacent." Shakespeare used this device to good effect in Richard II
when King Richard laments his unfortunate position:
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood . . . . (3.3.170-73)
PERIPETEIA (Also spelled peripetea,
Greek for "sudden change"): The sudden reversal of fortune in a
story, play, or any narrative in which there is an observable change in
direction. In tragedy, this is often a change from stability and happiness toward
the destruction or downfall of the protagonist.
POETRY: A variable literary genre
characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. These patterns typically
consist of patterns of meter
(regular patterns of high and low stress), syllabification (the number of
syllables in each line of text), rhyme, alliteration,
or combinations of these elements. The poem typically involves figurative
language such as schemes
and tropes, and the poem
may bend (or outright break) the conventions of normal communicative speech in
the attempt to embody an original idea or convey a linguistic experience. Many
modern students mistakenly believe that rhyme is the dominant feature
separating poetry from prose (non-poetic) writings. However, rhyme is actually
a fairly recent addition to poetry. In classical
PUN (also called paranomasia):
A play on two words similar in sound but different in
meaning. For example, in Matthew 16:18, Christ puns in Koine
Greek: "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon
this rock [
RHYME
SCHEME: The pattern of rhyme. The
traditional way to mark these patterns of rhyme is to assign a letter of the
alphabet to each rhyming sound at the end of each line. For instance, here is
the first stanza of James Shirley's poem "Of Death," from 1659. I
have marked each line from the first stanza with an alphabetical letter at the
end of each line to indicate rhyme:
The glories of our blood and state
--------------A
Are shadows, not substantial things;
-----------B
There is no armor against fate; ------------------A
Death lays his icy hand on kings: ---------------B
Scepter and crown
-------------------------------C
Must tumble down, --------------------------------C
And in the dust be equal made ------------------D
With the poor crooked scythe and spade. -----D
Thus,
the rhyme scheme for each stanza in the poem above is ABABCCDD. It is conventional in most poetic genres
that every stanza follow the same rhyme scheme, though
it is possible to have interlocking rhyme scheme such as terza rima. It is also
common for poets to deliberately vary their rhyme scheme for artistic
purposes--such as Philip Larkin's "Toads," in which the poetic
speaker complains about his desire to stop working so hard, and his rhymes
degenerate into half-rhymes or slant
rhymes as an indication that he doesn't want to go to the effort
of perfection. Among the most common rhyme schemes in English, we find heroic
couplets (AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, etc.) and quatrains (ABAB, CDCD, etc.), but the possible permutations are
theoretically infinite.
RHYTHM (from Greek, "flowing"): The varying speed,
loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and expressiveness of speech, especially
poetry. In verse the rhythm is normally regular; in prose it may or may not be
regular.
SIMILE: An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb
such as like or as, in contrast with a metaphor which
figuratively makes the comparison by stating outright that one thing is another
thing.
SOUND SYMBOLISM: Often,
several words with similar meaning may coincidentally have a similar phoneme-
combination in them. Because this particular sound occurs in this pattern of
words, the sound itself may become strongly associated with some quality in the
words' connotation. This accident can become a building block in poetry,
allowing literary artists to choose words that convey some additional indirect
meaning or create a line in which the sound symbolism echoes or mirrors or
contrasts with the content in that line. For example, Denning and Leben point out how the phoneme combination /sl/ indicates a certain slippery nature in English words
(43):
slip
slick
slither
slide
The
connotations associated with this sound mean a poet can use several /sl/ sounds in a specific line to convey that slipperiness
indirectly. Alternatively, when coining a new neologism, the creator of a new
lubricant might use the phoneme combination /sl/ in the new product name to convey that quality. Poets describing a
sword-fight might want to convey swishing and clattering sounds indirectly
through alliteration, describing how the "swaggering swain swung his sword
in answer" or the "clever cut came close to carving
him as he jerked back blocking the blow." Because the alliteration
not only borders on onomatopoeia
but actually connects with the content of the lines--i.e., the sword-fight--it
enters the realm of sound symbolism.
SYMBOL: A word, place, character, or object that means
something beyond what it is on a literal level. For instance, consider the stop
sign. It is literally a metal octagon painted red with white streaks. However,
everyone on American roads will be safer if we understand that this object also
represents the act of coming to a complete stop--an idea hard to encompass
briefly without some sort of symbolic substitute. In literature, symbols can be
cultural, contextual, or personal. (See cultural
symbol, contextual
symbol, and personal
symbol.) An object, a setting, or even a character can represent
another more general idea. Allegories are narratives read in such a way that
nearly every element serves as an interrelated symbol, and the narrative's
meaning can be read either literally or as a symbolic statement about a
political, spiritual, or psychological truth. See also allegory,
or click here to download a pdf handout contrasting allegory and symbolism in
greater detail.
SYNECDOCHE: A rhetorical trope involving a part of
an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a
part. For instance, a writer might state, "Twenty eyes watched our every
move." Rather than implying that twenty disembodied eyes are swiveling to follow him as he walks by, she means that ten
people watched the group's every move. When a captain calls out, "All
hands on deck," he wants the whole sailors, not just their hands. When a
cowboy talks about owning "forty head of cattle," he isn't talking
about stuffed cowskulls hanging in his trophy room,
but rather forty live cows and their bovine bodies. When La Fontaine states,
"A hungry stomach has no ears," he uses synecdoche and metonymy
simultaneously to refer to the way that starving people do not want to listen
to arguments. In the New Testament, a similar synecdoche about the stomach
appears. Here, the stomach represents all the physical appetites, and the heart
represents the entire set of personal beliefs. Paul writes:
Now I beseech
you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the
doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve
not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair
speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. (Romans 16:17)
Likewise, when
Christians pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," they aren't
asking God for bread alone, but rather they use the word as a synecdoche for
all the mundane necessities of food and shelter. In the demonic play Faust,
Marlowe writes of Helen of Troy, "Was this the face that launched a
thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of
Synecdoche is
often similar to and overlaps with metonymy,
above. It is an example of a rhetorical trope.
SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk.
"perceiving together"): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery.
It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch,
taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In
the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or
how a smell looks. When we say a musician hits a "blue note" while
playing a sad song, we engage in synaesthesia. When we talk about a certain
shade of color as a "cool green," we mix tactile or thermal imagery
with visual imagery the same way. When we talk about a "heavy
silence," we also use synaesthesia. Examples abound: "The scent of
the rose rang like a bell through the garden." "I caressed the
darkness with cool fingers." French poets, especially Baudelaire in Les
fleurs du mal, have proven especially
eager to use synaesthesia. The term itself is a fairly late addition to
rhetoric and literary terminology, first coined in 1892, though examples of
this figure of speech can be found in Homer, Aeschylus, Donne, Shelley,
Crashaw, and scores of other writers and poets. See examples under tropes.
ZEUGMA (Greek "yoking" or "bonding"):
Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects in an
ungrammatical but striking way, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two
separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate
for one of the two. For instance, in Shakespeare's Henry V, Fluellen cries, "Kill the
boys and the luggage." (The verb kill normally wouldn't be applied
to luggage, so it counts a zeugma.) If the resulting grammatical construction
changes the verb's initial meaning but is still grammatically correct, the
zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis--though in actual practice, most critics
use the general term zeugma to include both the grammatical and ungrammatical types
interchangeably. Examples of these syllepses and
zeugmas abound--particulary in seventeenth-century
literature:
"If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately!"
(Ben Franklin).
"The queen of
". . . losing her heart or her necklace at the
ball." (Alexander Pope).
"She exhausted both her audience and her repertoire." (anonymous)
"She looked at the object with suspicion and a magnifying glass."
(Charles Dickens)
"Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair." (Charles
Dickens)
[King Charles I was . . .] "Circled with his royal
diadem and the affections of his people." (Mistress Evelyn)
"I fancy you were gone down to cultivate matrimony and your estate in
the country" (Goldsmith)
"Her beauty pierced mine eye, her speech my wo[e]ful breast, / Her presence all the powers of my
discourse."
Zeugma
is also known as synezeugmenon. Some
rhetoricians subdivide zeugma according to the location of the verb that
functions as the shared connector, referring to a zeugma as a prozeugma or protozeugma
if the connector comes before the various subsequent components (as illustrated
in the last example listed above). They refer to the figure as a mesozeugma if the connector appears
in the middle of a phrase. For example, "And now a bubble burst, and now a world" (Lanham 99). Rhetoricians refer to the figure
as a hypozeugma if the
connector appears at the end. An example of a hypozeugma
would be "Hours, days,
weeks, months, and years do pass away"
(Sherry, quoted in Lanham 88).
Note: The following definitions have been culled from Kip Wheeler’s extensive online dictionary of Literary Terms at <http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms.html>