20th-Century Poetry & Poetics FIFTH EDITION

GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS

The aim of this glossary is not to set in concrete words that are constantly changing and

evolving, but rather to help students develop the critical tools and vocabulary with

which to understand and talk about poetry. Since poets themselves often disagree about

the meaning and importance of terms such as free verse, rhythm, lyric, structure, and the

prose poem, and since control of literary discourse is part of each new generation’s

struggle for poetic ascendancy, it seems only reasonable and appropriate for the student

to view all efforts to define critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a

healthy degree of scepticism.

This mini-glossary reflects the continuing debate between traditional metrics and

free verse, and between differing conceptions of the poet’s craft and role in society. A

fuller and more lively debate may often be found in the notes on the poets and in the

poetics section. In a number of instances, I have been less concerned to offer hard-and-

fast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds certain critical

terms.

The following list is by no means complete, but is intended to aid and provoke, to

stimulate discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more comprehensive

sources. I have made use of and recommend highly A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957),

by M.H. Abrams; the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974), edited by Alex

Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O.B. Hardison, Jr; and The Poet’s Dictionary: A

Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard.

G.G.

accent The emphasis, or stress, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, duration, and the

pressures of grammar and syntax. While all syllables are accented or stressed in

speech and in poetry, we tend to describe the less dominant as unstressed or

unaccented syllables.

In metrical verse, accented and unaccented (stressed and unstressed) syllables

are easily identified. Robert Burns’s famous line “My lóve is líke a réd, red róse”

might be described as an iambic tetrameter line, with four feet each consisting of one

unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. However, it can be argued that

such a reading trivializes and effectively undercuts the emotional power of the

poetic utterance, and that the sense of the line dictates a slightly different reading,

which locates three strong stresses or accents in the second half of the line: “My lóve

is líke a réd, réd róse”. See also FEET and METER.

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 2

alexandrine A twelve-syllable line, usually consisting of six iambic feet.

alliteration A common poetic device that involves the repetition of the same sound or

sounds in words or lines in close proximity. Alliteration was most pronounced in

Anglo-Saxon poems such as “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”, which Earle

Birney imitates in his satire of Toronto, “Anglo-Saxon Street”:

Dawndrizzle ended dampness steams from

Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste

Faded house patterns hoary and finicky

unfold stuttering stick like a phonograph

While such intense piling up of consonants was once a common mnemonic device

(an aid to memory), changing literary fashions have, to a large extent, rendered such

self-conscious exhibitions too blunt and obvious for the contemporary ear, except

when used for comic purposes. Exceptions include rap poetry and spoken word,

both of which make extensive use of alliteration and rhyme.

Nevertheless, the repetition, or rhyming, of vowels, consonants, and consonant

clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a still a central component in constructing the

soundscape of the poem, just as the repetition and variation of image and idea

enrich the intellectual and sensory fabric. The most talented practitioners will be

listening backwards and forwards as they compose, picking up and repeating both

images and sounds that give the poem a rich and interlocking texture. See

ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY.

allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary references are common in poetry,

though, to be successful, they require an audience with shared experience and

values. Biblical or classical allusions, for example, or Canadian political allusions,

might be totally unrecognizable to an Asian Muslim reader. Although readers soon

tire of verbal exhibitionism, they still expect a degree of allusion to challenge them

and to stimulate curiosity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Junkman’s Obgligato” assumes

the reader’s familiarity with both T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and

W.B. Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” for a full appreciation of the ironic counter-

pointing of down-and-out urban images and those of an idealized pastoral land-

scape. At the same time, the poem also overflows with topical and literary allusions

from the junkyard of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American

culture.

ambiguity Words and the texts they inhabit are susceptible of a variety of

interpetations. While a word may denote one thing, usage and context often bring

various connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the

poem. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his essay “The Obscurity of

the Poet” (in Poetry and the Age, 1953), what we speak of as literature ranges from

Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its seven levels of meaning, to Reader’s Digest, which,

Glossary of Poetic Terms 3

like pulp fiction and greeting-card verse, barely manages half a level of meaning.

Sophisticated readers not only enjoy, but also demand a certain level of ambiguity,

or mystery, in poems. They find such ambiguity in Shakespeare, who loved puns,

double-entendre, and various kinds of wordplay; they find it also in such early

Moderns as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, who were

influenced by seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets,

for both of whom the poem retains something of the quality of a riddle.

As a result of declining audiences, a general trend towards a democratization of

the arts, and the pressure of new kinds of psychological and political content, the

pendulum of taste since mid-century swung towards less ambiguity. While puns

and worldplay still add to our sense of the fecundity and depth of poetic expression,

contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be intended only as a rose; and

they tend to avoid the use of obscure and esoteric references. See Robert Graves’

Poetic Unreason (1925) and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).

anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an

accented one: / ∪ ∪ ´/. See METRE.

anaphora The rhetorical device of using the same word or phrase at the beginning of

successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation. See Ginsberg’s “Howl” and

Cohen’s “You Have the Lovers” and “style”.

apostrophe A literary device of “turning away”, usually to address a famous person or

idea. In the classical Greek plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the chorus would

march across the stage in one direction chanting various stanzas, or strophes, and

then reverse their motion in an anti-strophe, or verbal about-face. In twentieth-

century poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be used ironically, or for romantic

or satirical purposes.

archetype When you sense that a literary character, situation, or idea has significance

far beyond its specific, or particular, occasion in the poem, you are probably in the

presence of an archetype.

In an essay called “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype” (English Institute Essays,

1950), Northrop Frye says: “By archetype I mean an element in a work of literature,

whether a character, an image, a narrative formula, or an idea, which can be

assimilated into a larger unifying pattern.” Psychologist C.G. Jung, in an essay

called “The Problem of Types in Poetry” (1923), gives another dimension to the

matter: “The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon,

man, or process, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever creative fantasy

is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject

these images to a closer examination, we discover them to be the formulated

resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the

psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same type.”

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 4

Sibling rivalry, the betrayed or rejected lover, the innocent abroad, the rebel, the

fool, the seasonal cycles of rebirth, fertility, and death, the enchanter or enchan-

tress—all are common characters or situations in literature that can deepen our

appreciation of a work of art. However, the search for universal symbols can be

reductive in the reading of a poem; so, too, can excessive efforts to make a work

symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on

psychology.

assonance Also called vocalic rhyme, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel

sounds within a line (or lines), a stanza, or the overall poem. Listen to the long

vowels conjure expiration and death in Wilfred Owen’s “Greater Love”: “As theirs

whom none now hear, / Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.”

Assonance is most obvious among words beginning with an open, or initial, vowel

(open / eyes / eat / autumn), but equally powerful as an internal rhyming device

(tears / mean, thine / divine).

ballad A popular short narrative folk song, usually transmitted orally, and making use

of various forms of shorthand, including truncated action, psychological and histori-

cal sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and easy memorizing.

A direct link can be drawn between such early folk songs as “Barbara Ellen” and

“The Skye Boat Song”, country western music, and such contemporary ballads such

as “Frankie and Johnny”, Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, and Stan Rogers’ “The

Lockkeeper”.

blank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse has been a staple since it was

introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540 in his translations of

Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakepeare and Christopher Marlowe both used blank verse in their

plays; in poetry, Milton used it for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Wordsworth

for The Prelude, and T.S. Eliot for The Waste Land. Eliot claimed in Poetry in the

Eighteenth Century (1930) that the decasyllabic (or ten-syllable) line was “intractably

poetic” yet had many of the capacities of prose. As such, blank verse could be said

to be a precursor of the prose poem, which seems more aligned with ordinary

speech and the counting of syllables than with poetic meter.

broken rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to fulfill the requirements of

rhyme:

Madame had learned to waltz

before the charge of false-

hood had been laid . . .

cadence When poet John Ciardi describes the poem as “a countermotion across a

silence”, he comes close to defining cadence, which refers to the pattern of melody

established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of tíme slówed dówn

Glossary of Poetic Terms 5

and pálpable. While cadence originally referred to regular traditional poetic

measures, in which syllables and feet could be counted and identified, the term has

come to be used more in relation to irregular patterning, where stress and accent are

much looser and determined primarily by phrasing and syntax. Cadence is what

Ezra Pound was referring to when he spoke of composing with the musical phrase

instead of the metronome.

Also worth reading is Dennis Lee’s essay “Cadence, Country, Silence”, in which

he employs the term broadly and with greater cultural import. See also MEASURE,

MUSIC, RHYTHM, and SONG.

caesura This term is used to refer to any substantial break or pause within the line,

though it is most often found in lines of five or more feet. The caesura was a regular

feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating units within the line,

bluntly drawn in Earle Birney’s “Anglo-Saxon Street” or more subtly in Wilfred

Owen’s “Arms and the Boy”:

Let the boy try along this bayonet blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

canto While in the twentieth century the term is often used to mean, simply, a song or

a ballad, the canto was originally a subdivision of epic or narrative, which provided

both a simpler organizing principle for the creator of the long poem and a much-

needed respite for the singer during delivery. Ezra Pound draws on both meanings

of the word when he calls his great epic-length series of meditations The Cantos.

conceit When a METAPHOR or other FIGURE OF SPEECH is extended over many lines, it

is called a conceit.

concreteness Concrete nouns referring to objects, such as lip, flint, hubcap, gunbarrel,

wheel, smoke, sugar, and fingernail, seem capable of making their appeal through the

senses. So, too, verbs, such as run, scream, chop, and lick. Concrete words activate the

imagination and anchor poetry in the world of particulars. A gifted poet such as

Samuel Johnson can use abstract words in such as way as to make them feel

concrete, as in the line “stern famine guards the solitary coast”, where the abstract

idea is given the quality of sternness, the action of guarding, and a spatial location.

e.e. cummings concretized abstractions in much the same way: “love is more thicker

than forget, / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more

frequent than to fail”.

concrete poetry This name was first applied in the twentieth century to works that

exploit the visual and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary “visual

puns” back to a seventeenth-century “shape-poem” whose typography was de-

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 6

ployed to create the image of an altar. Since so much of the power of poetry is

derived from sound—from rhythmical patterns, the residue of recurring vowels and

consonants—it’s hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component

syllables and letters, downplaying the intellectual dimension of poetry and

emphasizing, instead, the psychic energy to be found in the acoustic dimension of

language. See the notes on, and poems and poetics by, bpNichol, as well as An

Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), edited by Emmett Williams, ed.

consonance Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with

differing vowels: winter / water / went / waiter. See, for example, Wilfred Owen’s

“Strange Meeting”, which proceeds with a series of consonantal half rhymes:

escaped / scooped, groined / groaned, moan / mourn.

content The substance or subject matter of a poem, as opposed to its style or manner, is

what we usually refer to when we speak of content. But content cannot, properly, be

discussed apart from form. A poet may begin to write a poem, broadly speaking,

about war, love, or beach-combing; however, as soon as his or her thought begins to

take shape as poetic language, as form, it is so transformed by the process that it

bears little or no relation to the original impulse. Ideas or anecdotes that find their

way into a poem are not the poem’s content, though they are certainly germaine to

its overall impact. In fact, everything in the poem contributes to what we might call

its content.

Poets have reacted strongly to attempts to oversimplify their work or reduce it

to a generalization or two. Archibald MacLeish argued that “A poem should not

mean, but be.” Most poets believe that the poem is its own meaning. Robert Creeley

insisted that content and form are indivisible, and rejected “any descriptive act . . .

which leaves the attention outside the poem”.

It’s probably most useful to stop asking what a poem means and begin to

consider, as John Ciardi suggests in his book title, How Does A Poem Mean? If you

begin to examine the formal and technical elements in a poem, the ways in which

certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to arrive at a point of under-

standing and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its

content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY.

couplet The couplet—two lines of verse, usually rhymed—is one of the most common

and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry. The couplet’s brevity

encourages a pithy, epigrammatic quality; its two-line split provides a fulcrum

which lends itself to argumentative summary and generalization, as in Alexander

Pope’s “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of

mankind is man”. Closed couplets such as Pope’s or Dryden’s, which use mostly

iambic pentameter lines and complete their thought with the final end-rhyme, are

also called heroic couplets, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century English

neoclassical period.

Glossary of Poetic Terms 7

The couplet has many uses, as a concentrating unit within the poem or as a

separate stanza form. Shakespeare used the couplet to conclude his sonnets

forcefully. See also GHAZAL.

dactyl A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented

syllables: / ´ ∪ ∪ /. See FOOT and METER.

diction Word choice. The French poet Verlaine felt the need to remind us that poems

are made of words, not ideas. This is useful to think about, since poems are often

spoken and written of as if they were chunks of autobiography, representations of

nature, or little treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. Words are

magical. When nature, experience, or ideas—any of which may give rise to a

poem—pass through the crucible of language, they are transformed, as surely as

white light is split into a spectrum of colour when it passes through a prism. Words,

similarly, slow and alter those non-linguistic elements that endeavour to use or pass

through them; that’s one reason poems, stories, and other verbal texts give us the

impression of time slowed down, of felt time. Words and the ideas they carry fly

rather quickly through the brain, but when you speak or hear them you become

aware of being immersed in another element, like a diver suddenly encountering

water.

These considerations are central to postmodern poetics, which seeks to remind

us that the poem is not a mirror of nature or a window through which we see the

natural world, or so-called reality, but rather a verbal reality in its own right. When

the word, or language in general, is foregrounded, poetry ceases to be simply a

vehicle for conveying pictures of, and passing on information about, quotidian

reality; it aspires, instead, to the condition of other arts such as music and painting,

where representation and referentiality are not the only, or even the primary,

concern.

In a sense, words are the poet’s paint, his or her primary medium. Coleridge

once spoke of poetry as “the best words in the best order”. He was using the word

best in the sense of most appropriate in a specific context, not with the idea that certain

kinds of words are forbidden or inherently better or worse than others, though the

choice would have its own moral significance. Words are dirty with meaning and

can never be washed clean; we use them for ordinary discourse, to sell lawn-

mowers, to deliver sermons, and to make political speeches. As Joseph Conrad once

wrote, using the Archimedean metaphor: Give me the right word or phrase and I will

move the world.

M.H. Abrams reminds us that diction can be described as “abstract or concrete,

Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, colloquial or formal, technical or common, literal or

figurative”, to which we might add archaic, plain, elevated. See CONCRETENESS and

WORD, and also Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1952) and Winnifred Nowottny’s The

Language Poets Use (1962).

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 8

didactic While classical and neo-classical poetics argue that poetry should both teach

and delight, in didactic poems the teaching function tends to override the

imaginative. Such works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeats’s distinction,

that his argument with the world produced only rhetoric, whereas his argument

with himself resulted in poetry. And yet all great works are overtly or covertly

didactic, whether they teach us indirectly and subliminally through the senses (by

way of imagery and patterns of sound) or by arguing transparently. And, of course,

all art, while it may not be a blatant call to arms, is an effort to persuade us to view

the world differently.

dimetre A line of verse consisting of two feet.

dissonance An effect of harshness or discordance in a poem, often achieved by

combining rhythmical irregularity and a jarring concentration of consonants.

distich A COUPLET.

dramatic monologue Unlike the soliloquy, in which a character on stage reveals his or

her inner thoughts by “thinking aloud”, the dramatic monologue assumes and

addresses an audience of one or more people. In the process of addresing this

audience, the speaker of the dramatic monologue manages to confess, or simply

reveal, a character flaw, a dread deed, or an impending crisis. Robert Browning

pioneered the form in poems such as “My Last Duchess”, “Andrea del Sarto”, and

“Fra Lippo Lippi”, but it has been used by Tennyson in “Ulysses”, by Eliot in “The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and by many contemporary writers.

duration The length of acoustic or phonetic phenomena such as syllables. According to

linguists, the sounds we produce when we speak have pitch, loudness, quality, and

duration. Aside from grammatical and syntactical considerations, the pacing in, or

the speed at which we read, a poem is largely determined by the length of time it

takes to enunciate syllables, lines, and stanzas. Short vowels speed up the poem;

long vowels slow it down. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG.

elegy Originally a specifically metered Greek or Roman form, the elegy has come to

refer generally to a sustained meditation on mutability or a formal lament on the

death of a specific person. The conventional pastoral elegy included a rural setting,

with shepherds and flowers (all nature mourning), an invocation to the muse, a

procession, and a final consolation. Classics such as Milton’s “Lycidas”, Thomas

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, and Shelley’s “Adonais” are

clearly the chief source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W.H.

Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, Michael Ondaatje’s “Letters & Other Worlds”,

Seamus Heaney’s “Requiem for the Croppies”, and so many of the poems of

Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Lorna Crozier and Michael Longley. In fact, one

Glossary of Poetic Terms 9

might safely say that the elegiac tone is dominant in English poetry from Beowulf to

the present.

enjambment A means of escaping the limitations and rigidity of the end-stopped line

or closed couplet, enjambment occurs when a sentence or thought carries over from

one line to the next. The enjambed line, with its greater freedom and flexibility, has

served to focus a great deal of attention on the position of line-breaks in twentieth-

century poetry. See LINE-BREAKS and also Al Purdy’s poem “The Cariboo Horses”.

epic While the epic, or heroic, poem such as Homer’s Iliad and Odsyssey or the Anglo-

Saxon classic Beowulf—each with its elevated style, tribal or national struggles,

invocations to the muse, occasional use of the supernatural, and cast of important,

or exalted, figures—belongs to an earlier age, it has not lost its appeal to poets of

later ages. From Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Fœrie Queene, Milton’s Paradise

Lost, and Dryden’s and Pope’s mock epic satires to such contemporary long poems

as Pound’s The Cantos, W.C. Williams’s Paterson, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna

Moodie, and Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or extended,

poem has provided an alternative to the limited scope, self-directedness and,

perhaps, too intense heat of the lyric. See LONG POEM and NARRATIVE.

epigram A short, witty poem or statement, seldom more than four lines long, whose

form dates back to Roman epigrammatist Martial. Alexander Pope’s poems are full

of condensed witticisms that might be displayed as separate epigrams: “To err is

human; to forgive, divine”.

eye-rhyme An eye-rhyme features words or syllables that look alike but are

pronounced differently: come / home; give / contrive.

feminine ending While it may no longer be politically correct, this term is still used in

criticism to refer to a line that ends with one or more unstressed syllables. Far from

suggesting weakness or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloqui-

al, and their informality and irregularity have been especially useful in dramatic

blank verse.

feminine rhyme A two-syllable (or disyllabic) rhyme, usually a stressed syllable

followed by an unstressed syllable: witness / fitness.

figurative language When language is heightened so that it moves beyond ordinary,

or literal, usage, it is said to be figurative. These figures, figures of speech, or tropes

(“turns”), as they are sometimes called, include simile, metaphor, personification,

hyperbole, paradox, and pun. An extended figure of speech is called a CONCEIT.

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 10

figure A group of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage.

Consider, for example, Gloucester’s comment in Richard III: “Now is the winter of

our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York”.

foot In A Poet’s Dictionary: Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), William

Packard provides an interesting account of the origin of the metrical foot:

When the Greeks described poetry as “numbers”, they were alluding to

certain conspicuous elements of verse that could be counted off: “feet” were

strong dance steps that could be measured out in separate beats of a choral

ode or strophe or refrain. These “feet” could then be scanned for repeating

patterns of syllable quantities, either long or short, within strophes and anti-

strophes of a chorus. Greek metrics, then, did not derive from accent or

stress but rather from the elongation required in the pronunciation of certain

vowels and syllable lengths.

Instead of the quantitative designation of long and short syllables, we now use the

terms stressed and unstressed, or accented and unaccented to describe the components

of the poetic foot, which is essentially a group of two or more syllables that form a

metrical unit in a line of verse. The most common feet are the iambic (/ ∪ ´ /), an un-

stressed followed by a stressed syllable (delight); the trochaic (/ ´ ∪ /), a stressed

followed by an unstressed syllable (action); the anapestic (/ ∪ ∪ ´ /), two unstressed

syllables followed by a stressed one (interrupt); the dactylic (/ ´ ∪ ∪ /), a stressed

syllable followed by two unstressed ones (comforting); and the spondaic (/ ´ ´ /), two

stressed syllables (handbook).

Other feet include the pyrrhic (/ ∪ ∪ /), one or more unstressed syllables; the

amphibrachic (/ ∪ ´ ∪ /), one unstressed, one stressed, one unstressed; the bacchic

(/ ∪ ´ ´ /), one unstressed followed by two stressed; and the chorimabic (/ ´ ∪ ∪ ´ /), a

stressed, two unstressed, and a stressed. See METER.

form Form in poetry is no less intriguing and no less difficult to define and describe

than form in the other arts. We can easily identify obvious elements of form, such as

rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, stanza-lengths, and traditional modes like the

sonnet and sestina; but the intricacies of language, timing, syntax, counterpoint,

verbal play—those elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a

poem—require some training and considerable attention.

However, in an essay called “Admiration of Form: Reflections on Poetry and the

Novel” (Brick / 34), poet and critic C.K. Williams offers some useful thoughts,

reminding us that, among other things, form and content are inextricably allied:

The important thing about form, though, is its artificiality. In English poetry,

the historically dominant iambic foot is closely related to the actual move-

ment of the voice in our language between stressed and unstressed syllables,

but the regularity of the iambic line, and the five beats of the pentameter, for

instance, are purely conventional. In irregular, or “free”, verse, where the

Glossary of Poetic Terms 11

cadences are not regular, and not counted, it is what Galway Kinnell has

called the “rhythmic surge”, which defies and controls the movement of

language across its grid of artifice; the line in free verse becomes a much

more defining factor of formal organization than in more arithmetical verse-

traditions.

The crucial thing about form is that its necessities, though they are

conventions, precede in importance the expressive or analytical demands of

the work. Although a poem may to a greater or less degree seem to be driven

by its content, in fact all the decisions a poet makes about a work finally have

to be made in reference to the conventions which have been accepted as

defining the formal nature of that work. If a compelling experience is

conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophical speculation occurs

in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an intricate and apparently

entirely engrossing narrative adventure, these are secondary, although

simultaneous with, the formal commitments of the work, and they must be

embodied within the terms of those commitments, although in the end these

almost playful divisions of an experienitial continuum, whether in the

structures of a musical mode, or the pulse and surge of a poetic line, will

mysteriously serve to intensify the emotion and the meaning which the work

evokes. (I should mention, perhaps, that the dour and puritanical and

ferociously self-serving “new formalism” has nothing to do with the notion

of form I am elaborating here: the new formalism is rather a kind of

conceptual primitivism which seems to gather most of its propulsive force

from a distorted and jealous vision of the literary marketplace; it calls for a

return to the good old safe and easily accounted-for systems of verse, with

counted meters, rhyme, and so forth. All despite the generation over the last

few centuries, from Smart to Blake through Whitman and countless others,

of an enormous amount of significant poetry in non-traditional forms; and

despite the fact that many verse-systems in the world require neither rhyme

nor strictly counted meter, and despite the practice of many modern poets,

who have been quite content to use whatever verse-form fitted the poem

they were composing. One would not want to sacrifice either Rilke’s “Duino

Elegies” or Lowell’s “Life Studies”, just to mention two poets who worked in

both systems.)

In his essay “Rebellion and Art” (in The Rebel, 1956), Albert Camus

argues that “A work in which the content overflows the form, or in which

form drowns the content, only bespeaks an unconvinced and unconvincing

unity. . . . Great style is invisible stylization, or rather stylization incarnate.”

See PROSODY, STRUCTURE, and STYLE, and also Denise Levertov’s “Notes on Organ-

ic Form” in the Poetics section.

free verse Poetry written with a persistently irregular meter (which is not to say

without rhythm) and often in irregular line-lengths. The King James translations of

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 12

the Psalms and Song of Songs are often held up as models of how dynamic non-

metrical poetry can be. Ezra Pound advised composing with the rhythms of the

speaking-voice sounding in your ear, rather than the regular beat of the metronome;

Robert Frost insisted that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net;

and T.S. Eliot claimed that no verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job.

All three were concerned to emphasize that, whether regular or irregular, the music

of poetry bears close scrutiny, for it accounts for much of our pleasure as readers

and, far from being incidental or decorative, is fundamental to our total experience

of the poem. See LINES-BREAKS, METER, MUSIC, RHYTHM, PROSODY, and SONG.

ghazal A Middle Eastern lyric, most commonly associated with the fourteenth-century

Persian poet Hafiz. The ghazal consists of five to twelve closed couplets, often using

the same rhyme. These seemingly disconnected couplets about love and wine are

held together not by a narrative or rhetorical thread, but by a heightened tone or

emotional intensity. Not surprisingly, the apparently random or non-rational

structuring of the ghazal has proven attractive to twentieth-century poets as diverse

as as John Thompson (Stilt Jack), Phyllis Webb (Water & Light), and Adrienne Rich.

hexameter A line of verse consisting of six feet.

hyperbole A figure of speech that involves extremes of exaggeration: big as a house,

dumb as a doornail.

iambic pentameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. Iambic pentameter is

considered the poetic rhythm most basic to English speech. See FOOT and METER.

image Ezra Pound described the image as “that which presents an intellectual and

emotional complex in an instant of time”. Other poets have spoken of images as

concentrations of linguistic energy directed at the senses. The image is a

controversial term, which has often been used to mean, simply, a verbal picture;

however, the poetic image may also conjure things, events, and people in our minds

by appealing to senses other than sight.

Images are so central to language that, in the line a brown cow leapt over the fence,

which constitutes a composite image, we also find four discrete images: a cow, a

fence, the act of leaping, and brownness. Imagery, along with prosody, is one of the

two central ingredients of poetry; and its evocative power cannot be divorced from

the texture of sounds through which it is delivered. Specific images seem more

likely to stimulate the senses than images that are generic (tree, animal, machine).

The difference between a line such as “I think that I shall never see / A poem as

lovely as a tree” and the following—“Don’t hang your bones from the branch / of

that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahua’s waiting in the Daimler”—has

as much to do with diction and specificity of image as with the difference between

metrical and non-metrical verse.

Glossary of Poetic Terms 13

Imagism A poetic movement in England and the US between 1909 and 1917, which

reacted against the discursiveness, sentimentality, and philosophizing of late

nineteenth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image. See Amy Lowell,

ed., Some Imagist Poets (1915) and Ezra Pound, ed., Des Imagistes: An Anthology

(1914). Ezra Pound advised paring poetry to the bone, as he does in “In a Station of

the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ironically, the Imagists proceeded by misundertanding the Chinese written charac-

ter, which Pound thought always originated in an attempt to create a stylized

drawing of the object. Nevertheless, the experiments of Pound, Lowell, F.S. Flint,

and H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] had a profound influence on the directions of twentieth-

century poets, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W.W.E. Ross,

and Archibald MacLeish, who wrote “For all the history of grief / An empty

doorway and a maple leaf”, a poem that by no means eschews comment and

abstraction, but does achieve a startling precision and economy.

internal rhyme Rhyme occurring within the lines, rather than at the end. See RHYME.

irony A statement that usually implies to opposite of what it says. Irony, at its most

subtle, is often contextual; in its most blatant forms, irony may be indistinguishable

from sarcasm and satire.

kenning An Old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon poetic device in which adjectival attri-

butes of an object or character are substituted for the name of the object or character.

Thus, ocean comes to be called whale-road in Beowulf; and Hamlet, to be known as

the “melancholy Dane”. See Earle Birney’s “Anglo-Saxon Street”.

lines and line-breaks According to Paul Fussell in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (1965,

1979), “the poetic line, regardless of its degree of syntactical integrity, is like a prose

sentence, or an opera, or a footrace in being an experience in time and in sharing in

the emphasis pattern which characterizes all such experiences. Thus the part of the

poetic line that is the most emphatic is the end of it: this is why end-rhyme has

developed into a convention and why, say, initial rhyme has not. . . . Every part of a

poetic line accumulates weight progressively: every part anticipates the end of the

line. This is less because the line is positioned in a poem than because the line is a

unit of measured time. Even if the end of the line offers us no rhyme to signal the

fruition of the accumulation, the end of the line constitutes an accumulation of

forces”.

When poets cease to write metrical verse, or count syllables, the length and

breaking of the poetic line become matters of serious debate. An excellent

symposium on the line was published at Cornell University in Epoch, with

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 14

contributions from many poets. Among the contributors, Fred Chappell calls the

line “a packet of energy”; Robert Kelly, “the shortest distance between two

silences”; Philip Booth calls the line “the poet’s springboard” and insists that he

repsonds to the poetic line in terms of its “torque”. Fleur Adcock says that the

purpose of the line is to “set certain statements apart from everyday speech so that

the listener or reader will know that these have to be given a special kind of

attention”; the line, she says, is used “to slow down what is being said, so that it can

be absorbed at the rate of poetry rather than of narrative or documentary, even if it

happens to be also narrative or documentary”. According to Sandra Gilbert,

“Without lines, we all agreed, one seemed to be tipping forward into an abyss,

diving into jello, plunging headfirst into quicksand. No closure anywhere, nothing

to shape things, nothing to hold onto, just one’s own inexorable metaphors going (as

here) on and on and tiresomely on.”

Seamus Heaney makes an interesting distinction: “In free verse, the line is less of

a unit, more a marker of time, a punctuating device, a pacer. In writing free verse,

the line is a feeler of sorts; in writing metrical verse, it is more like a template.”

Robert Morgan, who describes line-lengths as “a way of speeding or slowing the

poem’s current”, sets rather severe standards for the line: “My first principle of

versification was, make something happen in every line. Each line should be an

entering of a new territory in the ongoing momentum of the poem. Each line is an

image, an increment of energy.”

While some poets seem to have no rationale for breaking their lines and write

what is derogatorily called “chopped prose,” others have developed theories or

habits that may involve counting the number of syllables in each line; making sure

each line has at least one complete phrase; providing in each line something for the

eye, ear, and mind. One poet may never allow the line-break to separate noun and

adjective; another will do just the opposite to achieve certain effects. Denise

Levertov, whose essay “Line-Breaks, Stanza-Spaces, and the Inner Voice” (The Poet

in the World, 1973) is well worth reading in its entirety, reiterates her position in the

Epoch symposium statements, arguing that “the organization of verbal rhythm and

melody is largely dependent on the line.” Phyllis Webb, in “On the Line” (reprinted

in the Poetics section), takes a playful, though no less serious, tack on the question.

And Margaret Atwood seems, in practice, to be able to break every rule to good

effect.

Dennis Cooley, in “Breaking and Entering (thoughts on line breaks)” in The

Vernacular Muse (1987), argues for infinite variety, as long as it entertains and

delivers new energy. He also quotes approvingly a different passage in Fussell that

sets regularity of line-breaks against what is perceived to be current practice: “if

constant enjambment takes place‚ that is, if the sense and syntax of one line run on

into the next so that a hearer would have trouble ascertaining the line breaks—we

have a very different kind of free verse, a kind we can designate as meditative and

ruminative or private. It is this kind of vigorously enjambed free verse which has

Glossary of Poetic Terms 15

become a common style in the last twenty years or so as a vehicle for themes that

are sly or shy, or uncertain, or quietly ironic, or furtive.”

long poem The contemporary long poem, descended from the epic, the narrative, and

the sustained meditation, includes poem-sequences, extended poetic collage, and

book-length poems. Examples of the long poem are T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,

Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, John Berryman’s Dream Songs,

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Robert Kroetsch’s Seed

Catalogue, bp Nichol’s “continental trance”, and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”,

the last three included in the anthology in their entirety. While attempting to

subvert any impression of narrative authority, the contemporary long poem

continues to be steeped in narrative and its strategies. See EPIC and NARRATIVE, as

well as the notes on Hughes, Ashbery, Nichol, and Kroetsch.

lyric In the original Greek, the lyric was a song accompanied by a stringed instrument

known as a lyre. In popular usage today, lyric still refers to the words accompanying

a piece of music. The poetic lyric is usually a short poetic form characterized by

heightened language and intensity of feeling, although lyrical passages appear in

such longer forms such as the romantic ode, the dramatic monologue, and the long

poem. See MUSIC and SONG.

masculine ending A line ending with a stressed syllable: inert / dessert.

measure A quantitative term often applied to units of sound and sense in a poem. The

following quotations, however, suggest that poetic measure has less to do with

traditional metrics, or “counting the ways”, than with rhythmic control in general:

It seems almost a necessity in good verse that the ear should subconsciously

expect a certain pattern, and to have its hope, alternately or varyingly,

suspended and fulfilled. (Louise Bogan)

. . . during the moment of juncture between syllables the trained ear listens in

both directions. (Arnold Stein)

There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound, which remains in

the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ base. (Ezra Pound)

Real poems have a rhythmic pattern: the variation of emotional intensity from

line to line, or stanza to stanza, can be drawn in the air with one’s finger. The

end usually provides the climax: though sometimes the climax comes earlier,

and the end is what the Elizabethans called a “dying fall”. Occasionally a calm

level is sustained throughout, with only minor troughs or valleys. . . . Competent

verse must also have a pattern of varying emphasis, skilfully maintained by the

rhythmic control of words. (Robert Graves)

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 16

Robert Creeley’s poem “I keep to myself such measures” encourages the reader to

view measure as a sort of treaty between the demands of head and heart, with the

voice and its modulations, its fantastic grid-work of sounds, rhythms, and

syntactical twists, serving to give ideas substance and to give emotions form. See

also DURATION, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG.

metaphor A figure of speech, or a verbal construction, that describes one thing in

terms characteristic of another: John is a pig; the car flew down the highway; her jealous

lover snarled over his beer. Although many contemporary poets eschew the use of

metaphor altogether, the metaphorical impulse is central to literature and, indeed,

to the way in which we as humans control and map experience. We are constantly

on the lookout for similarities, for ways of making comparisons between the

unfamiliar and what we already know, a process psychologists call gestalt formation.

“It is a great thing indeed”, Aristotle says in Poetics, “to make a proper use of

these poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest

thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned

from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an

intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars.”

A metaphor, declaring sameness or equality between different things, often

functions locally within the poem; when it takes over the entire poem, it is called an

extended metaphor. In a sense, all writing is metaphorical, since it argues a link

between the verbal symbol and its correspondence in the non-verbal world.

meter Traditional poetic rhythm is usually determined by the kind and number of feet

in a line of verse. Monometer: one foot; dimeter: two feet; trimeter: three feet;

tetratmeter: four feet; pentameter: five feet; hexameter: six feet (the alexandrine has

six iambic feet); heptameter: seven feet; octameter: eight feet. If you scan the best

metrical verse, you will notice that strict adherence is seldom practised. The thrust

of syntax, or argument, often works against metrical regularity, forcing a shift, or

wrench, in stress or accent. A feminine ending, or additional unstressed syllable,

may alter the pulse, encouraging an expressive, as opposed to a mechanical,

rendering of the line. So, too, the scanning of a line of verse will be influenced by

the use of devices such as punctuation, caesura and enjambment. This is where

good metrical verse differs from the Coutts-Hallmark greeting-card variety of sing-

song verses and easy rhymes. See CADENCE, FOOT, FREE VERSE, MEASURE, METER,

MUSIC, RHYTHM, and PROSODY.

metonymy A figure of speech (from the Greek, meaning “change of name”) that

replaces another word or phrase, such as “the crown” to refer to monarchy, “the

coast” to refer to the whole of BC, or “Ottawa” to refer to the matrix of negatives we

might associate with the federal government.

Glossary of Poetic Terms 17

music Music is poetry’s closest relative. Music and poetry depend absolutely on

rhythm, on patterns of recognition, and on variation from those same patterns; they

are so obviously intertwined in our lives that Plato recommended banning both

poets and musicians from the ideal republic: “Any musical innovation is full of

danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited. When modes of music

change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them. The spirit of

licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into matters and customs. It

invades contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and

constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last by an overthrow of all rights,

private as well as public.” No wonder authoritarian regimes ban jazz and other

innovative forms of music and keep an iron fist ready for poets who step out of line.

Ezra Pound insists that “Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” And T.S.

Eliot, who agrees with Plato on the significance, if not the threat, of new musical

forms, says: “Few things that can happen to a nation are more important than the

invention of a new form of music.” Eliot has an essay called “The Music of Poetry”

in which he makes an interesting link between sound and sense in the poem: “a

"musical" poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical

pattern of secondary meaning of the words which compose it, and that these two

patterns are indissoluble and one.” He also suggests that “The music of a word is, so

to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words

immediately preceding it and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context;

and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all other

meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater of less wealth of

associations.” See PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG.

narrative: A narrative poem is one that tells a story, usually of greater duration than the

anecdote, though various shortcuts are common to all narration. While its ancestry

obviously includes the epic, the narrative poem is also related to the ballad. Edgar

Allan Poe described narrative poetry as “a contradiction in terms”, because he felt

that the long poem or narrative could not sustain lyrical intensity; and British

novelist B.S. Johnson has called contemporary narrative poets “literary flat-

earthers”, presumably because they persist in telling stories when that task has been

assumed so effectively by novelists. Nevertheless, the form persists because poets

have refused to accept their reduced status as mere imagists, coiners of epigrams,

occasional recorders, or self-propagandists. As Northrop Frye suggests in The Bush

Garden, the lyric has a tendency towards preciousness, becoming too tied up with

the printed page. Narrative, being central to our lives, and one of the ancient

birthrights of poetry, remains a central option and challenge. See also EPIC and

LONG POEM, and notes on Geddes, Hughes, Kroetsch, and nichol.

objectivism Imagist poets Ezra Pound, H.D., and T.E. Hulme argued for the poem not

only as a vehicle for recording and reclaiming the physical world, but also as a

concrete thing, or object, in its own right, with unique characteristics and structural

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 18

principles. W.C. Williams is linked with this poetic movement because of his much-

discussed phrase “No ideas but in things” and his involvement in 1931 with a group

of poets, including George Open, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Reznikoff, and Lorine

Niedecker, who called themselves “the objectivists” and published an objectivist

anthology a year later.

occasional poem A poem written in response to a specific event, traditionally of

historical or political significance. Most poets, however, may write about even the

most banal occasions of their individual lives—John Donne celebrating a louse on a

woman’s hat in church, Robert Burns responding to an encounter with a mouse—or

they may write against the pressure of current events—Yeats refusing to produce a

war poem on request, Dylan Thomas refusing to mourn a death by fire, and

Margaret Atwood composing “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written”

in response to horrific reports of torture.

octave An eight-line stanza. Some sonnets are divided, either physically or in terms of

rhyme scheme, into an octave and a sestet.

onomatopoeia Words whose sounds resemble the sounds of what they describe: buzz,

bang, splat. The term also applies to a line or phrase that imitates the rhythm or

movement of some natural or human phenomenon.

oxymoron A figure of speech involving paradoxical extremes, such as “living death”

and the title of George Bowering’s novel, Burning Water.

paradox A true statement that appears, initially, to be false; or a statement that seems

at face value to be absurd but turns out to be reasonable. A poetic figure of extreme

paradox is called an oxymoron.

pentameter A line consisting of five metrical feet.

persona An assumed mask or voice through which the poet speaks. A good deal has

been written in this century about the removal of self from poetry. Yeats made the

claim that “all that is personal soon rots”; Eliot recommended depersonalization, in

one form or another; even Charles Olson sounded an alarm against the “lyrical

interference of the individual ego”. Not surprisingly, the persona, or mask, has

played a central role in poetry in this and other ages, from the literal masks of Greek

theatre to the fictonalized voices of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, from the

assumed personas in Browning’s dramatic monologues to Eliot’s eccentric narrator

in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and random voices in The Waste Land.

When Keats described “negative capability” as the capacity to get outside the

self and into objects and persons, he was identifying a central procedure of the

imagination. Furthermore, since language itself is a system of symbols or signs that

Glossary of Poetic Terms 19

enables us to communicate, it can readily be argued that all experience rendered in

terms of language—and in its most expressive form, poetry—must be, by definition,

fiction. Even poets such as Denise Levertov, Al Purdy, and Sharon Olds, who

appear to be writing from the self, may be said to have constructed convenient

public personas which enable them to display, analyze, and give imaginative shape

to personal experience.

personification Endowing ininimate objects with human characteristics: the car jumped

the medium. A phrase such as the sky wept may achieve a modest effect in a poem,

but, in its extreme form, the humanizing of nature may appear ludicrous and result

in what is known as the pathetic fallacy.

poetry There are almost as many definitions for poetry as there are poets. Pope called

poetry “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”; Wordsworth called it

“emotion recollected in tranquility”; Dylan Thomas said poetry is what makes your

toenails twinkle; Robert Frost insisted that poetry, like love, moves from delight to

wisdom: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting”;

and Rilke considered poetry “the past that breaks out in your heart”.

While John Hollander, throwing in the towel, may describe a poem as “anything

that purports to be one”, other poets, including Joseph Brodsky, take the matter

more seriously:

In the work of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not talking

to people anymore, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing is

simply talking back to the language itself—as beauty, sensuality, wisdom,

irony—those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry

is not an art or a branch of art, it’s something more. If what distinguishes us

from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic

operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards

poetry as an entertainment, as a “read”, commits an anthropological crime,

in the first place, against himself. (The Paris Review, 1979)

prose poem In an interview with Karla Hammond, Margaret Atwood makes an

interesting attempt to locate the prose poem:

The unit of the poem is the syllable. The unit in a prose work—a short story

or a novel—is something much larger. It may be the character or the

paragraph. Formally it may be the paragraph, but then you’re working with

very large building blocks—things that may appear on page fifty and again

on page one hundred. It’s a very large structure. With the prose poem, the

unit is still the syllable, but the difference between a prose poem and a short

story for me is that the prose poem is still concerned with that rhythmical

syllabic structure. You’re as meticulous about the syllables in a prose poem

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 20

as you are in a poem. If the syllables aren”t right, then the whole thing is

wrong.

In his introduction to The Lyric Paragraph, the poet Robert Allen manages to make

the controversial statement that it’s possible “to conceive of the development of the

prose poem as part of a general evolution—from pre-literate to post-literate times—

of prose as the main vehicle of poetic ideas”, yet still argue that the prose poem has

capabilities belonging to no other form: “Its particular qualities must clearly be

located in the only structural units commonly available to a prose writer: the

sentence and the paragraph, as well as in the almost invisible structures of thought

and perception a reader brings to a block of type on a page.” These capabilities he

describes as follows:

In the first place, sacrificing the line breaks, caesuras, and built-in

discontinuities of the stanza, prose poems can achieve an intense, almost

hypnotic quality particulary suited to surrealistic techniques. . . . Secondly,

as prose, the prose poem transmits all of the fictional signals we recognize

immediately when we approach a familiar-looking page of type. It often

works towards something approaching plot—or at least plays on the

reader’s expectations that fiction implies time and change. The prose poem

can tell small stories marvelously well, and larger ones too, through elision

and implication, often moving formally towards the prose sketch, the essay

or the short story, usually with a compactness and poetic power not easily

obtained with these longer, more elliptical forms. Time, change, history,

mythology, recollection—all of these can be evoked and exploited more

surely and more accessibly than in most other poetic modes, though not,

obviously, in any exclusive way. . . . Thirdly, the prose poem is an ideal form

for the working out of ideas through extended imagery, analogy, dialectics—

and thus can quite easily be the sort of poem that is almost a short essay or

study—reflective, inquiring and self-revealing. . . . Finally, the prose poem,

in equal measures with the lyric poem, can move, by means of its language,

its music and its images, into those mysterious borderlands in which the best

art works its magic.

Whether you locate this hybrid form nearer to poetry or to prose, the prose poem

holds as much attraction for contemporary poets such as Atwood, Bly, Marlatt, and

McKay as it did for the Baudelaire and the author of the Song of Songs. For an

opposing view, consider these comments:

The prose poem, I feel, always skirts affectation, which is all right when you

want to be affected, but it is no substitute for the ease of verse. (Seamus

Heaney)

The prose poem is, to my ear, a contradiction in terms; no matter how

interesting in substance, it comes dull to my ear. Unduly dull, like an

Economics text that hasn’t yet heard of even prose rhythms. (Philip Booth)

Glossary of Poetic Terms 21

See also Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s intiguing prose piece “Modern Poetry Is Prose (But

It Is Saying Plenty)”.

prosody This term is useful, but a it’s bit of a brain-cruncher. Ezra Pound described

prosody as “the articulation of the total sound of the poem”. In drawing attention to

the poem as a complex network of sounds and rhythms, an acoustic phenomenon

worthy of the analytical skills of an engineer or linguist, Pound made prosody

sound so all-embracing as to defy description. Small wonder the term has been

ignored in favour of simpler terms such as music, rhythm, measure, and cadence.

Prosody is absolutely central to the poetic experience. In his essay “Prosody as

Rhythmic Cognition” (Perspectives on Poetry, edited by J.L. Calderwood and H.E.

Toliver), Harvey Gross makes this clear: “A poem is not an ‘idea’ or ‘feeling’

rendered into metrical language; still less is it an attitude toward an experience. A

poem is a symbol, in which idea, experience, and attitude are transmuted into

feelings; these feelings move in significant arrangements: rhythmically. It is prosody

and its structures which articulate the movement of feeling in a poem, and render to

our understanding meanings which are not paraphrasable. Prosody enables the poet

to communicate states of awareness, tensions, emotions, all of man’s inner life

which the helter-skelter of ordinary propositional language cannot express.” In

other words, prosody “is itself meaning. Rhythm is neither outside of a poem’s

meaning nor an ornament to it.” Echoing aesthetician Suzanne Langer, one of his

major critical influences, Gross concludes that prosody “comprises those elements in

a poem which abstract for perception the flow of time. This time, experienced in a

passage of verse, is not chronological time, measured by metronomic pulse, but felt

time, musical ‘duration’.”

Prosody concerns itself, then, with properties of sound in a poem, the study of

sound-clusters, units of recurrence, the relation among smaller and larger speech

units—that is, from the word with its nuclear constellation of letters, to syllable,

phrase, sentence, stanza, and the entire poem as a verbal utterance. See also

CADENCE, DURATION, MEASURE, MUSIC, RHYTHM, SONG, and STRESS.

pun A play on words that usually involves two words with the same sound but

different meanings: “I had a great time in Prague, except for all the bad Czechs”; as

King Lear discovered: “To heir is human; to fore-give, assinine.”

punctuation The conventions used for emphasis and clarity in ordinary prose can be

equally useful in poetry, although the post-Gutenburgian poet has many other

means—caesura, line-break, stanza-break, spacing, unusual typographical deploy-

ment—of creating a pause or interval. e.e. cummings, bpNicol, and the concrete

poets see the printed page as a visual space, or a musical score, challenging, even

demanding, from poets more than conventional punctuation and the usual hugging

of the left-hand margin. Few poets, however, even among those who emphasize the

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 22

oral rather than the printed dimension of poetry, are immune to the advantages of

some visual variety in the presentation of their work on the page.

quatrain A four-line stanza.

refrain The regular repetition of several lines throughout the poem is a common

feature in historical ballads and in contemporary folk and country & western music.

The refrain allows for greater emphasis and ease of recall and, in the case of music,

audience participation. Poets may, however, also repeat a word, phrase, or line

irregularly to signal its importance and to heighten the lyrical intensity of a poem or

passage. See RHYME, SESTINA, and VILLANELLE.

revision Paul Valèry knew enough about the endless task of rewriting and reworking

to say that a poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned. Yeats constantly revised

his work, claiming, “It is myself that I remake.” A few poets, such as Robert Creeley,

claim to do most revision in their heads before setting a poem to paper, but most

writers make some of their most startling leaps and improvements during revision.

rhetoric A positive term, once referring to the art of verbal persusasion, to the

techniques required for writing well. In the past century, the term assumed a

negative connotation. Yeats added to this confusion when he used the term in a

pejorative way, dismissing rhetoric as a linguistic operation inferior in quality to

poetry. Where rhetoric is often used as a term to dismiss poetry that tries to

persuade, it must be recognized that all art endeavours to persuade, to influence, to

move us. The critic Wayne Booth has had some success in restoring the term to its

original meaning in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction.

rhyme While rhyme refers broadly to the poetic principle of recurrence, or repetition,

most readers think of rhyme only in terms of repetitions that occur at the ends of

lines, to the ancient practice of making poems and ballads more easily memorized

by repeating approximate-sounding words at regular intervals. Although we can

identify many ways of creating a rhyming effect, here are three of the most

common:

full rhyme: witch / switch; money / honey; tiffany / polyphany

approximate (or half) rhyme: fix / lacks; fox / tacks

assonantal rhyme: hat / mad; groove / move

consonantal rhyme: run / ran; maid / mud; hill / hall

With the invention of the printing-press, the need for such mnemonic devices

diminished. Rhyme, however, did not disappear as a component of poetic rhythm,

because, in its subtlest form, it answers to other, deeper needs in the human psyche,

such as delight, enchantment, and healing. We love to be able to identify, predict,

and be surprised by not just end-rhyme, but many different kinds of recurrences in

Glossary of Poetic Terms 23

a poem. While end-rhyme continues to be an essential ingredient in children’s verse

and in song lyrics, it does not figure prominently in twentieth-century poetry. Poets

who still find rhyming a worthwhile and rigorous discipline tend to avoid end-

stopped lines as much as is possible, using enjambment to make the rhyme all but

imperceptible to the untrained ear.

The poet Frank Davey, paraphrasing Robert Duncan (“Rime, A Scholarly Piece”,

Evidence 9, Winter 1965), speaks of rhyme in the broadest possible sense, in terms of

the “measurable distance between correspondences, or the instinctively measurable

sense of recurrence that is possible at the opposite ends of a continuum of

resemblance”. “Rhyme”, he says, “could involve the correspondence of almost any

two or more things: themes, images, syntactic units, phonetic units.” See also

CADENCE, MEASURE, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG.

rhythm Rhythm is the most powerful and sensual ingredient of poetry, especially if

you listen to what poets have to say on the subject. According to Coleridge, the aim

of rhythm is “to hold in check the workings of passion”. Yeats has a similar insight:

“The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of

contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one

moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us

waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind

liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols.” The Mexican poet

Octavio Paz has argued that “Rhythm was a magical procedure: to bewitch and

imprison certain forces, to exorcise others.”

If Yeats and Paz seem to be shifting the project from the erotic to the religious

and the political, don’t be surprised. Listen to Robert Hass: “Rhythm has direct

access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make

us move, it is a power. And power is political.” Ezra Pound was so convinced of the

political signficance of poetic rhythm, he said: “A man who devises new rhythms is

a man who extends and refines our sensibility.”

Susanne Langer says: “If the feeling of rhythm be granted the status of a genuine

experience, perhaps even of cognition”—and what person has not experienced the

power of drum-rhythm or word-rhythm?—“then what is experienced in rhythm can

only be time itself.” The poet Ron Smith shifts focus to the reader’s response:

“Rhythm in poetry can be identified as the way in which the poem is heard and

then spoken by the individual voice. It is the discovery of the poem’s heart, the

poem’s experience. It is the way we play what has been scored; it it how we

interpret the time signature or, in closed forms, the metre of the poem.”

It’s easier to say what rhythm does than what it is. Here we have to get down to

identifying patterns of sound, which would include meter, rhyme, recurrence,

alliteration, assonance, dissonance, and structures of meaning, such as phrasing and

syntax, all those elements which prove poetry is a closer kin to music than to

philosophy. See also METER, MUSIC, PROSODY, MEASURE, CADENCE, and SONG.

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 24

rime royal A stanza consisting of seven iambic pentameter lines rhyming ababbcc,

such as used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde.

scansion The act of identifying the metrical pattern in poetry. See FOOT and METRE.

sentence The sentence is one of the main units of composition in poetry, more so in

traditional than in contemporary verse, where syllable and phrase assume greater

significance. Contemporary poets have struggled against the rules and formality of

traditional grammar, what the poet Bill Bissett calls “the imperial sentence”; they

have stretched, broken, mangled, and deconstructed the sentence in the hope of

freeing the poet from a too rational, too controlled, discourse. The best poets,

however, never stray far from the sentence. W.B. Yeats argued for a “passionate

syntax”, and John Berryman performed the most amazing poetic dance within his

wired and convoluted sentences. See SYNTAX.

sestet A six-line stanza. Some sonnets are divided, either physically or in terms of

rhyme scheme, into an octave and a sestet.

sestina A poetic form of French and Italian origin, the sestina, consists of six six-line

stanzas and a final three-line stanza, not employing terminal rhyme but rather

repeating the end-words from the first stanza according to the following pattern:

abcdef, faebdc, cfdabe, ecbfad, deacfb, bdfeca, eca. The concluding triplet must also

contain all six of the original end-words.

simile A figure of speech that compares two things indirectly, using like or as: “My

love is like a red, red rose”; “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a

patient etherised upon a table”; “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind

moves upon silence”. The indirect comparison of the simile has less power to move,

or persuade, than does the direct comparison of METAPHOR and has thus been

dismissed by some twentieth-century poets as too cerebral or intellectual; but the

extended simile, often called the epic or Homeric simile, has proven useful to poets

of all ages, allowing them to construct substantial digressions or asides—lateral or

horizontal shifts—thereby providing humour, analogy, and other useful counter-

points to an ongoing argument or narrative.

song Music and poetry have always been closely allied, so it’s no surprise to hear the

poem referred to as a song, or lyric. There is a provocative statement by the

American poet Wendell Berry in “The Specialization of Poetry” (The Poet’s Work,

edited by Reginald Gibbons) that is worth considering because it reminds us that

poets are essentially singers who wandered by mistake into a dictionary or a

printing establishment and never found their way out:

song is natural; we have it in common with animals. It is also traditional; it

has to be sung to someone, who will have to recognize it as song. Rhythm is

Glossary of Poetic Terms 25

fundamental to it, and is its profoundest reference. The rhythm of a song or a

poem rises, no doubt, in reference to the pulse and breath of the poet, as is

often said, but that is too specialized an accounting; it rises also in reference

to daily and seasonal—and surely even longer—rhythms in the life of the

poet and in the life that surrounds him. The rhythm of a poem resonates

with these larger rhythms that surround it; it fills its environment with

sympathetic vibrations. Rhyme, which is a function of rhythm, may suggest

this sort of resonance; it marks the coincidence of the rhythm of the structure

with the rhythm of the lines, or the coincidence of smaller structures with

larger ones, as when the day, the month, and the year all end at the same

moment. Song, then, is a force opposed to speciality and to isolation. It is the

testimony of the singer’s inescapable relation to the world, to the

community, and also, I think, to tradition.

See also CADENCE, LYRIC, MEASURE, METER, MUSIC, PROSODY, and RHYTHM.

sonnet A fourteen-line lyric, originating in Italy and called the Italian or Petrarchan

sonnet, which has an initial OCTAVE rhyming abbaabba, followed by a SESTET often

rhyming cdecde or cdcdcd. The English, or Shakespearean, sonnet usually has three

QUATRAINS and a closing COUPLET rhyming abba cddc effe gg; the Spenserian

variation has an interlocking rhyme for its quatrains: abab bcbc cdcd. Many modern

poets use the sonnet, or approximate-sonnet, and there is some justification for

thinking that its structure of statement followed by a resolution (or perhaps thesis,

antithesis, resulting in a synthesis), answering perhaps to some emotional dialectic

or need within us for revelation and closure, provides the fundamental underlying

structure of a great many FREE-VERSE lyrics.

stanza The formal division of a poem into discrete units consisting of a certain number

of lines. Traditional poems will most often have stanzas of a uniform size, while

unrhymed or free-verse poems may have stanzas of varying size. The stanzas of

some poets are closed, completing a thought or enclosing some movement. Others,

such as Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay”, use the stanza for primarily visual

reasons, to heighten the impression of deliberate shape. The couplet, while trad-

itionally rhymed, is now defined as any stanza of two lines. The tercet consists of

three lines, in its earliest manifestations characterized by a single rhyme. The Italian

terza rima, used by Dante in his Divine Comedy, consisted of three-line units, not

broken into stanzas, but linked by a common rhyme: aba, bcb, cec, ded. Shelley

modifed terza rima in his “Ode to the West Wind”. The quatrain is a four-line stanza,

common throughout the history of poetry in English. Chaucer’s rime royal is a seven-

line stanza rhyming ababbcc. The Italian ottava rima, introduced by Sir Thoms

Wyatt, consists of eight lines rhyming abababcc, and was used for comic effect by

Byron in Don Juan. The Spenserian stanza, nine lines long and rhyming ababbcbcc,

first appeared in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, with eight iambic pentameter

lines followed by an iambic hexameter (or alexandrine). This stanza form was also

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 26

used by Keats in “Eve of St Agnes” and by Shelley in “Adonais”. See also SESTINA

and VILLANELLE.

stressed syllables In metrical verse, each foot contains stressed and unstressed

syllables, which usually reflect the way a word or phrase is pronounced in ordinary

speech. Sometimes, the stress, or accent, of a word or a phrase will be wrenched or

altered by the thrust and import of the sentence in which it appears. See ACCENT,

FEET, and METRE.

structure One of the most difficult of critical terms, structure is often used inter-

changeably with form to describe the organizing, or shaping, principles of a poem.

The critic Paul Fussell (in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, 1965), considers logic an

essential ingredient of poetic structure:

There are many reasons why a poem has the power to endure, to transcend

its own local, historical moment and to join itself to the very small body of

permanent work which calls us back to it again and again. One of the

foremost reasons for a poem’s powers of endurance is its structural integrity,

the sort of logical accommodation of statement to form, of elements to

wholes, that we have been considering. Although successful poems do not

always inhabit a world of logic, their forms do; and just as the world of logic

is constructed from immutable propositions, so those elements of poems

which belong to that world partake of immutability. Like the forms of

geometry or music, the forms of poetry, whether stichic or strophic, fixed or

occasional, attach the art of poetry to the permanent world—that is, they

effect this attachment if they are sufficiently logical, economical, and organic.

See FORM and PROSODY.

style Style is not an arbitrary shape or vestment, but something that has its origins in

the creative temperament. Albert Camus, in The Rebel, argues that “Artistic creation

is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on

account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.” Camus goes on to

say that “By the treatment that the artist imposes on reality, he declares the intensity

of his rejection. . . . This correction which the artist imposes by his language and by

a redistribution of elements derived from reality is called style and gives the re-

created universe its unity and its boundaries. It attempts, in the work of every rebel,

to impose its laws on the world, and succeeds in the case of a few geniuses.”

Great style, which Camus insists is invisible, has as much to do with vision as

with technique. This romantic view of style has, at least, the advantage of lifting the

debate beyond a choice between traditional metrics and the techniques of free verse.

Short-story writer Mavis Gallant (in “What Is Style?”) insists that “style in writing,

as in painting, is the author’s thumbprint, his mark. . . . Style cannot be copied,

except by the untalented. It is, finally, the distillation of a lifetime of reading and

Glossary of Poetic Terms 27

listening, of selection and rejection.” Louise Glück, a superb stylist, rejects the

notion that poems are our fingerprints, arguing that authenticity has nothing to do

with autobiographical experience or sincerity and everything to do with “the

processes by which experience is changed—heightened, distilled, made memorable.

. . . The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be

invisioned.”

If “style is the man” (or woman), this raises the question, which man, which

woman, for surely a poet may assume any number of guises or personas and adopt

or forge a different style for each. See FORM and STRUCTURE.

syllabic verse While Elizabeth Barrett may have asked Robert Browning if she could

count the ways in which she loved him, it’s likely that her husband spent his own

time counting syllables. Syllabic verse is measured not by counting feet or stresses,

but by counting syllables. Tom Gunn claimed to be unable to write free verse, but to

find in syllabic verse both the discipline and free-verse effects he required.

synecdoche A figure of speech in which a part is used to refer to the whole, such as

“twenty head”, “a hired gun”, and “a private eye”.

syntax Winnifred Nowottny, who calls syntax the “groundwork of the poet’s art”,

argues that “Of all the elements necessary to make an utterance meaningful, the

most powerful is syntax, controlling as it does the order in which impressions are

received and conveying the mental relations ‘behind’ sequences of words.” In The

Language Poets Use (1962), she says that “syntax can, by repetition, or carefully con-

trolled variation, function as the prime organizing element in the pattern of

movement of a poem—as in Dylan Thomas’s ‘Ceremony After A Fire Raid’. . . it is

still true in such a case that the power that enables the poet to concentrate into

epigrammatic form the shape of a man’s destiny, or the moral status of his acts, is

the power syntax has of giving prominence to logical relationships.” See Donald

Davie’s Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (1955).

tercet A three-line stanza, sometimes used with a single rhyme.

trope A figure of speech. See FIGURE.

verse This term normally refers to a metrical composition, particularly a line of poetry.

To versify usually means to write a line or lines with identifiable metre. While verse

has not only given way to the more broadly used term poetry, it has also come to be

applied to what I call the Coutts-Hallmark syndrome: those metrical compositions

(such as greeting-card lyrics and advertising jingles) that lack the depth or linguistic

subtlety of poetry and are characterized by cliché and trite, predictable rhymes.

In more popular usage, the term verse may refer to the STANZAS in a song or

hymn or to lighter, humorous forms, as in this self-mocking ditty by Ogden Nash:

20th-Century Poetry & Poetics 28

“Immobilized the poet lies, / attended by a nurse. / But in a week or so he’ll rise /

and go from bed to verse.” Thus, the origin of the terms “comic verse” and “light

verse.” See METRE and POETRY.

villanelle A French verse form with roots in fifteenth-century Italian folk songs, the

villanelle generally consists of five tercets rhyming aba, followed by a quatrain

rhyming abaa. The opening line in the first tercet is usually repeated as the final line

in the second and fourth tercets; the third line of the first tercet usually recurs as the

final line of the third and fifth tercets; and these two repeated lines generally recur

as the last two lines in the closing quatrain. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into

That Good Night” is one of the most famous modern examples of the villanelle.

voice A poet is often said, at a certain point in mid-career, to have “found his or her

voice”, by which we mean the poet seems to have reached full stride, to have moved

beyond the awkward imitative stages and developed an “easy” originality. While

this voice may be recognizable, it is often difficult to pin down, combining certain

word-choices, ways of constructing phrases, usages of syntax, idiosyncratic ways of

viewing the world, a certain tone or manner. Al Purdy, who has a recognizable

poetic persona, argues against settling for a single poetic voice, recommending

instead “a continual becoming and a changing and a moving”. See also STYLE.

word A word is composed, at the most minute linguistic level, of letters—that is,

vowels and consonants—which constitute its unique sound- or audio-scape. A word

may also be divided into syllables, which constitute units of its sense or meaning.

Although some poets (Charles Olson is one, Margaret Atwood another) argue that

the syllable is the basic building block in poetry, the word has long been considered

the basic unit of expression in all writing. Alexander Pope described poetry as “the

best words in the best order”. French poet Verlaine insisted that poetry is made not

of ideas, but of words, whose letters and syllables are the basic components of

sound.

Word is translated as logos (or “law”) in Greek; thus the intriguing New

Testament equation of Christ and Word, and with language as the beginning, or

source, of all creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with

God, and the Word was God.” See also CONCRETENESS and DICTION.

zeugma The “yoking” of two words of significantly different value into one grammat-

ical relation, as when Pope makes a list that includes “puffs, powders, patches,

bibles, billet-doux”, wherein the sacred is degraded by its random link with objects

of human vanity and cosmetic concerns are raised to the level of a religion. So, also,

Pope’s line: “Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.”