English 28A

A variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. May contain: meter, syllabification, rhyme, alliteration, figurative language, and may bend normal conventions of speech.

An arrangement of lines of verse in a pattern usually repeated throughout the poem. Each stanza has a fixed number of verses or lines, a prevailing meter, and a consistent rhyme scheme.

A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress.Each unit of stress and unstressed syllables is called a "foot."

A lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed syllable.

Two light syllables followed by a stressed syllable

A stressed followed by a light syllable

A stressed syllable followed by two light syllables

A lyric poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with rhymes arranged according to certain definite patterns. It usually expresses a single, complete idea or thought with a reversal, twist, or change of direction in the concluding lines.

Has an eight line stanza (called an octave) followed by a six line stanza (called a sestet). The octave has two quatrains rhymingabba, abba, the first of which presents the theme, the second further develops it. In the sestet, the first three lines reflect on or exemplify the theme, while the last three bring the poem to a unified end. The sestet may be arranged cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce.

Uses three quatrains; each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Typically, the final two lines follow a "turn" or a "volta," (sometimes spelled volte, likevolte-face) because they reverse, undercut, or turn from the original line of thought to take the idea in a new direction.

Is similar to the Petrarchan sonnet, but it does not divide its thought between the octave and the sestet--the sense or line of thinking runs straight from the eighth to ninth line. Also, Milton expands the sonnet's repertoire to deal not only with love as the earlier sonnets did, but also to include politics, religion, and personal matters.

"Turn"; Sudden change in thought, direction, or emotion, near the conclusion of a sonnet, Followed by a couplet (English) or sestet (Italian)

Pattern of a rhyme

A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblence

Also called a metaphysical ____. An elaborate pr unusual comparison, especially using unlikely metaphors, simile, hyperbole, and contradiction.

The trope of exaggeration or overstatement

Using a contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. It reveals deeper truths to their contradiction

Also called paradoxes

A unit of foot of poetry that consists of lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed syllable

If a line ends with a lightly stressed syllable. Or with 2 syllables

A period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500's-early 1600's

A Renaissance intellectual and artistic movement triggered by "rediscovery" of classical Greek and Roman language, culture, and literature.

Also called Paranomasia- A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning

A single phrase or word with different meaning

Speaker uses a word one way, but a second speaker uses/responds using the word in a different way

A rhetorical device or figure of speech involving shifts in the meaning of words. Also a short dialogue inserted into the Church mass during the early Middle Ages as a sort of mini-drama

Using vaguely suggestive physical objects to embody a more general idea: Crown for royalty

Using a part of a physical object to represent the whole object

Giving human qualities to inanimate objects

Form of personification in which an inanimate object gains the ability to speak

A form of compounding in Olrd Norse, and Germanic Poetry. The poet creates a new compound word or phrase to describe an object or activity. This compound uses mixed imagery (catachresis) to describe properties of the object in indirect, imaginative, or enigmatic ways; ie: Tramp-stamp, rug-rats, bible-thumpers.

The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor
Whoso List to Hunt

Love, that doth reign and live within my thought

When I was Fair and Young

Sonnet 1
Sonnet 23 
Sonnet 67

Sonnet 1
Sonnet 47
Sonnet 63 
(From Astrophil and Stella)

Sonnet 29
Sonnet 65
Sonnet 135
(From Sonnets)

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
The Flea
Sonnet 14
(From Holy Sonnets)

To the Lord General Cromwell

An Horatian Ode

The Prologue

The Spleen

The Rights of Woman 
To the Poor

To the Shade of Burns

On Being Brought from Africa to America 
Liberty and Peace

The Slave Trade

Songs of Innocence, "Holy Thursday (1)"
The Little Black Boy 
Songs of Experience "Holy Thursday (2)"
London

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.

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.

Repeating identical or similar vowels (especially in stressed syllables) in nearby words. Assonance in final vowels of lines can often lead to half-rhyme.

Also spelled rime, rhyme is a matching similarity of sounds in two or more words, especially when their accented vowels and all succeeding consonants are identical.

Rhyme in which the last word at the end of each verse is the word that rhymes

A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line.

Rhymes that end with a heavy stress on the last syllable in each rhyming word. (1 syllable)

A rhyme that involves two syllables rather than one.

Exact rhyme or perfect rhyme is rhyming two words in which both the consonant sounds and vowel sounds match to create a rhyme.

Rhyming words that seem to rhyme when written down as text because parts of them are spelled identically, but which are pronounced differently from each other in modern English. Examples include forth/worth, come/home, bury/fury, stove/shove, or ear/bear

Rhymes created out of words with similar but not identical sounds. In most of these instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are identical, or vice versa.

A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener at length. It is similar to the soliloquy in theater, in that both a dramatic monologue and a soliloquy often involve the revelation of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the speaker. Two famous examples are Browning's "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." Cf. interior monologue and monologue.

Plural, personae or personas; Latin,("mask"): An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others.

The implied author is distinguishable from the narrator in that the implied author does not recount events or dialogue, but instead is present through ideology

Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses rather than the artificial constraints of metrical feet. Commonly called vers libre in French (the English term first appears in print in 1908), this poetry often involves the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables in unpredictable but clever ways. Do note that, within individual sections of a free verse poem, a specific line or lines may fall into metrical regularity. The distinction is that this meter is not sustained through the bulk of the poem.

(also called unrhymed iambic pentameter): Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents.

A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works. Authors often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association, contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself

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)

A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level

The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect. For instance, Churchill declared, "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be.

A literary scheme in which the author introduces words or concepts in a particular order, then later repeats those terms or similar ones in reversed or backwards order. It involves taking parallelism and deliberately turning it inside out, creating a "crisscross" pattern. For example, consider the chiasmus that follows: "By day the frolic, and the dance by night."

Distinctive language used by poets, i.e., language that would not be common in their everyday speech. The most common signs of poetic diction include involve archaisms, neologisms, rhyme, and unusual figures of speech.

The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary. For instance, the termscivil 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.

(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

(Greek, "bad sound"): The term in poetry refers to the use of words that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds. It is the opposite of euphony.

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.

(Latin trans + ascendere, "to climb beyond"): Transcendentalism is an American philosophical, religious, and literary movement roughly equivalent to the Romantic movement in England (see Romanticism).

(plural: caesurae): A pause separating phrases within lines of poetry--an important part of poetic rhythm. The term caesura comes from the Latin "a cutting" or "a slicing."

A vague, amorphous term referring to the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and philosophy of Europe and America in the early twentieth-century. Scholars do not agree exactly when Modernism began--most suggest after World War I, but some suggest it started as early as the late nineteenth century in France. Likewise, some assert Modernism ended with World War II or the bombing of Nagasaki, to be replaced with Postmodernism, or that modernism lasted until the 1960s, when post-structural linguistics dethroned it. Others suggest that the division between modernism and postmodernism is false, and that postmodernism is merely the continuing process of Modernism.

Also called "accentual rhythm," sprung rhythm is a term invented by the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe his personal metrical system in which the major stresses are "sprung" from each line of poetry. The accent falls on the first syllable of every foot and a varying number of unaccented syllables following the accented one, but all feet last an equal amount of time when being pronounced.

It's a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.The stanzas in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c pattern. The form is similar to the older Sicilian octave, but evolved separately and is unrelated. The Sicilian octave is derived from the medieval strambottoand was a crucial step in the development of the sonnet, whereas the OR is related to the canzone, a stanza form.

An early twentieth-century artistic movement in the United States and Britain. Imagists believed poets should use common, everyday vocabulary, experiment with new rhythm, and use clear, precise, concentrated imagery

In other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Using clauses with a precise degree of subordination and clear indication of the logical relationship between them--i.e., having clear subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, as opposed to parataxis. This style involves long complex sentences. The writings of John Milton would be an example.

Rhetorically juxtaposing two or more clauses or prepositions together in strings or with few or no connecting conjunctions or without indicating their relationship to each other in terms of co-ordination or subordination; i.e. a loose association of clauses as opposed to hypotaxis. A common form of this is asyndeton, in which expected conjunctions fail to appear for artistic reasons.

A dynamic period of writing, poetry, music, and art among black Americans during the 1920s and 1930s including figures such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Langston Hughes. These decades were marked by the post-World War I return of servicemen and the mass migration of black citizens to the urban North as African-Americans sought to flee the legal segregation in effect in America's South. The period is sometimes called "the Jazz Age" because of the parallel growth of jazz and soul music at the same time among black musical artists.

Poetry written in prose instead of using verse but preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery and emotional effects.

Excerpt from The Preface to Lyrical Ballads
“Expostulation and Reply”
“The Tables Turned”
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

“The Eolian Harp”
“This Lime Tree Bower My Prison”

“Stanzas (When a Man)”

“England in 1819”

“Ode on a Greek Urn”

From Aurora Leigh Book 5 [Poets and the present age]

“In an Artist’s Studio”
“In Progress”

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
“Wild Nights”
“The Soul selects her own Society—”
“Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—”

“The Lady of Shalott”

“My Last Duchess”

“The Slave’s Dream”

“Sonnet—To Science”
 “Annabel Lee”

From Song of Myself 1
From Song of Myself 24
“Beat! Beat! Drums!”

“God’s Grandeur”

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” 
“Easter 1916”

“The Garden”
“In a Station of the Metro”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“‘next to of course god america i”

“This Is Just to Say”
“Self-Protection”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Theme for English B

Heritage
Incident

Kitchenete Building
The birth in a narrow room
we real cool

A far cry from Africa 
Midsummer

Digging

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

The Fish

Kills Bugs Dead

Bath

Metals Metals

Information

Arrangement of words or phrase to create well-formed sentences in a language.  Normal word order in English sentences is firmly fixed in - subject -verb -object sequence or subject-verb-complement.

In poetry, word order may be shifted around to meet emphasis, to heighten the connection between two words, or to pick up on specific implications. The order of the poems words, or syntax, conveys an emotional, psychological and spiritual impact."

A Word or group of words functioning as a noun

occurs whenenjambment happens – when the grammatical sentence flows over the line endings of a poem. However, not all enjambment has double syntax. Double syntax only occurs when there is an uncertainty about how the sentence should be read because the word at the end of the line could grammatically belong to either the phrase before it or the phrase after.

metrical foot consisting of two consecutive slacks:  ∪ ∪.

metrical foot consisting of two consecutive stresses:  /  /.

IMAGINATION

NATURE

INDIVIDUAL

CRITIQUE OF SOCIAL ORDER

REJECTION OF NEOCLASSICAL STYLE

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY

•Most famous genre: Medieval Romances

•Some prose, some verse

•Quest narrative featuring, adventure, courtly love, chivalry, fantastic antagonists and obstacles

•Written in praise of religious and chivalric ideals such as courtesy, courage, manners, piety, loyalty, etc.

•Influences: folk traditions/legends (e.g. King Arthur), Persian tales

•Examples: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Morte d’ Arthur (sir Thomas Mallory), Lancelot and Perceval (Chretien de Troyes)

Other famous works from the period: Dante, The Divine Comedy (1321), Petrarch’s sonnets (c. 1350)

•Early Tudor Age, 1500-58

•Poets: Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

•Elizabethan Age, 1558-1603 (Elizabeth’s Reign)

•Poets: Sir Phillip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare

•Jacobean Age, 1603-25 (James I’s Reign)

•Poets: William Shakespeare, John Donne

•Caroline Age, 1625-49 (Charles I’s Reign)

•Poets: John Donne, John Milton (Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick)

•Commonwealth Age, 1649-1660 (Puritan Interregnum)

•Poets: John Milton, Andrew Marvel, Ann Bradstreet

•The (re) Rise of Humanism: predominant perspective shifts from Christianity to the secular

•Revival of classical (Greek and Roman) works and authors

•Copernican Revolution

•The sun is the center of the solar system

•The Reformation and the rise of Protestantism

•Individuals have relationships with God and scripture that don’t need the mediation of the church

•Discovery of the new world

•Rise of nationalism and imperialism

•Invention of the printing press

•Part II. Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1700-45

•“Elegant simplicity”: restraint, clarity, regularity and good sense. Decorum: choosing the right form (epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, ode) and language for the subject

•Good methods + Wit: quickness of mind, inventiveness, a knack for conceiving images and metaphors

•Characteristic “poetic diction”: personification, periphrasis (“finny tribes” vs “fish”), stock phrases (“shining swords”), Latinate words and syntax

•Favorite verse forms: the heroic couplet, blank verse

•Writers and works: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Jonathan Swift, “The Tale of the Tub,” Anne Finch, “The Spleen”

•Part III. Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1740-85

•Great prose dominates: novels, philosophy, criticism, biography, history, aesthetics, politics, economics

•Poetry on the feelings of simple people: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” Crabbe’s “The Village”

•Graveyard Poets: Thomas Gray, William Collins, Mark Akenside, Joseph and Thomas Warton wrote poems in which speakers think dark thoughts (usually about death and decay) in gothic settings (like graveyards)

•The gothic: the supernatural, fancy, willful excess

•William Shenstone, 1761: “The public has seen all that art can do, and they want the more striking efforts of wild, original, enthusiastic genius.”

•Revival of the lyric: William Cowper, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith.

•Authors: Phillis Wheatley, Anna Barbauld

•The novel: realistic portrayals often in service of reform. More broadly displaying societal relationships. Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Brontes.

•Verse Novels: ex. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

•What’s the proper subject: the heroic past or the current day?

•“Tempered” Romanticism:

•Cannot sustain a belief in the power of imagination

•Art for art’s sake

•Dramatizing the individual (Browning’s dramatic monologues)

Other characteristics:

Pictorial—detail used to create visual images

Sound—syntactic elaboration

Represent psychology—tone, mood , character

—Imagism promoted hard, clear, precise images. Imagists insisted on direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective and avoids all words that don’t contribute to that presentation. Famous proponent: Ezra Pound.

—Freer metrical movement

—Short poems

—Alienation of the individual from society and other individuals

—Fragmentation of experience—how do you make sense of a senseless world?

—Intellectual complexity

—Metaphors and symbols

—Allusiveness

—Irony (often created by mixing high and low language)

—Naturalistic language and freer forms

—Wit and puns