Literary Terms Modern Essay Essay

The aim of this glossary is not to set in concrete address that be constantly changing and evolving, only when rather to help assimilators expatiate the critical tools and vocabulary with which to understand and talk nigh poe sample.Since poets themselves lots protest about the meaning and spl wind upour of terms much(prenominal)(prenominal) as loosen poetry, rhythm, lyric, structure, and the prose poetry, and since control of literary discourse is part of each new datess struggle for poetic ascendancy, it seems l unity(prenominal) earthable and appropriate for the student to view each(prenominal) efforts to define critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a healthy degree of scepticism.This mini-glossary reflects the continuing cope betwixt conventional metrics and put out verse, and amidst differing c onceptions of the poets fashion and role in society. A fuller and to a greater extent lively view may a great deal be found in the notes on t he poets and in the poetics section. In a number of instances, I have been less concern to offer hard-andfast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds certain critical terms.The following inclining is by no means complete, however is intended to aid and provoke, to charge discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more(prenominal) comprehensive ancestrys. I have made character of and recommend exceedingly A Glossary of Literary term (1957), by M. H. Abrams the Princeton Encyclopedia of metrical com lay and poetics (1974), edited by Alex Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr and The Poets Dictionary A Handbook of inflection and Poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard. G. G. ccent The emphasis, or taste, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, duration, and the pressures of grammar and syntax. trance all syllables argon emphasise or unhappy in savoir-faire and in poetry, we tend to describe the less prevalent as distaff or clean syllables. In metrical verse, accented and unaccented ( punctuate and light) syllables argon considerably identified. Robert Burnss famous draw and quarter My love is similar a red, red rose boastful businessman be described as an iambic tetrameter stress, with four feet each consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.However, it can be argued that much(prenominal) a reading trivializes and effectively undercuts the stirred power of the poetic utterance, and that the smell of the note dictates a slightly varied reading, which locates cardinal strong stresses or accents in the second half of the farm animal My love is like a red, red rose. See too FEET and METER. 2 20 -Century song & Poetics th alexandrine A twelve-syllable line, commonly consisting of hexad iambic feet. alliteration A common poetic twist that involves the repetition of the same sound or sounds in words or lines in tightly fitting proximity. every(prenom inal)iteration was most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon poetrys such as The Wanderer and The Seafargonr, which Earle Birney imitates in his sa assume of Toronto, Anglo-Saxon road Dawndrizzle ended dampness steams from Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste Faded house patterns hoary and particular(a) 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 employ for comic purposes.Exceptions include rap poetry and spoken word, two of which key out extensive use of alliteration and render verbally. Nevertheless, the repetition, or rhyming, of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a still a primaeval component in constructing the soundscape of the verse mark, clean as the repetition and variation of foresee and bringing close together enrich the intellectual and sensory(a) fabric. The most talented practitioners will be listening patronisewards and in the lead as they compose, celluloidking up and retell both images and sounds that give the verse a rich and interlocking texture.See ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY. allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary re latishences be common in poetry, though, to be successful, they require an auditory modality with shared acknowledge 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 wind up curiosity.Lawrence Ferlinghettis Junkmans Obgligato assumes the readers familiarity with both T. S. Eliots bonk Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and W. B. Yeatss Lake Isle of Innisfree for a full sagacity of the ironic counterpointing of downcast-and-out urban images and those of an themelized pastoral landscape. At the same time, the poem also overflows with topical and literary allusions from the junkyard of nineteenth- and twentieth- carbon European and American culture. ambiguity speech and the texts they inhabit are susceptible of a variety of interpetations.While a word may denote one liaison, usage and context lots bring unhomogeneous connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the poem. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his rise The Obscurity of the Poet (in numbers and the Age, 1953), what we let loose of as literature ranges from Dantes Divine Comedy, with its seven levels of meaning, to Readers Digest, which, Glossary of Poetic Terms 3 like pulp fabrication 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 strike suc h 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 forest of a riddle. As a result of declining audiences, a general ignore towards a democratization of the arts, and the pressure of new kinds of mental and political content, the pendulum of thwack since mid-century swung towards less ambiguity.While puns and orbitplay still add to our sense of the fecundity and prescience of poetic expression, contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be intended only as a rose and they tend to empty the use of obscure and esoteric fictitious characters. See Robert Graves Poetic irrationality (1925) and William Empsons Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). anapest A metrical seat consisting of two unaccent ed syllables followed by an accented one / ? ? ? /. See METRE. anaphora The rhetorical device of using the same word or devise at the beginning of successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation.See Ginsbergs Howl and Cohens You Have the copers and style. apostrophe A literary device of turning a counselling, usually to address a famous someone 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(prenominal) reverse their motion in an anti-strophe, or verbal about-face. In twentiethcentury poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be used ironi chattery, or for quixotic or satirical purposes. rchetype When you sense that a literary character, situation, or idea has significance far beyond its proper(postnominal), or particular, occasion in the poem, you are probably in the presence of an archetype. In an act called Blakes discourse of the Archetype ( English Institute Essays, 1950), Northrop Frye says By archetype I mean an divisor in a work of literature, whether a character, an image, a narrative general anatomyula, 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 autochthonic image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon, man, or ferment, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever creative fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we thing these images to a closer examination, we discover them to be the forgeulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the psychic residue of limitless experiences of the same type. 4 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th 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 enchantressall 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 put on a work symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on psychology. ssonance also called vocalic rime, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel sounds inside a line (or lines), a stanza, or the overall poem. Listen to the gigantic vowels nurture expiration and death in Wilfred Owens Greater Love As theirs whom none now hear, / Now earth has stopped their unworthy 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 innate rhyming device (tears / mean, thine / divine). allad A popular short narrative class song, usually transmitted orally, and making use of vario us forms of shorthand, including truncated treat, psychological and historical sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and prospering memorizing. A direct link can be emaciated between such early folk songs as Barbara Ellen and The Skye Boat Song, surface area western music, and such contemporary ballads such as Frankie and Johnny, Leonard Cohens Suzanne, and Stan Rogers The Lockkeeper. lank 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 Virgils 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 18th Century (1930) that the decasyllabic (or ten-syllable) line was intractably poetic yet had m whatsoever of the capacities of prose.As such, blank verse could be say to be a precursor of the prose poem, which seems more aligned with commonplace speech and the counting of syllables than with poetic meter. dispirited rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to fulfill the requirements of rhyme Madame had learned to waltz before the charge of falsehood had been laid . . . criterion When poet John Ciardi describes the poem as a countermotion across a closeness, he start outs close to defining cadence, which refers to the pattern of melody established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of time slowed downGlossary of Poetic Terms 5 and palpable. While cadence primitively ref slewed to unbroken 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 formulate and syntax. Cadence is what Ezra Pound was referring to when he spoke of composing with the musical evince instead of the metronome. Also worth reading is Dennis Lees 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 all positive emit or pause within the line, though it is most a great deal found in lines of five or more feet. The caesura was a regular feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating social units within the line, bluntly drawn in Earle Birneys Anglo-Saxon Street or more subtly in Wilfred Owens Arms and the Boy Let the boy try along this bayonet blade How cold steel is, and keen with thirst of blood Blue with all malice, like a madmans flash And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. anto 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 lo ng poem and a much wishinged respite for the vocaliser during delivery. Ezra Pound draws on both meanings of the word when he calls his great epic- length serial publication of meditations The Cantos. conceit When a METAPHOR or other FIGURE OF patois is extended over many lines, it is called a conceit. oncreteness Concrete nouns referring to objects, such as lip, flint, hubcap, gunbarrel, wheel, smoke, sugar, and fingernail, seem capable of making their appeal finished 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 even off them feel concrete, as in the line stern shortfall guards the solitary coast, where the abstract idea is given the quality of ternness, the action of guarding, and a spatial location. e. e. cummings concretized abstractions in much the same way love is more thicker than forge t, / more thinner than recall / more rarely than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail. concrete poetry This name was first applied in the twentieth century to deeds that exploit the visual and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary visual puns back to a seventeenth-century influence-poem whose typography was de- 6 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th ployed to create the image of an altar.Since so much of the power of poetry is derived from soundfrom measured patterns, the residue of recurring vowels and consonantsits hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component syllables and letters, downplaying the intellectual dimension of poetry and emphasizing, instead, the psychic muscularity 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. concord Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with di ffering vowels winter / water / went / waiter.See, for example, Wilfred Owens 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 minute or no relation to the original im nerve impulse.Ideas or anecdotes that find their way into a poem are not the poems 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 generalizati on 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 inter depicted object the poem.Its probably most profitable to stop communicate 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 prescribed and technical elements in a poem, the ways in which certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to arrive at a point of understanding and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY. coupling The couplettwo lines of verse, usually rhymedis one of the most common and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry.The couplets transience encourages a pithy, epigrammatic quality its two-line wear out provides a fulcrum which lends its elf to argumentative analysis and generalization, as in Alexander Popes Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of humankind is man. Closed couplets such as Popes or Drydens, 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 neoclassic 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 corefully. See also GHAZAL. finger A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables / ? ? ? /. See FOOT and METER. diction Word choice. The French poet Verlaine tangle the need to remind us that poems are made of words, not ideas. This is useful to hold about, since poems are often spoken and pen of as if they were chunks of autobiography, representations of genius, or littl e treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. Words are magical. When nature, experience, or ideasany of which may give rise to a poempass by the rucible 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 feat to use or pass through them thats 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 substitution to postmodern poetics, which seeks to remind us that the poem is not a reflect of nature or a window through which we see the cancel world, or so-called domain, but rather a verbal reality in its own chastise. When the word, or language in gene ral, is foregrounded, poetry ceases to be simply a vehicle for conveying pictures of, and passing on breeding 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 poets paint, his or her primary medium. Coleridge once spoke of poetry as the infract 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 incorrupt significance. Words are dirty with meaning and can never be washed clean we use them for ordinary discourse, to sell lawnmowers, 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 orb, technical or common, vocal or figurative, to which we might add archaic, plain, elevated. See CONCRETENESS and WORD, and also Owen Barfields Poetic Diction (1952) and Winnifred Nowottnys The Language Poets Use (1962). 8 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th idactic 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(prenominal) works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeatss distinction, that his argument with the world bringd 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 ef fort to persuade us to view the world differently. dimetre A line of verse consisting of two feet. dissonance An effect of harshness or dissension in a poem, often achieved by combining rhythmical geometrical abnormality and a jarring concentration of consonants. distich A COUPLET. prominent soliloquy 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 venerate 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 lingu ists, 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 Miltons Lycidas, Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Shelleys Adonais are clearly the chief source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W. H. Audens In Memory of W. B. Yeats, Michael On daatjes Letters & Other Worlds, Seamus Heaneys 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 inflexibleness of the end-stopped line or closed couplet, enjambment occurs when a strong belief 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 twentiethcentury poetry. See LINE-BREAKS and also Al Purdys poem The Cariboo Horses. pic While the epic, or heroic, poem such as Homers Iliad and Odsyssey or the AngloSaxon classic Beowulfeach with its elevated style, tribal or national struggles, invocations to the muse, occasional use of the supernatural, and cast of important, or exalted, figur esbelongs to an earlier age, it has not anomic its appeal to poets of later ages. From Dantes Divine Comedy, Spensers F? rie Queene, Miltons Paradise Lost, and Drydens and Popes mock epic satires to such contemporary long poems as Pounds The Cantos, W. C.Williamss Paterson, Atwoods The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Ondaatjes The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or extended, poem has provided an option to the limited scope, self- tellness and, perhaps, too intense heat of the lyric. See LONG song and NARRATIVE. epigram A short, witty poem or statement, seldom more than four lines long, whose form dates back to Roman epigrammatist Martial. Alexander Popes poems are full of condensed witticisms that might be displayed as separate epigrams To err is human to forgive, divine. ye-rhyme An eye-rhyme features words or syllables that look alike but are pronounced differently come / home give / contrive. distaff 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 flunk or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloquial, 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. igurative 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. 10 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th figure A multitude of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage. Consider, for example, Gloucesters comment in Richard III Now is the winter of our discontented / Made glorious summer by the sun o f York. oot In A Poets Dictionary Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), William Packard provides an interesting work out of the origin of the metrical foot When the Greeks described poetry as come, they were alluding to certain conspicuous elements of verse that could be counted off feet were strong jump steps that could be measured out in separate overcome 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 antistrophes of a chorus.Greek metrics, then, did not derive from accent or stress but rather from the extension service required in the pronunciation of certain vowels and syllable lengths. Instead of the quantitative style 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 li ne of verse. The most common feet are the iambic (/ ? ? /), an unstressed 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 rocky 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 sonne t and sestina but the intricacies of language, timing, syntax, counterpoint, verbal playthose elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a poemrequire some learning 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 movement of the voice in our language between stressed and unstressed syllables, but the regularity of the iambic line, and the five overcome 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 freshet, which defies and controls t he movement of language across its grid of artifice the line in free verse becomes a much more defining figure of formal organization than in more arithmetical versetraditions.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 dictated 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 ompelling experience is conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophical venture occurs in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an complex 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 pla yful 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 step to the fore 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 patronage 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 despi te the practice of many modern poets, who have been quite an content to use whatever verse-form fitted the poem they were composing. One would not motive to sacrifice either Rilkes Duino Elegies or Lowells Life Studies, just to mention two poets who worked in both systems. In his essay revolt 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 covert stylization, or rather stylization incarnate. See PROSODY, STRUCTURE, and STYLE, and also Denise Levertovs Notes on Organic 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 12 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th the Psalms and Song of Songs are often held up as models of how dynamic nonmetrical poetry can be. Ezra Pound advised compos ing 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 easterly 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-coloured are held together not by a narrative or rhetorical thread, but by a heightened tone or ruttish intensity. Not surprisingly, the apparen tly 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. ambic pentameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. Iambic pentameter is considered the poetic rhythm most grassroots 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 li ne a brown frighten leapt over the fence, which constitutes a composite image, we also find four clear-cut 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 wine (tree, animal, machine).The rest between a line such as I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree and the followingDont hang your bones from the branch / of that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahuas waiting in the Daimlerhas 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 ninete enth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image.