Line break: the termination of the line of a poem and the beginning of a new line
Metre (or meter): the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Metres are influenced by syllables and their "weight"
Metrical foot (aka poetic foot): the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry
Prosody: the principles of metrical structure in poetry
Stanza: a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem. (cf. verse in music.)
Syllable weight and stress: weight refers to the duration of a syllable, which can be defined by the length of a vowel; whereas stress refers to a syllable uttered in a higher pitch—or with greater emphasis—than others
Stressedorlong syllable (Ancient Greek: longum; notation: –): a heavy syllable
Unstressedorshort syllable (Ancient Greek: brevis; notation: ◡): a light syllable
End rhyme (aka tail rhyme): a rhyme occurring in the terminating word or syllable of one line in a poem with that of another line, as opposed to internal rhyme.
Cretic (aka amphimacer): long-short-long. (Example: modern-day uses can typically be found in expressions like "Inawhile, crocodile;" as well as in slogans and advertising.)
Quantitative meter: the dominant metrical system in which the rhythm depends on the length of time it takes to utter a line rather than on the number of stresses.
Doggerel: a bad verse, traditionally characterized by clichés, clumsiness, and irregular meter.
Free verse and vers libre: an open form of poetry that does not use consistent of meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern, therefore tending to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
Riding rhyme: an early form of heroic verse derived from the rhythm of the poetry in parts of The Canterbury Tales depicting the pilgrims as they rode along.
Blank verse: non-rhyming iambic pentameter (10-syllable line). It is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns. Examples: "Paradise Lost" by John Milton and “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.
Chant royal: five stanzas of ababccddedE followed by either ddedE or ccddedE (capital letters indicating lines repeated verbatim).
'a Gra' Reformata': ten stanzas of ABA CD ABA CD ABA CD ABA CD ABA CD ABAC. Following the rhyme scheme of the Villanelle, but with 5 extra couplets just after each tercet.
Spenserian: consists of 9 lines in total—8 iambic-pentameter lines and a final alexandrine—with a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC.
Tercet (or triplet): a unit of three lines, rhymed (AAA) or unrhymed, often repeating like the couplet.
Triolet: an 8-line stanza with only two rhymes, repeating the 1st line as the 4th and 7th lines, and the 2nd line as the 8th (ABaAabAB, capital letters indicating lines repeated verbatim).
Terza rima: an Italian stanzaic form consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes (ABA BCB DED EFE).
Fixed form (French: forme fixe): the three 14th- and 15th-century French poetic forms:
Ballade: three 8-line stanzas (ababbcbC) and a 4-line envoi (bcbC). The last line of the first stanza is repeated verbatim (indicated by a capital letter) at the end of subsequent stanzas and the envoi. Example: Algernon Charles Swinburne’s translation “Ballade des Pendus” by François Villon.[1]
Rondeau: a mainly octosyllabic poem consisting of between 10 and 15 lines and 3 stanzas. It has only 2 rhymes, with the opening words used twice as an un-rhyming refrain at the end of the 2nd and 3rd stanzas.
Pantoum: a Malaysian verse form adapted by French poets comprising a series of quatrains, with the 2nd and 4th lines of each quatrain repeated as the 1st and 3rd lines of the next. The 2nd and 4th lines of the final stanza repeat the 1st and 3rd lines of the first stanza.
Petrarchan (or Italian): traditionally follows the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDECDE; a common variation of the end is CDCDCD, especially within the final 6 lines
Shakespearean (or English): follows the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG introducing a third quatrain (grouping of four lines), a final couplet, and a greater amount of variety with regard to rhyme than is usually found in its Italian predecessors. By convention, sonnets in English typically use iambic pentameter, while in the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used meters.
Stichic: a poem composed of lines of the same approximate meter and length, not broken into stanzas.
Syllabic: a poem whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses.
Tanka: a Japanese form of five lines with 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables—31 in all.
Villanelle: a French verse form consisting of five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas.
Abecedarian: a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet.[1]
Acrostic: a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. Example: “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky” by Lewis Carroll.
Concrete (aka pattern): a written poem or verse whose lines are arranged as a shape/visual image, usually of the topic.
Elegy: a poem of lament, praise, and consolation, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a particular person. Example: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray.
Ballad: a popular narrative song passed down orally. In English, it typically follows a form of rhymed ("abcb") quatrains alternating 4-stress and 3-stress lines.[1]
Folk ballad: unknown origin, recounting tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event. Examples: "Barbara Allen" and "John Henry"
Epic (or epos): an extended narrative poem, typically expressing heroic themes.
Mock-epic: a poem that plays with the conventions of the epic to comment on a topic satirically.
Epyllion: a brief narrative work written in dactylic hexameter, commonly dealing with mythological themes and characterized by vivid description and allusion.
Recusatio: a poem (or part thereof) in which the poet claim that they are supposedly unable or disinclined to write the type of poem that they originally intended to, and instead writes in a different style.
Beat: A movement that arose from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its poetry is primarily free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz music.[1]
Black Mountain: A group of progressives in North Carolina associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in the 1940s and 1950s. Its poetic composition promoted a nontraditional style, following a improvisational, open-form approach, driven by the natural patterns of breath and the spoken word.[1]
Allusion: a brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement; in other words, a figure of speech using indirect reference."[1]
Blason: describes the physical attributes of a subject, usually female.[1]
Circumlocution: a roundabout wording. Example: In "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge—“twice five miles of fertile ground” (i.e., 10 miles).
Epistrophe (aka epiphora): the repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases or verses.
Epizeuxis: the immediate repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis.
Metaphor: a rhetorical figure of speech marked by implicit comparison, rather than direct or explicit comparison like in a simile. In a metaphor, the tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed (i.e., the target); the vehicle is the subject from which the attributes are derived/borrowed (i.e., the source); and ground is the shared properties between the two.[3][4]
Conceit: a typically unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose appeal is more intellectual than emotional.[1]
Extended metaphor (aka sustained metaphor): the exploitation of a single metaphor or analogy at length through multiple linked tenors and vehicles throughout a poem.[5]
Allegory: an extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often, the meaning of an allegory is religious, moral, or historical in nature. Example: "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser.[1]
Periphrasis: the usage of multiple separate words to carry the meaning of prefixes, suffixes or verbs.
Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN0-226-47203-5.
David Mikics. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale Univ. Press, 2007. ISBN0-300-10636-X.
Ross Murfin & S. M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. ISBN0-312-25910-7.
John Peck & Martin Coyle. Literary Terms and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ISBN0-333-96258-3.
Edward Quinn. A Dictionary of Literary And Thematic Terms. Checkmark Books, 2006. ISBN0-8160-6244-7.
Lewis Turco. The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship. Univ. Press of New England, 1999. ISBN0-87451-955-1.
