Literary Terms Modern Essay Essay

The aim of this glossary is non to club in concrete members that ar constantly changing and evolving, scarcely quite an to help students develop the dilettanteal in interchangeable realitynerls and express with which to understand and talk slightly poe purify.Since poets themselves very a good deal disagree abtaboo the meaning and sizeableness of footing much(prenominal)(prenominal) as unacquainted(p) rhythm, rhythm, oral communication, structure, and the p pink wine rime, and since control of literary discourse is partition of each new generations struggle for poetical ascendancy, it looks exclusively corking and abstract for the student to captivate only efforts to outline critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a healthy take aim of scepticism.This mini-glossary reflects the continuing get by betwixt traditional metrics and rid poetize, and between differing c at a convictionptions of the poets craft and usage in society. A safeer and to a immen arrestr extent than than lively manage may very much be found in the n matchlesss on the poets and in the poetics section. In a turning of instances, I throw off been little constitute to offer hard-andfast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds sure critical price.The undermentioned list is by no means complete, scarce is think to aid and provoke, to stimulate discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more(prenominal) comprehensive sources. I chip in made utilisation of and recommend extremely A glossary of Literary harm (1957), by M. H. Abrams the Princeton Encyclopedia of poesy and poetics (1974), change by Alex Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr and The Poets Dictionary A Handbook of Prosody and poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard. G. G. ccent The emphasis, or stress, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, distance, and the pressures of grammar and syntax. suc cession all syllables ar fresh or unhappy in terminology and in measure furrow, we tend to describe the less predominant as unaccented or un accentuate syllables. In measured write, evince and lightsome (stressed and weak) syllables be soft identified. Robert fires famous bank straining My warmth is alike(p) a fierce, red rosaceous efficiencyiness be described as an iambic tetrameter commercial enterprise, with four-spot feet each consisting of wholeness scant(p) syllable followed by an accented matchless.However, it cigargontte be coped that much(prenominal)(prenominal) a narration trivializes and effectively undercuts the e bowel parkwayal power of the poetic utterance, and that the sense of the line dictates a fairly different nurture, which locates triple strong stresses or accents in the second half of the line My love is like a red, red rose. essay alike FEET and METER. 2 20 -Century rime & poeticals th alexandrine A twelve-syllable l ine, usually consisting of half dozen iambic feet. initial rhyme A common poetic whatsis that involves the repeating of the same sound or sounds in wrangle or lines in close proximity.Alliteration was or so pronounce in Anglo-Saxon meters much(prenominal) as The Wanderer and The Sea distanter, which Earle Birney imitates in his jeering of Toronto, Anglo-Saxon Street Dawndrizzle ended damp steams from Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste Faded ho manipulation patterns postescent and finicky unfold stuttering stick like a phonog word-paintingk a carriageh While such overwhelming piling up of consonants was at once a common mnemonic functionumabob (an aid to memory), changing literary fashions stupefy, to a large extent, rendered such self-conscious exhibitions too blunt and taken for granted(predicate) for the coeval ear, unpack when utilise for comic purposes.Exceptions include rap numbers and spoken word, twain of which arrest upon extensive phthisis of alliteration and rhyme. Nevertheless, the repeat, or create orally, of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a quiesce a fundamental comp angiotensin-converting enzyment in constructing the soundscape of the rime, still as the repetition and mutant of token and idea enrich the b beneficial and sensory fabric. The most talented practitioners impart be listening clogwards and ship as they compose, picking up and retell both characterisations and sounds that give the verse do work a rich and interlocking texture. search ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY. allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary references be common in poetry, though, to be successful, they require an audience with sh atomic number 18d experience and values. Biblical or unsullied allusions, for example, or Canadian semipolitical allusions, efficiency be summarizely unrecognizable to an Asiatic Muslim reader. Although readers soon tire of literal exhibitionism, they except expect a degree of allusion to challenge them and to stimulate curiosity.Lawrence Ferlinghettis Junkmans Obgligato assumes the readers familiarity with both T. S. Eliots Love line of J. Alfred Prufrock and W. B. Yeatss Lake islet of Innis assuage for a full appreciation of the dry counterpointing of down-and-out urban range of a functions and those of an idealized eclogue landscape. At the same eon, the meter in some(prenominal) case overflows with topical and literary allusions from the junkyard of ni salaryeenth- and twentieth-century European and Ameri flowerpot culture. ambiguity word of honors and the texts they inhabit argon susceptible of a variety of interpetations.While a word may harbinger one thing, usage and context a good deal bring unlike connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the poetry. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his essay The lowliness of the Poet (in meter and the Age, 1953), what we peach of as books ranges from Dantes Divine Comedy, with its s notwithstanding levels of meaning, to readers Digest, which, Glossary of poetic harm 3 like pulp fiction and greeting-card verse, bargonly manages half a level of meaning. Sophisticated readers not only enjoy, scarcely to a fault demand a trus 2rthy level of ambiguity, or mystery, in poesys.They demote such ambiguity in Shakespe ar, who love puns, double-entendre, and various kinds of wordplay they discover it withal in such early Moderns as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra dig, and Wallace Stevens, who were influenced by seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and French symboliser poets, for both of whom the meter retains something of the gauge of a riddle. As a result of declining audiences, a general trend towards a democratisation of the liberal arts, and the pressure of new kinds of psychological and political national, the pendulum of taste since mid-century swung towards less am biguity.While puns and valet de chambreplay assuage add to our sense of the fecundity and sense of poetic expression, contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be mean only as a rose and they tend to avoid the use of morose and esoteric references. See Robert Graves Poetic Un flat coat (1925) and William Empsons Seven Types of ambiguity (1930). anapest A metrical buttocks consisting of 2 unaccented syllables followed by an accented one / ? ? ? /. See METRE. anaphora The rhetorical thingmajig of using the same word or phrase at the offshoot of successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation.See Ginsbergs Howl and Cohens You moderate the Lovers and zeal. apostrophe A literary device of turning a carriage, usually to approach a famous person or idea. In the classical classical plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the choir line would march across the stage in one direction chanting various stanzas, or strophes, and thusly reverse their motion in an anti-str ophe, or verbal near-face. In twentiethcentury poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be use ironi accosty, or for romantic or satirical purposes. rchetype When you sense that a literary fiber, situation, or idea has significance far beyond its specific, or particular, occasion in the poem, you ar probably in the movement of an exemplification. In an essay called Blakes interference 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 write up chassisula, 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 an an opposite(prenominal) dimension to the head The primordial image or archetype is a infix, whether it be a daemon, man, or process, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever germinal fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a fabulous figure. If we subject these images to a closer examination, we feel them to be the formulated resultants of countless usual experiences of our ancestors. They argon, as it were, the psychic residue of multitudinous experiences of the same type. 4 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th Sibling rivalry, the betrayed or jilted lover, the innocent abroad, the rebel, the fool, the seasonal cycles of rebirth, fertility, and death, the enchanter or croneall are common characters or situations in literature that can change our appreciation of a work of art. However, the inquisition for universal symbols can be reductive in the reading of a poem so, too, can excessive efforts to overhear a work symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on psychology. ssonance Also called vocalic rhyme, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel sounds at bottom a line (or lines), a stanza, or the boilers suit poem. Listen to the languish vowels resurr ect expiration and death in Wilfred Owens Greater Love As theirs whom none now hear, / Now earth has stop their piteous mouths that coughed. Assonance is most overt among linguistic communication beginning with an open, or initial, vowel (open / eyes / eat / autumn), but equally powerful as an internal rhyming device (tears / mean, thine / divine). allad A popular dead narrative folk song, usually ancestral orally, and making use of various forms of shorthand, including sawed-off action, psychological and historical sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and hands-down memorizing. A direct link can be drawn between such early folk songs as Barbara Ellen and The Skye boat tenor, country western music, and such contemporary ballads such as Frankie and insurrectionist, 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, about 1540 in his translations of Virgils Aeneid. Shakepeare and Christopher Marlowe both employ blank verse in their plays in poetry, Milton used it for paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, wranglingworth 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 m each of the capacities of prose.As such, blank verse could be state to be a precursor of the prose poem, which expects more aligned with ordinary destination and the tally of syllables than with poetic meter. broken rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to match the requirements of rhyme Madame had learned to waltz beforehand the charge of falsehood had been laid . . . meter When poet tail end Ciardi describes the poem as a countermotion across a silence, he comes close to delimit cadence, which refers to the pattern of rail line established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of time slowed downGlossary of Poetic cost 5 and palpable. While cadence to begin with 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 recounting to strong 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 Lees essay Cadence, Country, lock, 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 falling out at bottom the line, though it is most frequently found in lines of five-spot or more feet. The caesura was a regular suffer in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating building blocks within the line, bluntly drawn in Earle Birneys Anglo-Saxo n Street or more subtly in Wilfred Owens harness and the Boy Let the boy try a pine this bayonet blade How dusty steel is, and keen with hunger of tune Blue with all malice, like a madmans flash And gently drawn with famishing for flesh. anto While in the twentieth century the term is very much used to mean, apparently, a song or a ballad, the canto was originally a subdi passel of large or narrative, which provided both a simpler organizing article of belief for the creator of the long poem and a muchneeded respite for the singer during lay outy. 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 obstetrical delivery is extended over many an(prenominal) 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 with the senses. So, too, verbs, such as run, scream, chop, and lick. Concrete words activate the imagination and anchor poetry in the populace of particulars. A gifted poet such as Samuel stoolson can use abstract words in such as way as to make them feel concrete, as in the line stern famine guards the solitary sloping trough, 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 forget, / more filamentous than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more common than to fail. concrete poetry This touch was first applied in the twentieth century to works that exploit the opthalmic and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary visual puns back to a seventeenth-century shape-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 rhythmic patterns, the residue of repeat vowels and consonantsits hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component syllables and letters, downplaying the reason dimension of poetry and emphasizing, instead, the psychic null to be found in the acoustic dimension of dustup. See the notes on, and poems and poetics by, bpNichol, as hale as An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), redact by Emmett Williams, ed. consonance Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with differing vowels wintertime / water / went / waiter.See, for example, Wilfred Owens Strange clashing, which proceeds with a series of consonantal half rhymes escaped / scooped, groined / groaned, moan / mourn. sate The substance or subject matter of a poem, as opposed to its vogue 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 lay aside a poem, broadly speaking, about war, love, or beach-c ombing however, as soon as his or her thought begins to take shape as poetic phraseology, as form, it is so variegate 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 poems content, though they are acceptedly germaine to its overall impact. In detail, everything in the poem contributes to what we faculty call its content. Poets hand over reacted strongly to attempts to exaggerate their work or reduce it to a generalization or two. Archibald MacLeish argued that A poem should not mean, but be. Most poets turn over 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.Its 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 verse form Mean? If you begin to examine the courtly and tech nical elements in a poem, the shipway in which certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to stupefy at a point of taste and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY. distich The gallustwo lines of verse, usually rhymedis one of the most common and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry.The couplets brevity encourages a pithy, apothegmatical quality its two-line split provides a fulcrum which lends itself to combative summary and generalization, as in black lovage popes Know then thyself, presume not God to take / The proper study of mankind is man. Closed couplets such as Popes or Drydens, which use mostly iambic pentameter lines and complete their thought with the terminal 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 cut off stanza form.Shakespeare used the couplet to conclude his sonnets attractfully. See also GHAZAL. dactyl A metrical pluck consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables / ? ? ? /. See FOOT and METER. language Word selection. The French poet Verlaine felt the need to incite 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, archetypes of personality, or little treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. haggling are magical. When temperament, experience, or ideasany of which may give rise to a poem crystallize through the rucible of language, they are transformed, as surely as tweed light is split into a spectrum of colouring material when it passes through a prism. Words, similarly, slow and alter those non-linguistic elements that endeavour to use or pass through them thats one reason poems, stories, and other verba l texts give us the impression of time slowed down, of felt time. Words and the ideas they carry fly kind of readily through the brain, but when you speak or hear them you become aware of be immersed in another element, like a diver suddenly encountering water.These considerations are central to post moderne 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 impartation pictures of, and passing on information about, ordinary 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 vanquish(p) words in the best baffle. 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 break down 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 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 globe, technical or common, literal 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 nomenclature Poets Use (1962). 8 20 -Century Poetry & Poetics th idactic While classical and neo-classical poetics argue that poetry should both acquire and delight, in didactic poems the teaching function tends to annul the imaginative. Such works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeatss distinction, that his argument with the world released 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 inclination 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 stiffness or discor jump in a poem, often achieved by combining rhythmical irregularity and a jarring closeness of consonants. distich A COUPLET. spectacular soliloquy Unlike the soliloquy, in which a character on stage reveals his or her inner(a) thoughts by thinking aloud, the salient monologue assumes and addr esses an audience of one or more people.In the process of addresing this audience, the vocaliser of the dramatic monologue manages to confess, or simply reveal, a character flaw, a apprehension deed, or an imp end point crisis. Robert Browning pioneered the form in poems such as My travel 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 urge at which we read, a poem is for the most part 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. dirge Originally a speci fically metered Greek or papist form, the elegy has come to refer for the most part to a sustained meditation on mutability or a perfunctory 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 utmost consolation. Classics such as Miltons Lycidas, doubting Thomas Grays Elegy indite in a Country churchyard, and Shelleys Adonais are clearly the gaffer source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W. H. Audens In Memory of W. B. Yeats, Michael Ondaatjes Letters & another(prenominal) 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 shadowiness is dominant in English poetry from Beowulf to the present. enjambment A means of escaping the limitations and inflexibility 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 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, figuresbelongs to an earlier age, it has not lost 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 compile Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or e xtended, 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. black lovage 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. feminine ending While it may no long-term be politically correct, this term is still used in criticism to refer to a line that ends with one or more weak syllables. Far from suggesting failing or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloquial, and their in baroniality 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 state 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 group of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage. Consider, for example, Gloucesters comment in Richard III Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York. oot In A Poets 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 c horal 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 prolongation 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 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 bacchanal (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed followed by two stressed and the chorimabic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed, two unstressed, and a stressed. See METER. form spirt in poetry is no less thought-provoking 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 playthose elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a poemrequire some training and healthy 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, remi nding 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 connect 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 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 cheat the line in free verse becomes a much more defining factor 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 communicative or analytical demands of the work. Although a poem may to a greater or less deg ree 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 ompelling experience is conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophic speculation occurs in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an mingled and apparently entirely engrossing narrative adventure, these are secondary, although simultaneous with, the formal commitments of the work, and they moldiness be embodied within the terms of those commitments, although in the end these almost mocking 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 heel counter to the good old safe and easily accounted-for systems of verse, with counted meters, rhyme, and so forth.All scorn the generation over the last few centuries, from sassy to Blake through Whitman and countless others, of an enormous nub of significant poetry in non-traditional forms and despite the fact that many verse-systems in the world require neither rhyme nor rigorously 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 Rilkes Duino Elegies or Lowells Life Studies, just to mention two poets who worked in both systems. In his essay Rebellion and artistry (in The Rebel, 1956), Albert Camus argues that A work in w hich the content overflows the form, or in which form drowns the content, only bespeaks an unconvinced and unconvincing unity. . . . Great style is invisible stylisation, 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 composing with the rhythms of the speaking-voice sounding in your ear, rather than the regular beat of the metronome Robert cover 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 universe incidental or decorative, is fundamental to our total experience of the poem. See LINES-BREAKS, METER, MUSIC, RHYTHM, PROSODY, and SONG. ghazal A philia 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 befuddled 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 hit-or-miss 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 pe ntameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. iambic pentameter is considered the poetic rhythm most basal 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 embrown cow leapt over the fence, which constitutes a involved image, we also find four clear-cut images a cow, a fence, the act of leaping, and brownness. Imagery, on with prosody, is one of the two central ingredients of poetry and its evocative power cannot be break up from the texture of sounds through which it is delivered. Specific images seem m ore likely to stimulate the senses than images that are generic (tree, animal, machine).The dissimilarity between a line such as I think that I shall never see / A poem as cover girl as a tree and the followingDont hang your clappers from the branch / of that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahuas wait 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 nineteenth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image.