Critial Vocab, English Lit a Level

Critical Vocabulary Builder

A

Abjure – To renounce or retract esp formally or under oath, or solemnly.
Abduration – The act of renouncing.
Ablation – The surgical removal of an organ, structure, or part. Ablate.
Ablution - The ritual washing of a priest’s hands.
Abnegate (abnegation) – To deny to oneself; renounce privileges, pleasure, etc.
Abstergent – Of cleaning or scouring
Abstruse – Not easy to understand; recondite; esoteric.
Acalculia – psycol. An inability to make simple mathematical calculations.
Acumen - Quickness of perception or discernment; shrewdness shown by keen insight.
Adherents – Follower, or supporter of.
Adjacent – Being near or close, esp. having a common boundary. ; adjoining; contiguous.
Adjuvant – Aiding or assisting.
Aesopian - Conveying meaning by hint, euphemism, innuendo or the like. 2) Pertaining to, or characteristic of Aesop or his fables.
Aesthetic - Broadly speaking, something pleasing, or the study of beauty.
Aesthetic distance - degree of emotional involvement in a work of art. The most obvious example of aesthetic distance (also referred to simply as distance) occurs with paintings. Some paintings require us to stand back to see the design of the whole painting; standing close, we see the technique of the painting, say the brush strokes, but not the whole. Other paintings require us to stand close to see the whole; their design and any figures become less clear as we move back from the painting. Similarly, fiction, drama, and poetry involve the reader emotionally to different degrees. Emotional distance, or the lack of it, can be seen with children watching a TV program or a movie; it becomes real for them. Writers like Faulkner, the Bronte sisters, or Faulkner pull the reader into their work; the reader identifies closely with the characters and is fully involved with the happenings. Hemingway, on the other hand, maintains a greater distance from the reader.
Affective Fallacy – The error of evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader. As a result the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear.
Alacrity – Liveliness or briskness.
Alalia – Complete inability to speak; mutism.
Allegory - A narrative where characters, actions and sometimes setting are consistently symbolic of something else (often philosophical or moral abstractions).
Alliteration - the use, especially in poetry, of the same sound or sounds, especially consonants, at the beginning of several words that are close together
Ambiguity - Ambiguity is the quality of having more than one meaning; does
Ameliorate – To make or become better; improve. Amelioration.
Amorphous – Lacking a definite shape; formless. 2 – Of no recognisable character or shape.
Anachronisms – Flash backs, jumps forwards.
Analogy - a comparison between things which have similar features, often used to help explain a principle or idea
Analepis – A flash-back
Anathema – A detested person or thing ‘he is anathema to me!’ 2 A formal ecclesiastical curse of excommunication.
Antonym - An antonym is a word opposite in meaning to another word but similar to it in most other respects. For example, tall and short are opposite in meaning but both are the same parts of speech (adjectives) and would take the same position in a sentence.
Aporia – An impassable moment or point in a narrative, a hole or opening that produces a hermeneutic analysis.
Arbitrarily – Founded on or subject to personal whims, prejudices, etc.; capricious. 2 – Having only relative application. 3 – Of a government or ruler despotic or dictatorial.
Arcane – Requiring secret knowledge to be understood; mysterious; esoteric.
Arrhythmic / Arrhythmia – Any variation from the normal rhythm of the heart beat.
Arrière-pensèe – An unrevealed thought or intention.
Arriviste – A person who is unscrupulously ambitious.
Assiduous – Hard-working; persevering.
Assignation – A secret or forbidden arrangement to meet esp. between lovers.
Attest – To affirm the correctness or truth of.
Auric – Of or containing gold in the trivalent state.
Autodidact - One who is self-taught.
Avarice – The getting and keeping of money, possessions etc as a purpose to live for.

B

Ballad - relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Two characteristics of the ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza. Incremental repetition repeats one or more lines with small but significant variations that advance the action. The ballad stanza is four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet or accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads often open abruptly, present brief descriptions, and use concise dialogue.
Baroque – A term applied by art-historians (at first derogatorily, but now merely descriptively) to a style of architecture, sculpture, and painting that developed in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century and then spread to Germany and other European countries. The style employs the classical forms of the renaissance, but breaks them up and intermingles them to achieve elaborate, grandiose, energetic, and highly dramatic effects. In Literature, it may signify magniloquent style in verse or prose.
Beatitude – Supreme blessedness or happiness.
Benefactor – A person who supports or helps a person (Beneficiary), institution etc., esp. by giving money; patron.
Bilious – Bad tempered. 2. Hideously green.
Blank verse - Blank verse is a form based on unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The verse parts of Shakespeare's plays are blank verse (with exceptions, such as the witches' recipe), as is Milton's Paradise Lost. The form is one that is close to normal speech (indeed, "the form is one that's close to normal speech" is itself an iambic pentameter) so it gives a subtle pulse to a poem, rather than an obvious shaping as a limerick might. However, there is a tendency in contemporary poetry to use shorter lines, so the form can also sound stately or slow to a modern ear.
Bowyer – Person or makes or sells archery bows.
Bumptious – Offensively self-assertive or conceited.

C

Cadence – (Poetry) A fall, in tone, in pitch etc.
Catalectic – (Poetry) - of a line, missing one or more beats.
Catechism – Instruction by a series of questions and answers esp a book containing such instruction on the religious doctrine of the Christian church. 2 Rigorous and persistent questioning, as in a test or interview. Character - Characters may be classified as round (three-dimensional, fully developed) or as flat (having only a few traits or only enough traits to fulfil their function in the work); as developing (dynamic) characters or as static characters.
Caesura - a strong pause within a line, and is often found alongside enjambment. If all the pauses in the sense of the poem were to occur at the line breaks, this could become dull; moving the pauses so they occur within the line creates a musical interest.
Chivalric Romance – Developed in 12th Century France, spread and displaced epic and heroic forms.
Climax - The height of tensions or suspense in a story's plot where conflict comes to a peak.
Coetaneous – Of the same age or period.
Coeval – Of belonging to the same age or generation. 2) A contemporary.
Collocate – To group or place together in some system or order.
Collusion – Secret agreement for a fraudulent purpose; connivance; conspiracy.
Conceit - The Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century enjoyed creating particularly audacious metaphors and similes to compare very unlike things, and drawing attention to how skilfully they could sustain this comparison; this became known as the conceit. The classic example is probably Donne's 'The Flea', in which a flea-bite is compared to a marriage, and like most conceits, the extended comparison is more notable for its invention than its believability.
Concomitant – Existing or occurring together; associative.
Concord – Agreement or harmony between people or nations; amity.
Confabulate – To talk together, to communicate.
Confiteor – A prayer consisting of a general confession of sinfulness and an entreaty for forgiveness.
Conflagration – A large destructive fire.
Conflagration – A large destructive fire.
Conflate / Conflation – To combine or blend, esp two versions of a text, so as to form a whole.
Conflict - The part of the plot that establishes an opposition that becomes a point of interest. Can ve an opposition between characters, between character and environment, between elements in a character's personality etc.
Conglomerate – A thing composed heterogeneous elements.
Conjecture – The formation of conclusions from incomplete evidence; a guess.
Consonance - Consonance is the effect of similar speech-sounds being near each other. Some forms of consonance can be singled out, which are: alliteration, where initial sounds matter; sibilance, where 's' and 'z' sounds are enhanced; and assonance, where the vowel-sounds of words are in concert.
Contiguous – Touching along the side or boundary; in contact.
Convivial – Sociable, jovial or festive.
Corpulent – Physically bulky; fat.
Coterie – A small exclusive group of friends with common interests; clique.
Coterminous – Enclosed within a common boundary.
Coterminous – Having a common boundary.
Couplet - A couplet is a stanza (or even a poem) consisting of two lines. These need not rhyme, nor be the same length, but can be. If there is no enjambment at the end of the second line, it can be called a closed couplet (the opposite being an open couplet), especially if this is a recurring pattern. A closed rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter, especially one which forms a unit of sense, is called a heroic couplet; many of these can be found in Pope's 'Essay on Man'. It is also possible to find a longer poem whose lines are rhymed in pairs - aabbcc etc - described as being in rhyming couplets, even if the stanzas are longer than two lines.

D

Daltonism – Colour blindness: the inability to distinguish green from red.
Damocles – Imminent danger in midst of prosperity/ Greek who feasted with sword hung by a hair above his head.
De Facto – In fact. 2 – Existing in fact.
De haut en bas – In condescending or superior manner.
De’ I gra’tia – By God’s grace.
Deambulation – Walking.
Debacle – Break-up of ice on a river/ confused rush or stampede/ collapse, downfall esp of a government.
Debouch – (esp. of troops) – To move into a more open space, as from a narrow or concealed place.
Declarativist – Want to show a mystery resolved – transparent – form has no effect over the shaping of events.
Declivous – Sloping down.
Decrescent – Waning, decreasing usually of the moon.
Deference – Submission to or compliance with the will, wishes, etc., of another.
Deleterious – Noxious physically or morally injurious.
Demarcate – To mark, fix, or draw the boundaries, limits etc. (Demarcation) – the act of establishing limits, boundaries etc.
Denouement - French for untying, it is the final element of the conflict in a plot similar to a resolution, usually very emotional.
Devilment – Mischief, wild spirits: Devilish or strange phenomenon.
Dextrous – Variant spelling of dexterous – Possessing or done with dexterity.
Diatribe – A bitter or violent criticism or attack; denunciation.
Dichotomy - a difference between two completely opposite ideas or things
Dramatic monologue - A dramatic monologue is a poem that shares many features with a speech from a play: one person speaks, and in that speech there are clues to his/her character, the character of the implied person or people that s/he is speaking to, the situation in which it is spoken and the story that has led to this situation. Ian Duhig's 'Fundamentals', for example, gives plenty of information about the character of the hapless missionary, about the tone of the meeting, and the colonial violence that underpins what is on face value a message of religion. The effect is one of a small poem seeming to leave you with the experience of having seen the whole film that was packed tightly into it.
Dystaxia – Lack of muscular co-ordination resulting in shaky limb movements and unsteady gait.

E Eclectic – Selecting or made up of what seems best of varied sources.

Effervesce – To give off bubbles of gas.

Egalitarian – of relating to, or upholding the doctrine of the equality of mankind and the desirability of political, social, and economic equality.

Egregious – Outstandingly bad; flagrant.

Egress – (also called egression) – the act of going or coming out; emergence.

Electorate – The body of all qualified voters

Elegy - An elegy is a poem of mourning; this is often the poet mourning one person, but the definition also includes Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', which mourns all the occupants of that churchyard, and looks into the future to mourn the poet's own death. The difference between an elegy and a eulogy is that the latter is a speech given to honour someone's best qualities, often (but not necessarily) after their death.

Endemic – Present within or localised area or peculiar to persons in such an area.

Enjambement - Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break. If a poet allows all the sentences of a poem to end in the same place as regular line-breaks, a kind of deadening can happen in the ear, and in the brain too, as all the thoughts can end up being the same length. Enjambment is one way of creating audible interest; others include caesurae, or having variable line-lengths.

Enlightenment – The name applied to an intellectual movement and cultural ambiance which developed in Western Europe during the 17th Century, reaching its height in the 18th century. The common element was a trust in human reason as adequate to solve the crucial problems and to establish the essential norms in life, together with a belief that the application of reason was rapidly dissipating the darkness of superstition, prejudice, and barbarity, was freeing humanity from its earlier reliance on mere authority and unexamined tradition, and had opened the prospect of progress toward a life in this world of universal peace and happiness. See Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Godwin, Diderot, Franklin, Jefferson.

Ephemeral – Lasting only for a short time; transitory; short-lived.

Epigone – An inferior follower or imitator

Epigram - An epigram is a short, succinct poem, often with witty (or even vicious) content. Coleridge wrote an epigram to define an epigram: "What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, / Its body brevity and wit its soul." It is worth noting that this is a stricter definition than epigrams seem to have had in classical Greece and Rome, where the form originates; it is probably the eighteenth-century fondness for a smart wit and the epigrams of Martial that tightened the definition thus. The preference in contemporary poetry for exploring an issue rather than summing it up means epigrams are not as popular as they were then, but Anne Stevenson's 'On Going Deaf', with its wit, rhyme and definite opinion, is probably the closest example within the Archive.

Epigraph - An epigraph is a brief bit of text, usually borrowed from another writer, found before a poem, but after the title. (You may also find one at the start of a book, before the poems, but after the title page.) It gives a reader, or listener, something else to hold in mind as the poem is read. Neither part of the poem, nor wholly separate from it, an epigraph can be used for various purposes; it can be necessary information to understand a poem, for example, or it can be something with which the poem disagrees.

Epistemophilia – The reader’s desire to know.

Ergo – Therefore; hence.

Esoteric – Restricted to or intended for an enlightened or initiated minority, esp. because of abstruseness or obscurity: an esoteric cult. 2 – Difficult to understand; abstruse: an esoteric statement. 3 – Not openly admitted; private: esoteric aims.

Espouse – To adopt or give support to.

Espy – To catch sight of or perceive.

Eugenics – The study of improving the quality of the human race esp. by selective breeding.

Evanescent – Passing out of sight; fading away; vanishing.

Evangelism – The practice of spreading the Christian gospel. 2 – Ardent or missionary zeal for a cause

Exegesis – Explanation or critical interpretation of a text, esp. of the Bible

Exhaustivistic – A book must be complete; to be reliable is to be complete therefore Realistic novels have more detail and description per square inch than any other literary form.

Expectorant – Promoting the secretion, liquefaction, or expulsion of sputum from the respiratory passages.

Expediency – Appropriateness; suitability. 2) The use or inclination towards methods that are advantageous rather than fair.

Exposition - Provides background on characters, setting, plot.

Extant - Still existing; not yet destroyed, lost or extinct.

F

Fabula – Order of events recounted by the narrative, the real order of the chronological events.
Facetious - joking or jesting often inappropriately / meant to be humorous or funny : not serious. Falsetto – A form of vocal production used by male singers to extend their range upwards beyond its natural compass by limiting the vibration of the vocal cords.
Fatuous –Complacently or inanely foolish. Feminine – of an ending (poetry) of one or more unstressed beats. Fervour – Great intensity of feeling or belief. Figurative Language - Language used in a way to achieve some effect beyond literal meaning. See hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile and synecdoche. Flambeau – A burning torch, as used in night processions. Foil - A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character; in Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, whose fathers have been killed, are foils for Hamlet. Foot - A foot is a unit of metre, consisting of a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. If stressed syllables are marked "/" and unstressed "u", the main types can be shown thus:
Iamb: [ u / ], such as "delight". (The adjective is "iambic".)
Trochee: [ / u ], such as "badger" (Trochaic)
Anapest, or anapaest: [ u u / ], such as "unaware" (Anapestic / anapaestic)
Dactyl: [ / u u ], such as "multiple" (Dactylic)

and, more rarely:

Spondee: [ / / ], such as "tooth-ache"
Pyrrhic: [ u u ], such as "such as" was until it was put in quotation marks.

It is important to remember that feet and words need not coincide. The feet in John Heath-Stubbs' line, "A caterpillar among those mulberry leaves", from 'The Mulberry Tree' appear thus:

| a CAT | er PILL | ar a MONG | those MUL | berry LEAVES |
| u / | u / | u u / | u / | u / |

That one word "caterpillar" is scattered across three feet in this five-foot line - the first two are iambs, then after a single anapaest there are two further iambs (or one iamb and one more anapaest, depending on whether you say mul-ber-ry or mul-bree). Also note that, although there is an anapaest in the centre of this line, this is still a predominantly iambic line (especially as it is within a predominantly iambic poem) - varying the feet like this can keep a line from getting metrically dull. The process of working out where the stresses fall is called scanning, or scansion. It's easiest to do it on poems where the rhythms are pronounced; on the other hand, it can be near-impossible, or simply unhelpful, to scan free verse. The poems suggested below have strongly accented feet, and the links to metre and form go into more detail on how poets use feet. Foregrounding – Giving unusual providence to one element or property of a text, relative to other less noticeable aspects.

Form - Form, in poetry, can be understood as the physical structure of the poem: the length of the lines, their rhythms, their system of rhymes and repetition. In this sense, it is normally reserved for the type of poem where these features have been shaped into a pattern, especially a familiar pattern. 

Another sense of "form" is to refer to these familiar patterns - these can be simple and open-ended forms, such as blank verse, or can be a complex system of rhymes, rhythms and repeated lines within a fixed number of lines, as a sonnet or villanelle is. (This is similar to the word "shape"; asked to think about "a shape", you would expect a triangle or a circle, but Alaska too has a shape.) The difference is visible in Sebastian Barker's poem 'Holy The Heart On Which We Hang Our Hope': the form of this poem shares aspects with another form, the villanelle, but also differs from it in interesting ways, just as its content shares in some aspects of organised faith but not in others.

ACROSTIC 
An acrostic poem is one that uses the first letters of each line to spell out a word or phrase. More uncommonly, you can find a word or phrase through the centre of a poem (when it is called a mesostich) or at the end of the lines (which makes it a telestich). If the poem is written so that the first letters and last letters both write out a message, it is known as a double acrostic. 

CENTO
A poem consisting only of lines from other poems. This, from the Italian word for patchwork, is almost a technique rather than a form, especially as it can be of any length, and any metre, and need not rhyme; however, as the finished poem is referred to as a cento, just as a sonnet is called a sonnet, it is a form.

CLERIHEW
Named after its inventor, this is a four-line poem rhymed aabb; its first line is the name of the subject of the poem, it often breaks into two sentences at the end of the second line, and the rhythm tends to be entertainingly irregular. 

DOUBLE-DACTYL
This one is normally reserved for nonsense verse. 8 lines, all consisting of two dactyls (hence the name). Line 1 is a nonsense word (such as "higgledy-piggledy"), line 2 is someone's name, line 6 is a single six-syllable word, and lines 4 and 8 rhyme. 

OTTAVA RIMA
A stanza form often used for longer poems, most famously in Byron's 'Don Juan', consisting of eight lines, usually in iambic pentameter, rhymed abababcc.

PANTOUM
This can be of any length; it is a poem of four-line stanzas, in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third of the next. The last stanza's second and fourth lines can be the first and third of the first stanza, either reversed or not, which locks the poem into a circle of repetitions or, as the poet Marilyn Hacker says, "until it ends up with its tail in its mouth". 

SPENSERIAN STANZA
8 lines of iambic pentameter, followed by 1 iambic hexameter (or alexandrine); rhyme scheme ababbcbccc. This is the stanza invented by Spenser in The Faerie Queene.

TERZA RIMA
A poem in which each stanza is rhymed aba, with the inner rhyme from one stanza providing the outer rhymes for either the previous or subsequent stanza: aba bcb cdc... or aba cac dcd.... The form can end in a single-line stanza, a couplet, or by referring back to the as-yet-unused rhyme from the first stanza.

Free Verse - What free verse claims to be free from is the constraints of regular metre and fixed forms. This makes the poem free to find its own shape according to what the poet - or the poem - wants to say, but still allows him or her to use rhyme, alliteration, rhythms or cadences (etc) to achieve the effects that s/he feels are appropriate. There is an implicit constraint, however, to resist a regular metre in free verse - a run of a regular metre will stand out awkwardly in an otherwise free poem.
Sometimes known as vers libre, free verse has a long pedigree and is very common in contemporary poetry. Yet there are still voices that claim poetry is only poetry when it is formal verse, and would agree with Robert Frost who, when asked about free verse, said "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down". Fans of free verse can counter with T S Eliot's insistence that "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job" - the net may be down, but this allows a poet (of either gender) to play to different rules. Simon Armitage's 'You're Beautiful', for example, creates for himself a set of rules that includes repeated words at the starts of phrases, rather than a structure of repeated sounds at the end of lines.

G Garish – Gay or colourful in a crude or vulgar manner. Garner – To gather or store in or as if in a granary Gendarme – A member of the police force of France or in countries formerly influenced or controlled by France. Germane - describes ideas or information connected with and important to a particular subject or situation e.g 'her remarks could not have been more germane to the discussion.' Ghazal - Mimi Khalvati, whose poem 'Ghazal' is the only poem so far to use a ghazal form in the Archive, defines it at the start of her reading of it: "Ghazals are an old Persian form, and they're written in self-contained couplets with a monorhyme, sometimes one- (or two- or three-) word repeated phrase, like a refrain, and the last couplet is a signature couplet, in which the writer has to refer to themselves by name, or pseudonym, or by using some kind of wordplay on their name." In her ghazal, the repeated word is "me", the rhyme is on "through", "woo", "cue", "tattoo" and so on, and the 'signature' is in the reference to being "twice the me", or 'Mimi'. 
Like the haiku, the age of the form - the ghazal can be traced back through a millennium - and its translation into the English language mean that the 'rules' have had significant variations over time. You may find some definitions insist that the subject of a ghazal should be love, and others that let the rhyme move to be earlier in the line than Khalvati's placement of it immediately before the refrain. Some insist that each couplet should be complete in itself, meaning that each stanza ends on a full stop, and can therefore have only a thematic connection to those either side. There are even some that do without the refrain, but these appear rare. The closed couplets, however, appear to be a necessity to the form. Gimcrack – Cheap; shoddy. Grandiloquent - Inflated, pompous or bombastic in style or expression. Grandiose – Pretentiously grand or stately. Imposing in conception or execution.

H

Haiku - A haiku is a brief Japanese form that has been adapted into English in various ways. Its usual definition is that it is a three-line poem, consisting of seventeen syllables split 5 - 7 - 5. Other criteria (such as a 'zen mood', a reference to a season, or the poem being divided by a word that implies some form of cutting) may be demanded, and may even replace the strict syllable count. John Stallworthy considers Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' a haiku, as, although it has only two lines and considerably more than 17 syllables, it has the brief and direct presentation of an image that many haiku have. Hermeneutics – The theory of interpretation, concerned with general problems of understanding the meaning of the texts. Heterogeneous – Comprised of unrelated or differing parts or elements. Heteroglossia – To describe the variety of voices and language found within a novel, and multiple references found in a single voice. Hoary – Having grey or white hair. 2 White or whitish in colour. Homunculus – A miniature man; midget. 2 – Early biological theory that a miniature man existed in fully-formed in the spermatozoon or egg. Hyperbole - Figurative language that uses exaggeration for emphasis, like I’m starving when you haven’t eaten in four hours, or I’ve been waiting forever when that’s impossible because you probably were born at some point, and forever was happening a long time before you were born.

I Impeccant – Not sinning; free from sin.
Iambic pentameter - Iambic pentameter is the name given to a line of verse that consists of five iambs (an iamb being one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed, such as "before"). It has been a fundamental building block of poetry in English, used in many poems by many poets from the English Renaissance to the present day. 
As with any metre, it is not necessary that every line should be entirely slavish in following the rhythm; in fact, being so could make the poem sound dull. Swapping, dropping or adding stressed and unstressed syllables will lend variety to a line without changing the underlying rhythm. Poems in iambic pentameter may or may not rhyme. Those that are written in continuous lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are said to be in blank verse, while rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter may be called "heroic couplets", particularly when each couplet closes a thought or sentence on its second line. Iconoclast – Someone who attacks established or traditional concepts, principles, laws etc. 2 Destroyer of religious images or sacred images. Ides – (in the Roman calendar) the 15th day in March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of each other month. Idiolect – The variety or form or form of a language used by an individual. Idiopathy – Any disease of unknown cause. Illusionist – Everything we need to make things happen, and that cause events are all present in the novel: all the causes and events can be traced. Imagery - Imagery is the name given to the elements in a poem that spark off the senses. Despite "image" being a synonym for "picture", images need not be only visual; any of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) can respond to what a poet writes. Examples of non-visual imagery can be found in Ken Smith's 'In Praise of Vodka', where he describes the drink as having "the taste of air, of wind on fields, / the wind through the long wet forest", and James Berry's 'Seashell', which puts the "ocean sighs" right in a listener's ear. A poet could simply state, say, "I see a tree", but it is possible to conjure up much more specific images using techniques such as simile ("a tree like a spiky rocket"), metaphor ("a green cloud riding a pole") or synechdoche ("bare, black branches") - each of these suggests a different kind of tree. Techniques, such as these, that can be used to create powerful images are called figurative language, and can also include onomatopoeia, metonymy and personification. One of the great pleasures of poetry is discovering a particularly powerful image; the Imagists of the early 20th century felt it was the most important aspect, so were devoted to finding strong images and presenting them in the clearest language possible. Of course, not every poem is an Imagist poe Immitigable – Unable to be mitigated; relentless; unappeasable. Impasse – A situation in which progress is blocked; an insurmountable difficulty. Impasto – Paint applied thickly, so that brush and palette knife marks are evident. The technique of applying paint in this way.

Impecunious – Without money, penniless. Impediments – A hindrance or obstruction. Imprecate – To swear and curse, to blaspheme. In the Middle Ages one hour was equal to 480 ounces of sand, or 22,560 atoms. Inchoate – Just beginning; incipient. 2 – Undeveloped; immature; rudimentary. Incommode - To bother, disturb, or inconvenience. Incommunicado – Deprived of communication with other people, as while in solitary confinement. Incontrovertible – Incapable of being contradicted or disputed; undeniable. Indeterminacy: The unknowable, undecidable, uncertain, or ambiguous in a text. Indeterminacy is related to gaps in a text, but are less obviously identifiable and are a quality of a reading or interpretation, not just the text. Indign – Undeserving, unworthy. Innocuous – Having little or no adverse or harmful effect; harmless. Innominate – Having no name; nameless. Irony - At its most basic, a difference or gap between the presentation/representation of something and its reality. In other words, when what something appears to be and what it is are not the same. Irony can be engaged or detached: Engaged irony uses the gaps between reality and representation to make a point or expose something; detached irony exploits gaps for immediate effect, like humor, satire or surface criticism. Irony can also occur at different levels of a text; for instance, verbal irony would occur at the level of the word or sentence, where double meanings come into play; dramatic irony would occur at the level of the plot, where events and action are constructed in a way to take the reader in one direction while the reality is something else (a technique often found with 1st person unreliable narrators and 3rd person privileged narrators). Insuperable – Incapable of being overcome. Interlocutor – A person who takes part in a conversation. Internecine – Mutually destructive or ruinous; maiming both or all sides: internecine war. Interpolate – To insert or introduce (a comment, passage, etc) into (a conversation, text, etc). 2 To falsify or alter (a text, manuscript etc) by the later addition of spurious or worthless passages. Interpolation – The act of interpolating. Intertextuality: In a text, implied references to or implied influences from another text. This concept allows a reader to make links between genres, and to see how themes, plot, etc. may develop or change in relation or in light of that other text. Intractable / Intractability – Difficult to influence or direct; difficult to solve (of problem). Intransigent – Not willing to compromise; obstinate; obstinately maintaining an attitude. Irascible - Prone to anger; easily provoked to anger; hot-tempered. Invidious – Incurring or tending to arouse resentment, unpopularity etc. 2) unfair or offensively discriminating. Inviolable – That must not or cannot be transgressed, dishonoured, or broken; to be kept sacred.
Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is done, what is expected or intended and what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand. Sometimes irony is classified into types: in situational irony, expectations aroused by a situation are reversed; in cosmic irony or the irony of fate, misfortune is the result of fate, chance, or God; in dramatic irony. the audience knows more than the characters in the play, so that words and action have additional meaning for the audience; Socratic irony is named after Socrates' teaching method, whereby he assumes ignorance and openness to opposing points of view which turn out to be (he shows them to be) foolish.

J

Joskin – Country bumpkin.
Juxtaposition - an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast. 2) the state of being close together or side by side Juxtaposition - when two contrasting ideas, images, phrases, descriptions are placed close together to emphasise their differences. K

Kenning - A kenning is a much-compressed form of metaphor, originally used in Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry. In a kenning, an object is described in a two-word phrase, such as 'whale-road' for 'sea'. Some kennings can be more obscure than others, and then grow close to being a riddle. Judith Nicholls' 'Bluebottle' uses kennings as part of a larger poem, that is itself a riddle; Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters go further, building a pair of poems both consisting entirely of kennings. Künstlerroman – Development of the artist through a novel similar in some respects to the Bildungsroman.

L

Lacustrine – Of, growing in or dwelling in lakes. Lagan – Goods or wreckage on the seabed. Langrage – Shot used to damage rigging. Laniferous – Wool bearing. Larceny – A technical word for theft (Larcenous). Larrikin – Rowdy street hooligan. Lepidopterist – A person who collects or studies moths and butterflies. Lugubrious – Excessively mournful; doleful. Lyric Poetry:a short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre.

M

Maculation – A pattern of spots as on certain plants and animals. Maelstrom – A large powerful whirlpool 2) Any turbulent confusion. Magniloquent – (of speech) Lofty in style. Malaise – A feeling of unease, mild sickness, or depression. Manumit – To free from slavery, servitude, etc.; emancipation. Manumission. Manumitter. Maudlin – Foolishly tearful or sentimental, as when drunk. Maunder – To move, talk, or walk aimlessly or idly. Maundy – The ceremony of washing the feet of the poor. (Christianity). Mawkish – Falsely sentimental, esp. in a weak or maudlin way. Melliferous – Forming or producing honey. Meretricious – Superficially or garishly attractive. 2 – Insincere: meretricious praise. Metafictional – Fiction about fiction; or more esp a kind of fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status. Metaphor - An expression which describes a person or object in a literary way by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to the person or object you are trying to describe. (Noun) Metre - Metre is from the Greek word for measuring; at its most basic, metre is a system of describing what we can measure about the audible features of a poem. The systems that have been used in history to structure metres are: the number of syllables (syllabic); the duration of syllables (quantitative); the number of stressed syllables, or accents (accentual); and combinations of the above. English is not a language that works easily in quantitative metre (although this has not stopped people trying), and it has developed an accentual-syllabic metre for its formal verse. This means that, in a formal poem, the poet will be counting the syllables, the stresses, and keeping them to a pattern.

To describe the pattern, the stressed and unstressed syllables are gathered into groups known as feet, and the number of feet to a line gives a name thus:

1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
7 feet: heptameter
8 feet: octameter

Lines of less than 3 or more than 6 feet are rare in formal poems.

The pattern of the syllables within a foot is also noted. A foot that is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, for example, is an iamb; three of these in a row would be an iambic trimeter, while five make the famous iambic pentameter. All the common feet are outlined under 'Foot' in the glossary.

Like the rhythm in a piece of music, the metre is an underlying structure. Poets often slip in extra feet, or remove them, or change stress patterns around to prevent monotony, like playing rubato. (Sometimes a poem seems to be exploring how far a line can be pushed without losing all connection with the underlying metre.) This means that the discovery of a foot other than an iamb in the middle of what is otherwise iambic, say, does not stop the poem from being iambic; rather the attention ends up lingering at that point, so the word on the different foot ends up more powerful as it has the attention longer. An example of this can be found in Peter Dale's 'Half-Light'; he writes "I'm trying not to give another glance. / Lit window thirty years back up that path." The first line is a perfectly regular iambic pentameter, but the second introduces an extra stress on "Lit", so that what the speaker's trying not to be drawn to seems more powerful, perhaps helping us empathise with him when he does look back and "catch her eye an instant". Metonymy - where one term is used in place of something else that it is related to or often associated with; like saying the White House for the president, or Hollywood for the
American film industry. Mimetic – Mimics the real world; the text behaves formally in a way to report the world outside. You look at objects and describe how the physical senses receive them. Mithridate – A substance believed to be an antidote to every poison and a cure for every disease. Mitigated – To make or become less severe or harsh. Möbius Strip – A one sided continuous surface, made by twisting a long narrow rectangular strip of material through 180° and joining the ends. Mobocracy – Rule or domination by a mob. Modernism - Loosely, a term referring to experimental and avant- garde trends in literature and other arts in the early 20th century, which resulted from conscious rejections of traditional 19th century artistic conventions like realism and traditional verse forms. Some of the experimental forms include symbolism, expressionism, and surrealism, and some narrative innovations include stream-of-consciousness and multiple points of view. A problematic term, since we are always already in the modern moment. Morass – Swamp; something that entangles, impedes or confuses. Moribund – Near-death, stagnant, without force or vitality. Moribundity, moribundly. Munificent - Very liberal in giving or bestowing; very generous; lavish. Myopia / Myopic – Inability to see distant objects clearly because images are focused in front of the retina.

N

Nacreous – Relating to or consisting of mother-of-pearl. 2) Having the lustre of mother-of-pearl. Naturalism - Is sometimes claimed to give a more accurate depiction of life than realism. It is a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis. The thesis, a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century, held that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the natural world; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-order animal whose character and behaviour are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment. A person inherits compulsive instincts – especially hunger, and the drive to accumulate possessions, and sexuality – and is then subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born. The novel is organized in a mode of a scientific experiment on the behaviour of the characters it depicts. Naturalist writers try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity and with elaborate documentation, sometimes including an almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions usually unmentioned in earlier literature. They tend to choose characters that exhibit a strong animalistic drive towards greed and sexual desire and who are helpless victims both of glandular excretions and of sociological pressures without. The end is usually tragic, not in the Elizabethan sense, but of a losing struggle of the individual mind and will against gods, enemies, and circumstances. Instead the protagonist is a pawn to multiple compulsions, and usually disintegrates or is wiped out.
O

Obdurately/ Obdurate – Not easily moved by feelings or supplication; hard-hearted, impervious to persuasion, esp moral persuasion. Objectivist – Humans are treated as objects – subjects should be treated as objects. Occlude – To block up or stop up (a passage or opening). Ode - An ode is a lyric poem, usually addressing a particular person or thing. It originated in Ancient Greece, and the Pindaric ode (so-called because it was written by the Theban poet Pindar, 518 ? 442 BC) was based on a pattern of three stanzas called the strophe, antistrophe and epode. It was performed by a chorus, which walked along one side of the orchestra chanting the strophe and down the other side chanting the antistrophe, then came to a standstill before the audience and chanted the epode. This performance was repeated with each set of three stanzas. The Horatian ode (invented by the Latin poet Horace in about 65 BC) was adopted in the early 19th century by John Keats for one of his most famous poems, 'Ode to a Nightingale'. Many modern odes, however, are irregular in form, such as 'Intimations of Immortality' from 'Recollections of Early Childhood' by William Wordsworth. While the ode does not necessarily have a regular metre or fixed rhyme scheme, Kit Wright's tongue-in-cheek Ode to Didcot Power Station uses both - as well as a repertoire of old-fashioned language - to parody the lofty style traditionally associated with this form. As Wright says in his introduction, "if you're going to have an ode, why not go the whole hog?" Oeuvre – A work of art, literature, music etc. Oligarchy – Government by a small group of people. Olivaceous – Of an olive colour. Onomatopoeia - Onomatopoeia is the forming and use of words and phrases to imitate or suggest the sounds they describe, such as bang, whisper, cuckoo, splash and fizz.
Onomatopoeia is one of the resources of language more often used by poets than prose writers; this is because poetry is made for the ear as well as the eye, and depends more heavily than prose does on sound-effects. Spike Milligan's 'On the Ning Nang Nong' makes heavy use of onomatopoeia, but it can play a role in classic poetry too - an example is the use of "Crash'd" to describe the noise of battle in Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Heavy Brigade'. Opulence – Having or indicating wealth. Abundant or plentiful. Overslaugh - To pass over or disregard (a person) by giving a promotion, position, etc, to another instead. Oxymoron - Oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two terms appear to contradict each other. Some examples have become so familiar that we hardly notice the contradiction, eg deafening silence. The word comes from the Greek: oxus ('sharp') and mōros ('foolish').

P

Paladins – One of the legendary twelve peers of Charlemagne’s court. 2) A knightly champion. Parody - Parody is the imitation of the style of another work, writer or genre, which relies on deliberate exaggeration to achieve comic or satirical effect. It is usually necessary to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate the parody, though some parodies have become better known than the poems they imitate. Pastiche – A work of art that mixes styles, materials etc. 2) A work of art that imitates the style of another artist or period. Pathos - Pathos is part of a poem or other work of art which makes the reader or audience feel sorrow or pity. The Greek word pathos means 'suffering'. Pathos is a key skill for any writer, and a highly effective feature of many poems, often in those cases where it is somewhat restrained or understated. Poetry has a special reputation for being able to move us. On the other hand, a clumsy or exaggerated attempt at pathos can result instead in bathos or over-sentimentality or make the reader feel manipulated. Pedant – A person who relies too much on academic learning or who is concerned chiefly with insignificant detail. Pedantry – The habit or an instance of being a pedant, esp., in the display of useless knowledge or minute observance of petty rules or details. Peregrinate – To travel or wander about from place to place. Peripatetic – Of or relating to the teachings of Aristotle (384-322B.C.), Greek philosopher who used to teach whilst walking about. Peripeteia, Peripetia – (esp. in drama) an abrupt turn of events or reversal. Persona - A persona is a fictional character. Sometimes the term means the mask or alter-ego of the author; it is often used for first person works and lyric poems, to distinguish the writer of the work from the character in the work. Personification - in which a concept, idea, object or animal is given human qualities (think of every Bugs Bunny cartoon you ever saw). Perspicuity – The quality of being perspicuous. Perspicuous – (of speech or writing) – easily understood; lucid. Pertinacious – Doggedly resolute in purpose or belief; unyielding. Planchette – A heart-shaped board on wheels with a pencil attached that writes messages under supposed spirit guidance. Platitude – A trite, dull or obvious remark or statement; common place. 2 Staleness or insipidity of thought or language; triteness. Pogroms – An organised persecution or extermination of an ethnic group, esp of Jews. Polemic – Of or involving dispute or controversy. Politburo – The executive and policy-making committee of a communist party. Politic – Artful or shrewd; ingenious: a politic manager. Pollard – An animal, such as a sheep or deer, that has either shed its horns or antlers or has had them removed. Polled – (of animals) having the horns cut off or being naturally hornless. Pollinosis – Technical name for hay fever. Polymath – A person of great and varied learning. Posit – To assume or put forward as fact or the factual basis for an argument; postulate. Postmodernism – Involves not only the continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also attempts to break away form the modernist forms which had, inevitably, become conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass culture” in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Prescience - nowledge of events before they take place; foresight. Presentiment – A sense of something about to happen. Probabilistic – Gives us a sample that seems most probable; it gives us a slice of life; it makes sure we feel this is a typical representation of the world therefore when they do something out of the norm it is significant. (Humanist tradition = man is the measure of all things). Realism creates situations where humans control everything; otherwise it exceeds the realms of probability. Prolepses – Slowing down/ speeding up of events and other distortions of the linear sequence.

Prolix - Wordy, extending to great length. 2) Tending to speak or write at excessive length. Propitious - Presenting favourable circumstances or conditions. 2) Favourably inclinded; gracious; benevolent. Prose poetry - A prose poem is a poem that does not use line breaks. This still allows the poet to use alliteration, metaphor, ambiguity, personification, and many other poetic techniques, but it can still be strange to see a poem that goes all the way to the right-hand margin. One thing that may differentiate a prose poem from a very short story is that the latter will have a stronger preference for narrative than the former, but this is very much debatable. John Ashbery's 'For John Clare' is a good example, one that explores the contrast between openness and containment; as John Clare was a poet who was devoted to nature, but locked in an asylum, it could be suggested that it is very appropriate to see the subject explored without the containment that line-endings would give. Prosody – The study and notation of metre. Protagonist - The protagonist is the main character, who is not necessarily a hero or a heroine. The antagonist is the opponent; the antagonist may be society, nature, a person, or an aspect of the protagonist. The antihero, a recent type, lacks or seems to lack heroic traits. Providence – Is the idea that good can come out of evil. Purulent – Of relating to, or containing pus.

Q

R

Raucous – (of voices or cries) Harshly or hoarsely load. Reactionary – Reactionist – of relating to or characterised by reaction, esp against radical political or social change.
Realism - Realistic fiction is said to oppose Romanticism. The romance is said to present life as we would have it be – more picturesque, fantastic, adventurous, or heroic than actuality; realism is said to present life as it really is. Realistic fiction is written to give the effect that it represents real life and the social world as it appears to the common reader, evoking the sense that the characters actually exist, and that such things might actually happen. Techniques used include the use of the ‘commonplace everyday setting,’ represented in minute detail. Events, whether ordinary or extraordinary are all rendered in the same matter-of-fact, circumstantial and seemingly unselective way. Recondite - Difficult to understand; abstruse. 2) concerned with obscure subject matter. Refrain - A refrain is a repeated part of a poem, particularly when it comes either at the end of a stanza or between two stanzas. Sebastian Barker's 'The Uncut Stone' has a traditional refrain, consisting of two rhymed sentences that never change at the end of each stanza; James Fenton uses a slightly looser type of refrain in 'In Paris With You', where the title returns at the end of almost every stanza, but with slight additions so that it continues the sentence of which it is a part. Some forms, such as villanelles, demand a refrain as part of their definitions. With every line repeated, a pantoum might be said to be made entirely of refrains, but this would be an unusual usage, as refrains tend to be thought of as a moment of repetition within an otherwise flowing poem. Regicidal – The person who kills a king. Regicide – The killing of a king. Requiem – A mass celebrated for the dead – 2 – Any piece of music composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person or persons. Rhyme - Rhyme is the repetition of the end-sounds of words. Examples include Valerie Bloom's use of "tramp" and "camp" in 'The River', Roger McGough's use of "breath" and "death" in 'Oxygen', and Peter Porter's rhyme of a single-syllable word with a polysyllable, "stars" with "particulars", in 'So, Francis, Where's the Sun?'. Each of these is an example of end-rhyme, which means the rhyme occurs at the end of a line, but rhyme can also happen within a line, where it is known as internal rhyme. A rhyme on a stressed syllable, as in the examples above, is sometimes referred to as 'masculine rhyme'; its counterpart, feminine rhyme, is made up of a stressed syllable followed by one or more unstressed syllables, such as "fishes" and "wishes" in Charles Causley's 'At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux'. These near-exact repetitions of end-sounds are known as full rhyme (sometimes as perfect, true or exact rhyme). There are also various forms of near-rhymes (half-rhymes, slant-rhymes, pararhymes), which are not exact repetitions, but are close enough to resonate, as David Harsent's use of "supper" and "blubber" as rhymes in 'Marriage: XVI', or P J Kavanagh's "happy" / "Cavafy" in 'Perfection Isn't Like A Perfect Story'. Further types of rhyme include eye-rhyme, which looks like it should rhyme but doesn't (e.g. through / although), and rime riche, in which the words that rhyme sound identical (e.g. hare / hair). Rhyme can be used purely for its own sake, because it sounds good, but there may also be further reasons; for example, the form of terza rima has overlapping rhymes that give the poem forward motion, as in George Szirtes' 'Preston North End', each stanza's middle line giving the rhyme for the outer two lines of the next stanza. The "breath" / "death" rhyme, noted above, is not only nice in the ears but resonates because these two concepts are linked, as they are in the poem. Ribald / Ribaldry – Coarse, obscene, or licentious, usually in a humorous or mocking way...

S

Sacrosanct – Very sacred or holy; inviolable. Sadomasochism – The combination of sadistic and masochistic elements in one person, characterised by both aggressive and submissive periods in relationships with others. Sagittal – Resembling an arrow; straight. Sagittate – Shaped like the head of an arrow (esp., of leaves). Salacious – Lustful, lecherous. Salient – Prominent, conspicuous, or a striking salient feature. Sallow – (human skin) – Of an unhealthy yellow. Salutary – Salubrious (healthy) – producing good effects; beneficial. Saprozoic – (of animals or plants) – feeding on dead organic matter.

Sardonic – Characterised by satire, mockery, or derision (sardonically). Sasquatch – (In Canadian folklore) – In British Columbia, a hairy beast or manlike monster said to leave huge footprints. Scansion – The individual metrical pattern of a particular line or poem. Schism – The division of a group into opposing factions. 3 Division within or separation from an established church especially the Roman Catholic Church, not necessarily involving differences in doctrine. Self-reflexive – A term applied to literary works that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition; how they are written put together. Senescence / senescent – 1) Growing Old 2) Characteristic of old age. Sententious – Characterised or full of aphorisms, terse, pithy sayings, or axioms, tending to indulge in pompous moralising. Sentient / Sentience – Having power of sense perception or sensation, conscious. Sestina - A sestina is a form that uses six six-line stanzas, each using the same six words at the end of its lines in different orders, followed by an envoi of three lines using two of those words to each line. They tend to be written in iambic pentameter, and without rhyme. Later sestinas sometimes allow homophones - such as 'hare' and 'hair' - for the repeat words, or even looser interpretations. Simile - (The use of) an expression comparing one thing with another, always including the words 'as' or 'like'. (noun) Sjuzhet – How the events are arranged and related to the narrative sequence. Solecism – The non-standard use of a grammatical construction. 2) A violation of good manners. Solipsism / solipsist / solipsistic – Philosophy – the extreme form of scepticism which denies the possibility of any knowledge other than one’s own existence. sonnet - A sonnet, in English poetry, is a poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, that has one of two regular rhyme schemes - although there are a couple of exceptions, and years of experimentation that have loosened this definition. One of these schemes is known as the Petrarchan, after the Italian poet Petrarch; it consists of a group of eight lines, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a group of six lines with different rhymes. The distribution of these rhymes can vary, including cdcede, cdecde, cdedce, or even cdcdcd. Often, at the point where the eight-line section, known as the octave, turns into the six-line section, or sestet, there is a volta, from the Italian for 'turn' - this is a shift in the poem's tone, subject or logic that gains power from (or demands?) the matching shift in its structure. The Shakespearean sonnet breaks into three quatrains, followed by a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg - as the name suggests, this is the form Shakespeare used for his sonnets, although he did not invent it. In Shakespeare's usage, the three quatrains tend to make an argument in three stages, which the couplet will sum up or comment on. The main exceptions are the curtal sonnet, a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins that roughly maintains the 8:6 ratio over a ten-and-a-half line poem, and the Meredithian sonnet of 16 lines. The fact that these are still referred to as a curtal and a Meredithian sonnet, however, shows that they are not (yet?) considered sonnets per se. There are also innumerable individual exceptions to the form - a poet may refer to a poem as a sonnet because it meets some of the descriptions above, or even just because s/he says so. This means that calling a poem a sonnet is not necessarily to define it strictly, but to say that it stands in relation to the long tradition of sonnets. Specious – Apparently correct or true, but actually wrong or false. 2 Deceptively attractive in appearance. Spelunker – A person whose hobby is the exploration of caves. Spurious – Not genuine or real. 2 Having the appearance of another part but differing from it in origin (of plants). Stanza - A stanza is a group of lines within a poem; the blank line between stanzas is known as a stanza break. Like lines, there is no set length to a stanza or an insistence that all stanzas within a poem need be the same length. However, there are names for stanzas of certain lengths: two-line stanzas are couplets; three-lines, tercets; four-lines, quatrains. (Rarer terms, like sixains and quatorzains, are very rarely used.) Whether regular or not, the visual effect and, sometimes, the aural effect is one of uniting the sense of the stanza into one group, so poets can either let their sentences fit neatly within these groups, or create flow and tension by enjambing across the stanza breaks. Stentorian – (of the voice) uncommonly loud. Stress - Stress is the emphasis that falls on certain syllables and not others; the arrangement of stresses within a poem is the foundation of poetic rhythm. The process of working out which syllables in a poem are stressed is known as scansion; once a metrical poem has been scanned, it should be possible to see the metre. By way of example, the word "produce" can be pronounced with the stress on either syllable - a farmer may proDUCE carrots, which a greengrocer will sell as PRODuce. Similarly, the differently placed stress is what separates the English and American pronunciations of "defence". Longer words may have more than one stress - "photography", for example, is stressed on both '-tog-' and '-phy'. In some places, including the Oxford English Dictionary, a difference is drawn between the primary stress - the heavier emphasis on '-tog-', in this case - and secondary stress, as in the more lightly stressed '-phy'. For the purposes of scansion, however, it is usually enough to consider stress as either present or absent. However, the different weights of stress mean that its presence or absence is relative - one difference between "a photograph taken on forestry land" and "a photograph composed beneath the trees" is that the second seems to have a stress on the '-graph' syllable that the first lacks. This is because the following syllable is more stressed than '-graph' in the first phrase, but less so in the second. As English is a language that has stresses in it, every poem in the Archive has stresses in it. Useful examples include Sebastian Barker's reading of 'The Articles of Prayer', which makes strong distinctions between his stressed and unstressed syllables, and draws attention to their patterning, and Sylvia Plath's delivery of 'Parliament Hill Fields' also has clear stresses, but are distributed according to free-verse rhythms. Stricture – A severe criticism; censure. 2 – Pathol: an abnormal constriction of a tubular organ. Succinctly – succinct – Marked by brevity and clarity; concise. Surculose – (of a plant) bearing suckers. Symposiarch – The president of a symposium, esp, in ancient Greece. Symposiast – Person who takes part in a symposium. Symposium – A conference or meeting for the discussion of some subject, esp. an academic or social problem. 2) A collection of scholarly contributions usually published together, on a given subject. 3) Classical Greek – A drinking party with intellectual conversation, music, etc. Synecdoche - (figurative language) in which a part of something stands for the whole to give an other than literal meaning; Green Bay doesn’t play St. Louis, but their football teams do.

T

Taciturn – Habitually silent, reserved, or uncommunicative; not inclined to conversation. Tautology – The use of words that merely repeat elements of the meaning already conveyed. Teleology – The doctrine that there is evidence of purpose in the universe esp. that this provides proof of the existence of the designer. 2) The belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms purpose rather than cause. Text - Broadly, a specific work or the actual wording of a work. Topos – An idea that occurs with regularity within a text. E.g. love makes the world go round. Tortuous – Twisted or winding. Tortuosily. Totalistic – (Cosmos = all parts of the Universe fits together in perfect meaning. Chaos lacks unity, it is fragmented) – In Realist fiction all bits fit together. Toujours déjá-lá – Always already there-ness – a world that was there before the text came along or before the story begins. A sense that the world of the novel existed before the story begins. Trenchant – Keen or incisive, vigorous or effective. Trope – Rhetoric – A word or expression used in a figurative sense. 2 An interpolation of words or music into the plainsong settings of the Roman Catholic liturgy. 3 Indicating a turning towards, development in the direction of, or affinity to. Truculent – Defiantly aggressive, sullen or obstreperous.

U

Unavailing – Useless or futile. Usurious/ Usurer – A person who lends funds at an exorbitant rate pf interest.

V

Verdant – Covered with green vegetation. 2 – Of green in colour. Vermicular – Resembling the form, markings, motion, or tracks of worms. Vermiculate – To decorate with wavy or worm-like markings. Vermiculation – of worm-like movement. Vers Libre – (French) Free Verse. Villanelle - A villanelle is one of the more complex forms. It is written in five tercets, in which the first and last lines of the first stanza alternately appear as the last lines of the subsequent stanzas, with a final quatrain repeating both lines together as the last two lines. There are only two rhymes through the whole poem, the tercets rhymed aba and the quatrain abaa, and the lines usually in iambic pentameter. Vinous – Of, relating to, or characteristic of wine. 2 – Indulgence of wine. Vivacious – Full of high spirits and animation, lively or vital. Vivacity – The quality or condition of being vivacious. Volubly/Voluble – Talking easily, readily and at length. Vouchsafe – To give or grant or condescend =, to give or grant. 2 To agree or promise. 3 To warrant as being safe. 4 To bestow favour upon.

W

Wastrel – Wasteful, spendthrift, idler, vagabond.

X
Xenophobia - an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.

Y
Z

Zeitgeist - The spirit of the time; the general intellectual and moral state or temper characteristic of any period of time.