Poetics

Allegory:
- A narrative in which the agents and actions and sometimes the setting, are conveyed by the author to make sense of the “literal”, primary level of significance as well as a secondary level of significance.
1) Historical and political allegory: in which characters and actions represent historical personages and events.
2) The allegory of ideas: Literal characters represents concepts and the plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine. Personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind.
- Allegorical imagery: The personification of abstract entities who perform a brief allegorical action in short passages.
> John Keats, To Autumn: Autumnal season as a female figure amid the scenes and activities of harvest.
- Sustained allegory: Middle ages, dream vision, narrator falls asleep and experiences an allegoric dream.

Alliteration:
- Alliteration is the repetition of a speech sound in a sequence or nearby words, usually applied to consonance.
- Alliterative meter: The verse is unrhymed , each line is divided into two half lines of two strong stresses by a decisive pause.

Assonance:
- Repetition of identical or similar vowels.
- Thou foster child of silence and slow time.

Allusion
- Allusion is passing reference, without explicit identification to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary passage.
- Ironic allusion.
- Allusions are intended to be recognized by the generally educated readers of the author’s time. Imply knowledge shared by author and audience.
- T.S. Elliot.

Anti-climax
- A writer’s deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect.
- Don Juan.

Apostrophe
- Direct and explicit address to an absent person or to an abstract or non human entity.
Often the effect is of high formality, or else of a sudden emotional impetus. Many odes are constituted in the mode of an address to a listener who is not able to listen.
- John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Ballad
- Narrative poem written in deliberate imitation of the form, language and spirit of the traditional ballad.
Ballad stanza
- Quatrain: alternate four and three stress lines, usually on second and fourth lines rhyme.
- Sir Patrick Spens.
- Set formulas
1) Stock descriptive phrases ‘blood red wine’, ‘milk white steed’
2) Refrain in each stanza (Edward, Lord Ramndall)
3) Incremental repetition: Line or stanza but with an addition that advances the story

Bathos:
- Unintentional descent when straining to be pathetic or passionate or elevated, the writer overshoots the mark and drops into the trivial or the ridiculous.

Blank Verse
- Lines of iambic pentameter which are unrhymed.
- Closest to the natural rhythms of English speech.
- Paradise Lost.
- Divisions in blank verse poems to set off the page are called verse paragraphs.

Caesura
- When a strong phrasal pause falls within a line. Important for giving variety and providing expressive emphases.

Character
1) Name of literary genre, short and witty, sketch in prose of a distinctive type of person.
2) Persons represented in dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as possessive particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities as inference by speech (dialogue) and what they do – action. They have motivations; grounds for their temperament. A stable character is one that remains relatively unchanged from beginning to end.
Flat character
- Also called a type, a two-dimensional character.
- Built around a single idea or quality and does not have much individualization.
Round character
- Complex in temperament and motivation, three dimensional, like real life people.

Characterization
- Showing and telling.
- Showing: the author simply presents the characters talking and acting, leaving it up to the reader to infer motives ad dispositions.
- Telling: The author intervenes authoritatively in order to describe, and often to evaluate, the motives and dispositional qualities of the characters.

Chiasmus
- A sequences of two phrases which are parallel in syntax, but reverse the order of the corresponding words.
- The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind

Closure
- The sense of completion or resolution at the end of a literary work or part of a work. In literary criticism, it is the reduction of a work’s meanings to a single and complete sense that excludes the claims of other interpretations.

Conceit
- Figure of speech used to establish a parallel, ingeniously elaborate, between two very dissimilar things or situations.
Petrarchan conceit
- Detailed, ingenious, exaggerated comparisons applied to disdainful mistresses as cold as she is beautiful, to the distress and despair of her worshipping lover.
- Thomas Wyatt
Metaphysical conceit
- John Donne and other metaphysical poets
- The metaphysical conceit, associated with the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, is a more intricate and intellectual device. It usually sets up an analogy between one entity’s spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem.
- Fell out of favour, but J. Alfred Prufrock

Consonance:
- Repetition of two or more consonance but with a change in the intervening vowel.
- Live-love, lean-alone, pitter-patter.

Dramatic monologue
1) Single person who is not the poet
2) We know of the auditor’s presence only from clues by the speaker
3) Reveal to the reader something about the speaker’s temperament and character
Dramatic lyric
- Monologue uttered in a dramatic moment but NOT about self-revelation

Ekphrasis
- To proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.
- "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

Enjambment
- The sentence carries onto the next line.

Epic
- Long verse or narrative on serious subject told in a formal and elevated style, centered on a heroic figure whose actions depend the fate of a tribe or nation.
1) The hero is a figure of great national importance.
2) The setting is ample in scale, worldwide
3) The action involves extraordinary deeds or battle
4) Great action of gods or supernatural beings; machinery
5) Ceremonial style;

1) The narrator begins by stating his argument or epic theme, invoke a muse to inspire him to great understanding, address epic question.
2) Starts in media res (middle of things).
3) Catalogues of principal characters.

Epiphany
- The sense of a sudden radiance and relevance that occurs during the perception of a commonplace object.

Figurative Language
- Departure from standard meaning of words to get a special meaning.

1) Tropes
- Words or phrases are used in a way that effect a conspicuous change in the figurative use.
2) Figure of speech
- Departure from standard usage in the order or syntactical pattern.

Free indirect discourse
- Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech.
Examples
• Quoted or direct speech:
He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked.
• Reported or normal indirect speech:
He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.
• Free indirect speech:
He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

Free verse
- Free verse is a form of poetry that does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Heroic Couplet:
- Heroic couplet, a couplet of rhyming iambic pentameters often forming a distinct rhetorical as well as metrical unit. The origin of the form in English poetry is unknown, but Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century was the first to make extensive use of it. The heroic couplet became the principal metre used in drama about the mid-17th century, and the form was perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. An example, from Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” is

Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief; Ah, more than share it, give me all thy grief.

Hyperbole
- Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally.

Imagery
1. All the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem.
2. Specific descriptions of visible objects and scenes.
3. Figurative language.
- Image clusters (recurrent groupings of seemingly unrelated metaphors and similes.)
- Motif: Elements that establish the overall tonality or atmosphere.

Implied author
- Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a literary work is written, which may differ considerably from the author's true personality.

Irony
- Verbal irony: What the speaker implies is different from the meaning expressed. Requires close reading by the reader, kinship to be in on the joke.
- Structural irony: The author introduces a structural feature that serves to sustain a duplex meaning and evaluation throughout the work, like the naïve hero.
- Stable irony: In which the speaker/author makes available to the reader an assertion which serves as a firm ground for ironically qualifying or subverting the surface meaning. Unstable irony offers no fixed point.

Lyric
- Short poem by a single speaker to express a state of mind, often musing in solitude.

Metafiction:
- Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. Metafiction uses techniques to draw attention to itself as a work of art, while exposing the "truth" of a story. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection.

Metaphor
- A word or expression that in literal usage denoted one kind of thing applied to another different thing without asserting the comparison.
O my life is a red, red rose.

Tenor
- Subject: ‘My love’
Vehicle
- Metaphorical term itself ‘rose’

Implicit metaphor
- The tenor (subject) is not specific.
The reed (human) was too frail the survive the storm of sorrows
Mixed metaphor
- Use two diverse metaphoric vehicles, often with ludicrous effects
Dead metaphor
- Like ‘leg of a table’, metaphor that has been used so long and become so common we have ceased to be aware of the discrepancy between vehicle and tenor.

Metonymy
- One thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated because of recurrent relation.
Crown can mean king and Hollywood to mean film industry.

Meter:
- When rhythm is regular, it is often called meter. Each verse is made up of a number of metrical feet. Use a pair of terms to describe a line of verse: first, an adjective for the basic kind of foot. Typical feet include iambs (the most common in English poetry), trochees, and spondees. Less common are dactyls, anapests, and amphibrachs.
- The second term gives the number of feet in each line. The most common in English are pentameter (five beats per verse) and tetrameter (four beats per verse); other possibilities are monometer, dimeter, trimeter, and hexameter.

Wrenched Accent:
- Prevailing stress pattern enforces a drastic alteration of the normal word accent.
- Conventional in folk ballad.
- Sometimes used for comic effect, Don Juan.
Rising meter:
- Iambs and anapests, with the strong stress at the end.
Falling meter:
- Trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning.

Masculine ending:
- The closing foot ends in a stressed syllable.
Feminine ending:
- The closing foot ends with an extra unstressed syllable
End stopped:
- Natural pause at the end of a line.

Mock epic:
- Uses elaborate form to narrate a commonplace or trivial subject. High burlesque.

Ode:
- A long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment, elevated style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure.
- Pindaric ode: Written to praise and glory someone or could be to eulogize someone.
- Homeric ode: Calm, meditative and colloquial.

Onomatopoeia
1. A word in place to duplicate a sound, hiss, buzz, rattle.
2. Words or passages which correspond to what they denote – size, tactile feel, duration, force.

Oxymoron:
- Paradoxical utterance, used in Petrarchan conceit, “I burn and freeze, loving hate”

Paradox:
- A statement which seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd.

Pastiche
- A pastiche is a work of art, literature, film, music or architecture that closely imitates the work of a previous artist, sometimes with the intent of satire.

Pastoral
- An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It is also a work of art representing the idealized life of shepherds to create an image of a peaceful and uncorrupted existence. In addition, the term is used to describe simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life. Currently, it applies to any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities.
Pastoral elegy
1. Invoking the muses.
2. All nature joins in mourning.
3. The mourner charges with negligence the nymphs or other guardians of the dead shepherd.
4. Procession of mourners.
5. Poet raises question about justice of fate, and averts to the corrupt condition of his own times.

Persona
- First person speaker who tells the story in a narrative poem or novel, or whose voice we hear in a lyric poem.
Voice:
- A sense of distinctive authorial presence, a determinate of intelligence and moral sensibility.
Tone
- Tone is a literary technique that is a part of composition, which encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work.

Personification
- Inanimate object as spoken as though it were endowed with life.

Plot and story
- Go read section.

Point of view
- Go read section.

Rhyme
- Eye-rhyme: words whose endings are spelled alike and in most instanced were once pronounced alike, but over time acquired different pronunciation.
- Slant rhyme: Vowel rhymes are approximate.

Satire:
- Diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement.

Sestina:
- Six, six line stanza in which the end words in the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in a set order of variation, as the end words of the stanza that follow.
- Concludes with a three line envoy which incorporates all six words.

ABCDEF
FAEBDC
CFDABE
ECBFAD
DEACFB
BDFECA

Simile
- Comparison between two distinctly different things with the words ‘like’ or ‘as’.
O my love’s like a red, red rose.

Sonnet
- A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme.
Petrarchan Sonnet
- Octave (eight lines) abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde.
- The hopes and pains of an adoring male lover, Wyatt.
Shakespearean Sonnet
- Three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg.
Spenserian Sonnet
- Linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Sonnet cycles
- Sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers or the development.

Sprung rhythm:
- Each foot begins with a stressed syllable and may either stand alone or be associated with one to three light syllables.
- Great weight of strong stresses, frequent spondees.

Style
- Read section.

Symbol
- Read section.

Synecdoche
- Part of something used to signify a whole.
Ten hands; ten workers.

Villanelle
- Five tercets and a quatrain, all on two rhymes, and with systematic later repetitions of lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet.

Zeugma
- Single word stands in the same grammatical relation as two or more words but with an obvious shift in significance. Or stain her honour, or her new brocade