Incomplete Glossary of Poetic Terms
I hope I haven’t left out anything vital: not all terms for metric feet are here, since they are gathered in the table of metric feet at the end of Chapter One.
abecedarian Pointless style of acrostic q.v. in ABC order.
acatalectic Metrically complete: without clipping or catalexis, acephalic or hypermetric alteration q.q.v.
accent The word used for the natural push given to words within a sentence. In poetry, accent is called stress. q.v.
accentual Of verse, metre that is defined by stress count only, irrespective of the number of weak syllables. Comic and non-literary ballads and rhymes etc. accentual- alliterative Poetry derived from the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English traditions of four-stress alliterated lines divided into two, where the first three stressed syllables alliterate according to the bang, bang, bang–crash rule, q.v.
accentual-syllabic Poetry ordered by metre and syllabic count. Iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter etc.
acephalous Lit. ‘headless’. A line of poetry lacking its initial metrical unit. Same as clipped, q.v.
acrostics Kind of verse whose first letters, when read downwards, spell out a name, word or phrase: What A Nonsensical Kind, you might think.
Adonic line The final short line of a Sapphic (Ode). Classically, the dactyl-trochee (named after Sappho’s line ‘O for Adonis’).
alba Alt. name for an aubade q.v.
alcaics Named after Alcaeus, another poet from Lesbos, greatly admired by Horace. Some English versions of his rather complex metre have been attempted, Tennyson’s ‘Milton’ being a well-known example. Alcaics now seem to be settled as a quatrain form. I will leave you to discover more.
aleatory Lit. ‘of dice’–a. verse uses chance (drawing of words from a hat, sticking a pin in a random word from a dictionary etc.) to determine word choices.
alexandrine A line of iambic hexameter, typically found in English as the last line of a Spenserian Stanza or similar pentametric verse arrangement.
allegory, allegorical The device of using a character or narrative element symbolically to refer to something else, either abstract (the quest for the Holy Grail is an allegory of Man’s search for spiritual grace), or specific (Gloriana in the Faerie Queen is an allegory of Elizabeth I).
alliteration, alliterative The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected.
amphibrach, -ic A ternary metrical unit expressed as , romantic deluded etc.
amphimacer A ternary metrical unit expressed as , hand to mouth, packing case etc.
anacoluthon Change of syntax within a sentence.
anacreontics Short-lined (often seven-syllable trochaics), celebrating erotic love, wine and pleasure.
anacrusis Extra weak syllable(s) at the start of a line.
anadiplosis Repetition of the last word of one clause or line as the first of the next, e.g. Keats’s use of ‘forlorn’ in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
anapaest, -ic A ternary metrical unit expressed as , unconvinced, in a spin.
anaphora Rhetorical or poetic repetition of the first word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or stanzas.
anceps A metrical unit that can be either short or long, stressed or unstressed according to the poet’s whim. Only really found in classical verse, such as quantitative imitations of Sappho etc.
anthology Collection of poems, literally of flowers–a posy of poesy, in fact.
antimetabole Rhetorical repetition by inversion and chiasmus q.v.–e.g. ‘I pretty and my saying apt? or ‘I apt and my saying pretty?’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost.