closet drama Not, as you might think, the hysterics attendant upon coming out, but a play written to be read, not performed. A genre invented by the Roman playwright Seneca.
Cockney School Blackwood (of Magazine fame) and the Quarterly Review q.v. used this snobbish and wholly inappropriate appellation to describe the ‘bad’ poetic diction of Keats and Leigh Hunt and their circle. Byron, too, ‘disapproved of that School of Scribbling’ and believed Keats guilty of wasting his talents in ‘Cockneyfying and Suburbing’ (letter to John Murray, 1821).
common metre ballad metre, i.e. 4-3-4-3, rhyming abab or abcb
conceit An extended metaphor or fanciful image.
connotation The associative, implied meaning of a word, as opposed to its denotation q.v.
consonance A loose or exact repetition of consonant sounds either used internally, or as partial rhyme. ‘And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old’, fuck/fork, pushing/passion, past the post etc.
corona sequence A sonnet sequence where the last line of a sonnet is used as the first line of the next. The final sonnet will end with the opening line of the first in the sequence.
coronach A threnody or funeral dirge.
counter-turn Ben Jonson’s word for antistrophe q.v.
couplet A pair of rhyming lines.
cretic Alternative name for the amphimacer q.v., after the Cretan poet Thaletas.
cross-rhyme End-rhyming of alternate lines: abab cdcd etc.
curtal Name for a sonnet that falls short of the usual fourteen lines, if such a thing can be said to exist. Properly speaking, the Hopkins stanza with an octave reduced to a sestet.
cynghanedd From Welsh poetry, a style of interlaced alliteration: as employed by Hopkins.
dactyl Ternary foot.
, or long-short-short in classical prosody.
denotation The strict, literal meaning of a word, stripped of its connotation q.v., colour, suggestion, implications etc.
diacritic -al A sign, such as an accent or cedilla, that goes above or below a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.
diamante Wretchedly silly diamond-shaped verse form in which one word becomes its opposite or antithesis according to pointless rules that I can’t be bothered to go into again.
diction In poetry, the choice of words. The discourse, frame of reference, atmosphere, coloration and other aspects of word choice are all elements of poetic d.
didactic Lit. ‘teaching’–writing that intends (usu. moral) instruction.
dieresis Diacritical mark–the two dots used to show that a diphthong’s vowel sounds should be pronounced separately, ‘Noel’, ‘naive’; etc. In metre, a word meaning a natural caesura (i.e. one that does not break a word or clause).
dimeter A verse line of two metric feet.
diminishing rhyme A rhyme scheme where each new rhyme takes a syllable or letter less than its predecessor: promotion, emotion, motion, ocean and passing, arsing, sing etc.
diphthong Two vowels together.
dipodic Composed of two feet (as most humans are).
dirge A mourning, wailing lament.
dithyramb, dithyrambic Wild choral Dionysiac celebratory verse. Often used to describe overblown poetic diction q.v.
divine afflatus (Now mock comic) phrase used to describe poetic inspiration.
dramatic monologue (Non theatrical) verse in the voice of a character, often addressing another imaginary character or the reader him/herself. ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sections of The Waste Land etc.
eclogue From Virgil, pastoral poem.
elegiac Of mourning. The elegiac quatrain abab in iambic pentameter was developed by Thomas Gray for his country churchyard.
elision The omission of words or parts of words.
encomium Praise song or ode for a (usu. living) person.
endecasillabo Italian name for a hendecasyllabic line of iambic pentameter.
