appalling table manners’ etc.
para-rhyme Partial rhyme, assonance or consonance rhyming, for example, head/bet, foul/stout, feel/full. Also called slant-rhyme or off-rhyme.
parody Imitation of the style of another.
paronomasia Wordplay, punning.
particle Small word like a conjunction (and, or, but), preposition (for, of, with, by), pronoun (they, his, me, who, that) and so on.
pathetic fallacy John Ruskin’s term for the romantic attribution of life and a soul to inanimate objects or principles, Nature esp.
pattern poem A poem whose physical shape on the page represents an object of some kind. Same as shaped poetry.
pentameter A metrical line of five feet.
periphrasis A roundabout way of speaking, circumlocution.
Petrarchan sonnet A sonnet form adapted from Petrarch’s original cycle of poems to his Laura: the octave rhymes abba abba and the sestet in English can be anything from the original cdecde to cdcdcd, cdcdee and other variations.
phaleucian A Greek metre consisting of a spondee, dactyl and three trochees.
phanopoeia Name Pound gave to Imagism in action–a revelatory or reified image.
phoneme Base unit of sound.
Pindaric Ode From the Greek poet Pindar; celebratory or praise songs that developed into formal triadic odes in English.
pleonasm Tautology, use of redundant words, unnecessary repetition–as in this entry. Not to be confused with ‘neoplasm’ which means a morbid new growth or tissue.
poesie, poesy Now poncey word for poetry.
polyptoton Repetition of the same word, but using different endings and inflexions e.g. ‘It’s socially unacceptable in society to socialise with an unsociable socialist’ etc.
prosody The art of versification: the very subject of this magnificent little book.
prothalamium An epithalamium, specifically one to be recited before entry into the bridal chamber (Spenser).
pyrrhic A binary foot of two unstressed units.
quantitative Of quantity. A word’s quantity is the sum of its vowel lengths. In quantitative verse, feet are not elements of stress but of sound duration (morae q.v.). ‘Smooth’ is long, ‘moth’ is short and so on. The stuff of classical verse, quantitative poetry was never much more than an experiment in the stress-timed English language. Longfellow’s Evangeline and Southey’s dactylic hexameters remain possibly the best-known examples.
Quarterly Review Tory magazine begun in 1809. Shelley held a ‘homicidal article’ in it responsible for Keats’s early demise: ‘Who killed John Keats? I, said the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly, ’Twas one of my feats.’ Byron adapted S’s squib in Don Juan (but see under Cockney School).
quaternary Divided into four: in prosody this refers to metrical feet that have four units, such as the choriamb and the antispast.
quatorzain Name given to a fourteen-line poem that is not considered by the prosodist or critic using the term to be a ‘true’ sonnet. A subjective matter, to be honest.
quatrain A four-line stanza.
quintain A five-line stanza, or cinquain.
q.v. From Latin quod vide meaning ‘which see’ or ‘take a look at that one’, used in fancy glossaries like this to follow a word in the body of a definition which has its own entry q.v.
rann A quatrain in Irish verse.
redondilla Spanish verse cast in octosyllables.
refrain Line repeated at set intervals within a song or poem.
reify, reification To concretise the abstract, to embody an idea.
rentrement Refrain, burden or single-lined chorus.
repetend Any word or phrase that is (to be) repeated.
rhadif The refrain line of a ghazal.
rhapsody The sung part of an epic or saga. Applied to moments of lyricism in otherwise non-lyric verse, i.e. the ‘Isles of Greece’ section in Byron’s Don Juan.
rhopalic Progression of words whereby each word is longer by one syllable than its predecessor.
