Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

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 , ro mantic de luded etc.

amphimacer A ternary metrical unit expressed as , handto mouth, packing caseetc.

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 , uncon vinced, 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.

antiphon Sung verse. antistrophe The ‘counter-turn’, used as the second part of a triad in Pindaric Odes .

aphaeresis, aphaeretic The omission of a syllable at the beginning of a word: ’gainst, ’neath etc.

aphorism Wise saying, often witty. Like an epigram but with a more universal truth. An epigram could be made about the appearance of a particular bride at a wedding, say, but this would not be an aphorism unless its wit and truth held for any occasion.

apocope, apocopation An elision or omission of the final letter or syllable of a word, ‘i’the’ for ‘in the’, ‘seld’ for ‘seldom’ and the Chaucerian ‘bet’ for ‘better’ etc.

apostrophe Aside from the obvious reference to a punctuation mark, a moment when a poet turns to address some person, object or principle, often preceded by a (pro)vocative ‘O’, as in ‘O attic shape!’ as Keats liked to say to his favourite Grecian urns.

apothegm A short aphorism, q.v.

assonance, assonantal A repetition of vowel sounds either used internally, or as a partial rhyme q.v. ‘Most holy Pope’, ‘slurred first words’, etc.

asyndeton, asyndetic The omission of conjunctions, personal pronouns and other particles: ‘hoping see you tomorrow’, ‘not fond turkey, prefer goose,’ etc.

aubade A poetic celebration of dawn or a lament at daybreak’s interference with lovers and their private bliss e.g. Romeo and Juliet : ‘But soft what light at yonder window breaks?’, Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ etc. Also called an alba .

ballad Traditional verse form, often sung, usually in four-stress cross-rhyming quatrains, often alternating with three-stress lines. Not to be confused with ballade or salad q.v.

ballade Verse form of three stanzas, three rhymes and envoi: ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA.

bang, bang, bang–crash! Michael Alexander’s phrase describing the alliterative principle behind Anglo-Saxon verse. Three alliterated stresses followed by a non-alliterated one.

bathos, bathetic A (comic or pathetic) failure to achieve dignity, a banal anticlimax.

binary A metrical foot of two units: iambic , trochaic , spondaic or pyrrhic .

blank verse Non-rhyming verse: most often applied to iambic pentameter, such as that found in Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s The Prelude .

burden A refrain , q.v.

cadence Lit. ‘falling’, the natural rhythm derived from accentuation, i.e. the rise and fall of stress. The sound that precedes a pause. caesura Of metrical verse: a pause or breath in mid line.

canto A series of long poems.

canzone A lyric poem, usually with envoi.

catalexis, catalectic Truncation: the docking of a final metrical unit, such as the last feminine syllable of a trochaic line.

cataplexis, cataplectic Hardly relevant, but a fun word. It means a poetical or rhetorical threatening of punishment, horror or disaster. Like King Lear’s ‘I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth’.