Definitions, examples, and etymologies of literary terms

The deliberate combination of clashing, harsh sounds to convey discord, pain, tension, or moral corruption.

'With throats unslaked, with black lips baked' (Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner).

A word or phrase that carries two interpretations, one typically straightforward and one risqué or subversive.

Shakespeare exploits Elizabethan slang throughout his plays and sonnets for sustained double meanings.

A poem in which a single speaker — not the poet — addresses a silent listener, revealing character through the speech itself.

Browning's 'My Last Duchess' (1842): the Duke's words gradually expose his vanity and menace.

A short pastoral poem, often in dialogue between shepherds, dealing with rural life in an idealised setting.

Virgil's ten Eclogues (37 BC); Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579).

A formal poem of lamentation, meditating on death or profound loss, traditionally moving toward consolation or acceptance.

Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751); Milton's 'Lycidas' (1638).

The omission of words readily implied by context, creating compression, urgency, or pregnant silence.

'She left. Without a word.' — 'without saying a word' is implied; the omission dramatises the abruptness.

A line of poetry that concludes with a grammatical pause or complete unit of sense, often reinforced by punctuation.

'She walks in beauty, like the night.' (Byron) — complete sense and punctuation align at the line's end.

The continuation of a sentence or phrase beyond the end of a line without pause, propelling the reader forward.

Keats: 'when I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain…'

A short concluding stanza that closes certain fixed forms (ballade, sestina), summarising or dedicating the poem.

The envoi of a ballade addresses a 'Prince' or patron; the sestina's envoi (tercet) uses all six key words.

Repetition of a word or phrase at both the beginning and the end of a clause, line, or sentence.

'Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say, Rejoice.' (Philippians 4:4)

A brief, pointed, and polished poem or statement, witty in expression and often satirical in intent.

Oscar Wilde: 'I can resist everything except temptation.' Pope's Essay on Criticism consists largely of verse epigrams.

Repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses — the mirror image of anaphora.

Lincoln: 'government of the people, by the people, for the people.' — 'the people' closes each phrase.

A short verse or inscription commemorating the dead, either carved on a monument or composed as if for one.

Gray's 'Elegy': 'Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth / A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.'

An adjective or phrase expressing a defining characteristic of a person or thing, often formulaic in epic.

Homer's 'rosy-fingered Dawn', 'swift-footed Achilles', 'wine-dark sea' — repeated epithets aid oral composition.

The substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one considered harsh, blunt, or taboo.

'Passed away' for 'died'; 'collateral damage' for civilian casualties; 'between jobs' for unemployed.

The use of harmonious, mellifluous combinations of sounds that please the ear and suggest beauty or calm.

Tennyson: 'The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees.' (Princess)

A metaphor sustained and elaborated across several lines or throughout an entire poem.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: the comparison of the beloved to a summer's day is developed across all 14 lines.

A line that ends on an unstressed syllable, producing a softer, less decisive close than a masculine ending.

'To be, or not to be, that IS the QUES-tion' — the eleventh syllable -tion is unstressed.

The basic rhythmic unit of verse, consisting of a fixed pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Iamb (u —): 'be-CAUSE'; Trochee (— u): 'GAR-den'; Dactyl (— u u): 'HEA-ven-ly'; Anapest (u u —): 'in the NIGHT.'

Poetry created by selecting and reframing words, phrases, or passages from non-literary sources.

William Burroughs' cut-up technique; David Lehman's found poems from newspapers; erasure poetry from legal documents.

Poetry that abandons fixed metre and rhyme, relying instead on rhythm, imagery, syntax, and the line break for structure.

Whitman's 'Song of Myself' (1855): 'I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume.'

A poem offering practical instruction on farming or rural crafts, celebrating productive labour in the natural world.

Virgil's Georgics (29 BC): four books on crops, trees, livestock, and bees.

A lyric form of Arabic-Persian origin: autonomous couplets sharing an end-rhyme and refrain, thematising longing and love.

Hafiz and Rumi are the great Persian masters; Adrienne Rich and Agha Shahid Ali have written powerful English ghazals.

A Spanish form in which a short introductory poem (cabeza) is elaborated stanza by stanza, each ending with one of its lines.

P.K. Page's English glosas borrow lines from other poets and spin extended meditations upon them.

A pithy, sententious maxim or aphorism, especially one drawn from classical or proverbial wisdom.

'Know thyself' (gnomikon); 'Nothing in excess' — gnomic sayings embedded in Greek lyric and drama.

A Japanese lyric form of three lines (5-7-5 syllables), traditionally evoking a natural image and a seasonal word (kigo).

'An old silent pond… / A frog jumps into the pond— / Splash! Silence again.' (Matsuo Bashō, tr.)

Half a line of verse, created by the division of the caesura; each half-line is a hemistich.

'To err is human; || to forgive, divine.' — each of the two halves is a hemistich.

A line of eleven syllables — the basis of Greek and Latin lyric metres and of iambic pentameter with a feminine ending.

Catullus: 'Phasellus ille, quem videtis, hospites' — eleven syllables with a characteristic opening pattern.

Two rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, typically self-contained in sense and closed by punctuation.

Pope: 'True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.'

A quatrain of iambic pentameter rhyming ABAB, also known as the elegiac stanza or heroic quatrain.

Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' employs this stanza throughout its 32 stanzas.

A line of six metrical feet — the metre of Greek and Latin epic poetry and one of the most ambitious in English.

Longfellow's Evangeline (1847): 'This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.'

A broad term for any significant departure from normal word order — the general category of which anastrophe is a specific type.

Milton: 'Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky…' — direct object before subject.

Deliberate, extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis, satire, or comic effect, not intended literally.

Marvell: 'My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow.' (To His Coy Mistress)

An implied comparison in which only the image is named, leaving the subject of comparison unstated.

'You wolf!' — the speaker does not say 'you are like a wolf' or 'you are a wolf' but names the image directly.

A metrical foot of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (u —) — the basic unit of English poetry.

'shall I com-PARE thee TO a SUM-mer's DAY' — five iambs making a line of iambic pentameter.

A line of five iambic feet — the fundamental metre of the English sonnet, dramatic verse, and blank verse epic.

Shakespeare: 'But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?' — five iambic feet.

A short poem or passage evoking a picturesque, idealised scene of rural or pastoral life.

Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85) blend Arthurian legend with meditative pastoral.

Language that evokes any of the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) to create vivid mental experience.

Keats: 'The beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stainèd mouth' — visual, tactile, taste imagery combined.

An early 20th-century movement demanding precise, concrete images, economy of language, and free verse, rejecting abstraction.

Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' (1913): 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.'

Beginning a narrative at a critical point of action already in progress, without prior exposition.

Homer's Iliad opens in the tenth year of the Trojan War — the back-story emerges through speech and flashback.

Rhyme occurring within a single line of verse, between a word in the line's interior and the final word, or between two interior words.

'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew' (Coleridge) — 'blew' and 'flew' rhyme internally.

The relationship a text has with other texts — through allusion, quotation, parody, echo, or structural borrowing.

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is dense with quotation from Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, and Wagner.

An appeal to a Muse, deity, or inspiring power at the beginning of an epic or long poem, requesting divine inspiration.

Milton's Paradise Lost: 'Sing, Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire…'

Expression of meaning through language that signifies the opposite, requiring the reader to infer the true intent.

Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' (1729): seriously proposing to eat Irish babies — the literal surface masks savage political critique.

The placement of two contrasting elements side by side so that their differences are heightened by proximity.

Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience: 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger' juxtapose naivety and dangerous energy.

A compound poetic epithet used in Old English and Norse poetry as a circumlocution for a common noun.

'Whale-road' (sea); 'ring-giver' (king); 'word-hoard' (vocabulary); 'battle-dew' (blood).

A poem expressing personal or communal grief over loss, defeat, exile, or death.

The Wife's Lament (Old English, c.10th c.): a woman mourns her exile from her lord and community.

A form of internal rhyme in which the word immediately before the caesura rhymes with the final word of the line.

'The moaning and groaning' — the medial and final words carry the same rhyme sound.

A five-line comic verse with an AABBA rhyme scheme, typically in anapestic meter, associated with bawdy wit.

'There was an old man of Nantucket / Who kept all his cash in a bucket…'

The point at which a line of poetry ends — a fundamental compositional decision that controls rhythm, emphasis, and ambiguity.

Plath: 'Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.' — the isolated 'Dying' amplifies its weight.