Definitions, examples, and etymologies of literary terms

Understatement achieved by negating the opposite of what is meant, typically for ironic or emphatic effect.

'He's not the brightest bulb'; 'Not bad' as high praise; 'The earthquake caused not inconsiderable damage.'

A short poem expressing the personal feelings, thoughts, or meditations of a single speaker — the dominant mode of Western poetry.

Shakespeare's Sonnets; Keats' Odes; Emily Dickinson's poems — all lyric in their subjective intensity.

A line that ends on a stressed syllable, producing a firm, definitive close.

'Shall I comPARE thee to a SUM-mer's DAY?' — the final 'DAY' is fully stressed.

A thematic motif or artistic object reminding the viewer or reader of the inevitability of death.

Renaissance poetry abounds in skulls, hourglasses, and withering roses as memento mori symbols.

A direct comparison between two unlike things, asserting identity rather than resemblance, without using 'like' or 'as'.

'All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.' (Shakespeare, As You Like It)

The systematic arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse, creating a recurring rhythmic pattern.

Iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter, trochaic tetrameter, anapestic trimeter.

Naming something by substituting a closely associated attribute, container, or related concept for the thing itself.

'The Crown' for the monarchy; 'the pen is mightier than the sword'; 'Washington decided' for the US government.

A poem that applies the elevated language and conventions of epic to a trivial or absurd subject for satirical effect.

Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714): a young woman's cut curl treated as a Homeric battle.

An early 20th-century movement rejecting Victorian conventions in favour of fragmentation, allusion, irony, and formal experiment.

Eliot's The Waste Land (1922); Pound's Cantos; Yeats's later visionary poetry.

A poem or passage in which all lines end with the same rhyme sound.

Arabic qasida and ghazal traditions; in English, Tennyson's 'The Eagle' uses monorhyme within each tercet.

Poetry that tells a story with characters, plot, and events — distinct from the subjective lyric or dramatic mode.

Homer's Odyssey; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Keats' 'The Eve of St. Agnes' (1820).

A newly coined word or phrase, or a familiar word given a new meaning, for creative or expressive purposes.

Milton coined 'pandemonium,' 'earthshaking,' 'lovelorn,' 'impassive'; Hopkins coined 'inscape' and 'instress.'

A poem evoking the mood, mystery, or beauty of night — typically meditative, melancholic, or romantically intense.

Longfellow's 'Hymn to the Night': 'I heard the trailing garments of the Night / Sweep through her marble halls.'

A formal, elevated lyric poem addressed to a particular person, object, or abstract quality, typically celebratory or meditative.

Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1819); Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' (1820).

Words whose sound imitates or suggests the thing they describe.

'Buzz,' 'hiss,' 'murmur,' 'clang,' 'rustle' — the word's pronunciation performs its meaning.

An eight-line stanza rhyming ABABABCC in iambic pentameter, originating in Italian Renaissance epic.

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; Byron's Don Juan uses it for comic deflation.

A figure that combines two contradictory or mutually exclusive terms in a single compressed expression.

'Deafening silence,' 'living death,' 'sweet sorrow,' 'dark light,' 'bitter sweet.'

A word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same forwards and backwards.

'Madam, I'm Adam'; 'A man, a plan, a canal, Panama' — visual and structural symmetry.

A form of interlocking quatrains in which lines 2 and 4 of each stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next, until the final stanza reverses the opening lines.

Carolyn Kizer's 'Parent's Pantoum' and Marilyn Hacker's work exemplify the form in English.

A statement that appears self-contradictory or absurd but on reflection reveals a deeper or surprising truth.

'I must be cruel only to be kind.' (Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.4)

A comic imitation of a specific work, author, or genre that exaggerates its stylistic features for humour or critique.

Lewis Carroll parodies Southey's 'Father William' and Wordsworth in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

A literary mode celebrating idealised rural life, typically featuring shepherds, and contrasting innocent nature with corrupt urban life.

Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'; Raleigh's witty reply; Milton's 'Lycidas'.

The attribution of human emotions to inanimate nature, especially weather that mirrors a character's inner state.

Stormy seas during shipwreck scenes; rain at funerals; sunlit meadows at moments of joy.

A line of five metrical feet — in English, almost invariably iambic, forming the basis of the sonnet, blank verse, and heroic couplet.

'Shall I comPARE thee TO a SUM-mer's DAY?' — five iambs.

A roundabout expression that uses more words than necessary — a circumlocution often used for elevation or euphemism.

'The watery main' for sea; 'the lord of rings' for king; 'the taking of life' for killing.

The speaker or 'mask' adopted by the poet — a voice constructed within the poem, distinct from the biographical author.

Browning's murderous Duke in 'My Last Duchess' is a persona, not Browning; Eliot's Prufrock is not Eliot.

Attributing human qualities, actions, or emotions to non-human entities — animals, objects, or abstract concepts.

'Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee / Mighty and dreadful…' (Donne, Holy Sonnet X)

A 14-line sonnet divided into an octave (ABBAABBA) proposing a situation, and a sestet (CDECDE or variant) resolving it.

Sidney's Astrophil and Stella; Milton's sonnets on his blindness and on the Piedmontese massacre.

A celebratory ode modelled on Pindar, built in three-part stanzas (strophe, antistrophe, epode) of great metrical complexity.

Thomas Gray's 'The Progress of Poesy' (1757) imitates Pindaric structure.

The use of multiple conjunctions in quick succession, slowing the rhythm and emphasising each element equally.

'And the thunder rattled, and the lightning flashed, and the rain poured, and the wind screamed.'

A word formed by fusing two or more words, blending their sounds and meanings into a single new coinage.

Lewis Carroll: 'slithy' (lithe + slimy); 'chortle' (chuckle + snort); 'mimsy' (miserable + flimsy).

A late-20th-century literary mode characterised by self-reflexivity, pastiche, irony, and scepticism toward grand narratives.

John Ashbery's 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'; Language Poetry; conceptual poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith.

The formal study of the sound structures of verse: meter, rhythm, rhyme, intonation, and all aspects of aural pattern.

Prosodic analysis of a line marks stressed (/) and unstressed (u) syllables to reveal its metrical skeleton.

A play on words exploiting different meanings of a word, or the similar sounds of different words, for comic or serious effect.

Shakespeare: 'Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.' — 'son/sun'.

A metrical foot of two unstressed syllables (u u) — the lightest foot, used to vary rhythm within a metrically regular line.

In 'to be or NOT to be,' the phrase 'to be or' contains a pyrrhic before the stressed 'NOT'.

A stanza or complete poem of four lines — the most common stanza unit in English verse, with many rhyme schemes.

ABAB (heroic stanza), ABBA (envelope), AABB (couplet pair), ABCB (ballad stanza).

A stanza of five lines, employed in the limerick, tanka, and various lyric forms.

The limerick is an AABBA quintain; the envoi of a sestina is a three-line quintain; the cinquain is a syllabic form.

A phrase, line, or group of lines repeated at regular intervals in a poem, typically at the end of each stanza.

Frost's 'Stopping by Woods': 'And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.'

A question posed for effect, implying its own answer, without genuinely soliciting a reply from the listener.

'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' (Macbeth, II.1) — Macbeth is not asking; he is expressing hallucination.

The correspondence of sound between the endings of words, particularly at the end of lines, creating sonic pleasure and structural pattern.

'Moon / June'; 'love / dove'; 'breath / death' — end rhymes linking line endings.

A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCC, giving a stately, courtly tone.

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

A broad 19th-century movement valuing imagination, emotion, nature, and the individual self against Enlightenment reason.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron in England; Goethe, Hugo, Pushkin across Europe.

A French lyric form of fifteen lines, two rhymes only, and a repeated rentrement (short refrain) derived from the opening words.

Leigh Hunt's 'Jenny Kissed Me' (1838) is the best-known English rondeau.

A classical stanza of three eleven-syllable Sapphic lines followed by a shorter five-syllable Adonic line.

Swinburne's 'Sapphics' (1865); Tennyson's 'Milton' — both recreate the Greek metre in English stress patterns.

The use of irony, wit, exaggeration, and mockery to expose and criticise human vices, follies, and social abuses.

Pope's The Dunciad (1728–43); Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe'; Swift's verse satires; Byron's Don Juan.

The analysis of a poem's metrical pattern by marking stressed and unstressed syllables to identify the prevailing foot and line length.

Marking 'To BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUES-tion' reveals five iambs (u —) = iambic pentameter.

A song or poem performed in the evening, addressed to a beloved, often beneath a window.

Shakespeare's 'Hark, hark, the lark' (Cymbeline); the troubadour serenata as evening counterpart to the aubade.

A six-line stanza or the concluding six lines of a Petrarchan sonnet, often providing resolution or complication.

The sestet of Milton's sonnet 'When I Consider How My Light Is Spent' offers divine consolation: 'They also serve who only stand and wait.'

A 39-line poem of six six-line stanzas, each using the same six end-words in a rotating pattern, plus a three-line envoi.

Elizabeth Bishop's 'Sestina' (1965); Swinburne's 'The Complaint of Lisa'; W.H. Auden's 'Paysage Moralisé'.

A 14-line sonnet structured as three ABAB quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG).

Sonnet 18: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate…'