Definitions, examples, and etymologies of literary terms

A comparison between two unlike things using 'like' or 'as,' making the resemblance explicit.

'My love is like a red, red rose / That's newly sprung in June.' (Robert Burns)

An approximate rhyme in which sounds are similar but not identical — also called half rhyme, near rhyme, or pararhyme.

Emily Dickinson: 'Hope' / 'stop'; 'faith' / 'breath'; Wilfred Owen: 'groined' / 'groaned'.

A speech in which a character voices their thoughts aloud as if alone — the dramatic form of the lyric 'I'.

Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' — an extended meditation spoken before an implied (silent) audience.

A 14-line lyric poem, typically in iambic pentameter, with a structural turn (volta) and a prescribed rhyme scheme.

Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Keats, Neruda, Berryman — the sonnet spans six centuries of mastery.

A nine-line stanza rhyming ABABBCBCC, the final line an alexandrine (iambic hexameter), invented by Edmund Spenser.

Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590); Keats' 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; Shelley's 'Adonais'; Byron's Childe Harold.

A metrical foot of two equally stressed syllables (— —), used to slow the line and add weight or gravity.

'Heartbreak,' 'moonrise,' 'cold steel' — two heavy syllables; also 'dead stop,' 'bright stars.'

Gerard Manley Hopkins's system in which each foot begins with one stressed syllable followed by any number of unstressed syllables.

'The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.' (Hopkins)

The representation of continuous, unfiltered thought — associative, non-linear, and mimicking the flux of mental experience.

Late Anne Carson; certain lyric essays; Dorothy Richardson's verse-influenced prose experiments.

In Greek choral performance and Pindaric odes, the first of the three movement stanzas (strophe, antistrophe, epode) danced by the chorus.

The chorus of Sophocles' Antigone alternates strophe and antistrophe, each metrically identical.

An aesthetic quality evoking awe, terror, and a sense of overwhelming power or vastness beyond the merely beautiful.

Shelley before Mont Blanc; Wordsworth's 'Simplon Pass' passage in The Prelude; Turner's paintings of storms.

An art and literary movement exploring unconscious imagery, dream logic, and irrational juxtaposition to liberate the imagination.

André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924); the poetry of Paul Éluard, Federico García Lorca, and Philip Lamantia.

An object, image, person, or event that carries meaning beyond itself, representing a broader idea or value.

The albatross in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner — symbol of guilt, nature violated, and spiritual consequence.

A late 19th-century literary movement using symbols and indirect suggestion to evoke states of mind and inner experience.

Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud in France; W.B. Yeats in English; Stefan George in German.

The description of one sense in terms of another — the cross-wiring of sensory domains in poetic imagery.

Keats: 'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter' — sound perceived as taste.

A rhythmic displacement in which the expected stressed beat is delayed or shifted — borrowed from musical terminology.

Hopkins's sprung rhythm and Dickinson's dashes both produce syncopated rhythmic pauses against the expected metrical pattern.

A figure in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole stands for a part.

'All hands on deck' (hands for sailors); 'England won the match' (nation for team); 'wheels' for a car.

A Japanese lyric of 31 syllables in five lines (5-7-5-7-7) — the dominant Japanese court poetry form for over a millennium.

Lady Ise (c.877–940): 'Even in the morning mist / the path through the mountain fields / remains unclear to me…'

I.A. Richards's terms for the components of a metaphor: the tenor is the subject, the vehicle is the image applied to it.

In 'my love is a rose': love = tenor (what is spoken of); rose = vehicle (the image illuminating it).

A unit or stanza of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed, forming a complete metrical and often semantic unit.

Three-line stanzas in terza rima (ABA); the triplet (AAA) within a Shakespearean sonnet.

A continuous chain of interlocking tercets rhyming ABA BCB CDC, in which each middle rhyme opens a new triplet.

Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' (1820): five sections in terza rima; Dante's Divine Comedy (1308–20).

A line of four metrical feet — a common length in ballads, hymns, and lighter lyric.

Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850): 'Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky' — four iambic feet.

The central idea, moral concern, or insight that a poem explores — distinct from its literal subject or story.

A poem about a storm may carry themes of human helplessness, nature's indifference, the sublime, or mortality.

A formal song or poem of lamentation for the dead, originally choral, grander in scope than a dirge.

Emerson's 'Threnody' (1844) laments his young son Waldo; Tennyson's In Memoriam is sometimes called a threnody.

The poet's attitude toward the subject and the reader, conveyed through diction, imagery, syntax, and formal choice.

Hardy's tone in 'The Darkling Thrush' is bleak yet grudgingly hopeful; Marvell's in 'To His Coy Mistress' is witty and seductive.

A line of three metrical feet — common in lighter lyric, the ode strophe, and song.

'Come live with me and be my love' — three iambs; Horace's Sapphic stanza uses a closing trimeter (Adonic).

An eight-line poem with only two rhymes and two refrains, rhyming ABaAabAB (capitals = repeated lines).

Thomas Hardy wrote triolets: 'How great my grief, my joys how few, / Since first it was my fate to know thee.'

A metrical foot of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (— u) — the reverse of the iamb.

Blake: 'TIger, TIger, BURNing BRIGHT, / IN the FORests OF the NIGHT' — sustained trochaic tetrameter.

Any figure of speech in which words are used in a non-literal sense — the broader category encompassing metaphor, irony, metonymy, and synecdoche.

Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are Jakobson's four master tropes of figurative language.

The omission of one or more syllables from the expected end of a metrical line — a synonym for catalexis.

A trochaic tetrameter line ending with only 7 syllables (instead of 8) is truncated: the final unstressed syllable is cut.

A Latin theme ('where are…?') lamenting the passing of people, pleasures, or eras that once were but are no more.

François Villon: 'Where are the snows of yesteryear?' (Ballade des dames du temps jadis)

Deliberate representation of something as less significant, powerful, or extreme than it actually is.

'It's just a scratch' when grievously wounded; Hemingway's prose style is defined by systematic understatement.

The quality of seeming true or lifelike — the convincing appearance of reality within a literary work.

The dramatic monologue achieves verisimilitude by constructing a plausible, psychologically consistent speaking voice.

A 19-line poem of five tercets and a concluding quatrain, using only two rhymes and repeating two lines as alternating refrains.

Dylan Thomas: 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night' (1951) — 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'

Poetry in which the visual shape, layout, or typography of the text on the page contributes essentially to meaning.

e.e. cummings' 'l(a' — the word 'leaf' inserted within 'loneliness' to enact falling isolation typographically.

The distinctive personality, tone, and diction of a poem's speaker — the characteristic quality that makes a poet recognisable.

Dickinson's voice: compressed, hymn-like, slant-rhymed; Whitman's: expansive, cataloguing, prophetic.

The turn or shift in argument, emotion, or perspective within a sonnet, typically between octave and sestet or before the closing couplet.

Keats's 'When I Have Fears': the volta shifts from fearful inventory of loss to stoic 'then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone.'

The distortion of natural word stress to fit the prevailing metrical pattern — especially common in folk ballads.

In a ballad, 'mournful' may be stressed 'mournFUL' to maintain the iambic beat of the line.

A single verb or adjective that governs or modifies two or more nouns in grammatically or semantically incongruous ways.

Pope: 'She sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tea' — 'takes' governs both 'counsel' and 'tea' absurdly.