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Personal Lexicon

“Glossary of Poetic Terms.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms.

  1. Abecedarian: Related to acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet. Ex: Jessica Greenbaum's "A Poem for S."

  2. Allegory: An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Ex: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress

  3. Anagram: A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word. Ex: She gapes at the mounds of pages lying on the table.

  4. Ballad: A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event. Ex: John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

  5. Beat poets: A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of the “Beat” aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. Beat poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality. Ex: Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg

  6. Common measure: A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Ex: Emily Dickinson's "It was not death, for I stood up"

  7. Confessional poetry: Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Ex: Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

  8. Didactic poetry: Poetry that instructs, either in terms of morals or by providing knowledge of philosophy, religion, arts, science, or skills. Although some poets believe that all poetry is inherently instructional, didactic poetry separately refers to poems that contain a clear moral or message or purpose to convey to its readers. Ex: John Milton's Paradise Lost

  9. Eclogue: A brief, dramatic pastoral poem, set in an idyllic rural place but discussing urban, legal, political, or social issues. Ex: Edmund Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar: April"

  10. Figure of speech: An expressive, nonliteral use of language. Like tropes (hyperbole, irony, metaphor, and simile) and schemes (anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus). Ex: Shit hit the fan

  11. Flarf: Originally a prank on the scam contest sponsored by the organization Poetry.com, the experimental poetry movement flarf has slowly assumed a serious position as a new kind of Internet-based poetic practice. Known for its reliance on Google as a means of generating odd juxtapositions, surfaces, and grammatical inaccuracies, flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or “incorrect” poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape. Original flarf member Gary Sullivan describes flarf as “a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’”

  12. Georgic: A poem or book dealing with agriculture or rural topics, which commonly glorifies outdoor labor and simple country life. Often takes the form of a didactic or instructive poem intended to give instructions related to a skill or art. Ex: Virgil's Georgics

  13. Hendecasyllabic: A Classical Greek and Latin metrical line consisting of 11 syllables: typically a spondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the end.

  14. Iamb: A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The words “unite” and “provide” are both iambic. It is the most common meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech. Ex: Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking"

  15. Lament: Any poem expressing deep grief, usually at the death of a loved one or some other loss. Related to elegy and the dirge. Ex: "A Lament" by Percy Bysshe Shelly

  16. Litany: Initially a prayer or supplication used in formal and religious processions, the litany has been more recently adopted as a poetic form that catalogues a series. This form typically includes repetitious phrases or movements, sometimes mimicking call-and-response. Ex: Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"

  17. Mock epic: A poem that plays with the conventions of the epic to comment on a topic satirically. Ex: Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"

  18. Neologism: A newly coined word. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is filled with them, including “slithy” and “gimble.”

  19. Octave: An eight-line stanza or poem. See ottava rima and triolet. The first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet are also called an octave.

  20. Palindrome: A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward and forward. The words “civic” and “level” are palindromes, as is the phrase “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama.” The reversal can be word by word as well, as in “fall leaves when leaves fall.”

  21. Quatrain: A four-line stanza, rhyming
    -ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain), as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
    -AABB (a double couplet); see A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” 
    -ABAB (known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic), as in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” or “Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
    -ABBA (known as envelope or enclosed), as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” or John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.”
    -AABA, the stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

  22. Rhyme: The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word’s last stressed syllable. Ex: "tenacity" and "audacity"

  23. Sestet: A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. A sestet refers only to the final portion of a sonnet, otherwise the six-line stanza is known as a sexain. Ex: the second stanza of Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged Moments” is a sexain

  24. Tautology: A statement redundant in itself, such as “free gift” or “The stars, O astral bodies!” Also, a statement that is necessarily true—a circular argument—such as “she is alive because she is living.”

  25. Verse: As a mass noun, poetry in general; as a regular noun, a line of poetry. Typically used to refer to poetry that possesses more formal qualities.

  26. Zeugma: A figure of speech in which one verb or preposition joins two objects within the same phrase, often with different meanings. Ex: “I left my heart—and my suitcase—in San Francisco.”

Lexicon

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1. Gaps and Silences

  • What is not present, directly said, or left out in a text.

  • ex. Harper Lee is able to comment on racism, bigotry, and social intolerance through her characters behavior with other characters, Bob Ewell.

 

2. Other/marginalization

  • the exclusion of a group/person, pushing to the side or ignoring/belittling them

  • Ex. the latino/a community or LGBTQ+ community

 

3. Decentering

  • the ability to “back away from” what is in main focus and put focus on background or underlying issues that shed new light on what is normally center focused.

  • Ex. If you were to take the character of Boo Radely and the towns view of him you’d consider him a crazy shut in however Scout Finch has a different a decentered perspective on view that goes against what the town believes.

 

4. Idiolect

  • Speech habits that are accustom to a person even among a dialect. The fingerprint of your language.

  • Ex. Donald Trump.

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5. Author and Authority

  • The glorified term for a writer and their ownership of a text or textual pattern/concept.

  • Ex. Shakespeare and his Romeo and Juliet, a narrative that can be found at the root of any love story.

 

6. Character and Characterization

  • A person and the way such person(character) is described using literary tools.

  • Ex. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and how he is the face of social justice even still in the literary world because Harper Lee created him so.

 

7. Round vs Flat

  • A round character shows complexity and is a significant character that is challenged in a story while a flat character has a singular defining quality and is more of a supporting figure that doesn’t have direct challenge in the story.

  • Ex. Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom

 

8. Comedy

  • A story that goes from chaotic to harmonious, includes a happy ending, and has low class characters.

  • Ex. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare

 

9. Tragedy

  • The opposite of comedy. It is a story that goes from harmonious to chaotic. Where someone of “higher class” sit experiencing something bad/loss.

  • Ex. Cabin in the Woods a fantastic example because five kids are just harmoniously vacationing and then the zombie redneck family comes out of the ground and people start dying very suddenly.

 

10. Pastoral

  • Genre in which shepherds/farmers are represented in simplicity and innocently away from city life

  • Ex. Charlotte’s web or Little House on the Prairie

 

11. Carnival/absurd

  • Carnival: comical depiction of fact/story, almost senseless and out-there, chaos, a binge on carnal needs

    •  ex. The Purge, Us

  • Absurd: questions the world and things that aren’t there and the senselessness of things. everything is meaningless. the whole world is upside-down. existentialism

    • ex. Waiting for Gado, Slaughterhouse Five, kinda Adventure Time (the one where Finn eats human meat)

 

12. Discourse

  • Discourse is a blanket term for dialogue, conversation or just any language interaction in social form.

  • The Liturgists is a podcast where they have a topic (for example the first episode of season 1 is about Creativity) and discuss it from different perspectives/lenses.

 

13. Dialogue

  • Dialogue is conversation between two or more characters. It is composed of just the actual words in a conversation. Dialogue is important to character development and plot development. Literary dialogue can also be two components in a comparison having a dialogue.

 

14. Absence and Presence

  • Absence and presence are closely related to "decentering". The way a text can either give attention to something by presenting it (presence) or the opposite, giving something no attention; which, in turn gives it an enormous amount of attention.

  • Ex. Inception (I know it is a stretch) but the absence of the top stopping spinning solidifies the presence of a dream. The end of the movie, it never shows the viewers if the top stops spinning or not, leaving us to wonder if he's dreaming or not.

 

15. Background

  • Background is defined as what is depicted as the most remote and inconspicuous.

  • Ex. In Romeo and Juliet the background is thirteenth century Italy and their families were feuding, so that explains why their love was forbidden.

 

16. Foreground

  • The elements of a story the standout from the background, they are the “main focus”

  • Ex. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet and their love are the foreground.

 

17. Point of view

  • The perspective from which the story is told, which character or tense or use of pronouns (who it addresses) First, Second or Third Point of view and all their subsections.

  • Ex. In the Michael Grant series “Gone” each chapter is told form the perspective of a different teen in the story.

 

18. Image

  • The individualized picture a text creates in the audience’s mind through figurative language and other literary tactics

  • Ex. The red curtain room from “The Great Gatsby” and how Fitzgerald describes it.

 

19. Imagery

  • Figurative language distinguished in terms of metaphor, simile, and personification.

  • Ex. Barn walls swayed with the wind that picked at paint like a nervous girl would pick at her nails.

 

20. Metaphor

  • A form of imagery that compares two things indirectly without use of “like” or “as”

  • Ex. She ate her cheese stick like peeling water damaged paint off walls, it stretched and then snapped off.

 

21. Personification

  • A form of imagery that applies human characteristics to a non-human object.

  • Ex. Sun rays dancing over waves.

 

22. Simile

  • Simile is a form of imagery that makes a comparison using the words "like" or "as".

  • Ex. Your friend on the track team is "as" fast as lightning.

 

23. Context

  • The physical and cultural conditions that makeup a text.

  • Ex. In Romeo and Juliet the context is that their families are feuding, in the 1300s in Italy.

 

24. Intertext

  • The relationship between two texts, using one to work for the other

  • Ex. "Modest" by Isaiah Rashad he uses intertext with Curb Your Enthusiasm, "She got something to say like Larry David"

 

25. Realism

  • In a literary sense to make things like setting or characters seem more real to the audience.

  • Ex. In “The Great Gatsby” where Daisy and Jay throw shirts around in the closet.

 

26. Heteroglossia

  • The presence of two or more voices or expressed viewpoints in a text or other artistic work. In Greek hetero means different and glossa means tongue, language.

  • Ex. Harry Potter speaking with his friends in English, parseltongue with snakes, and a variation of Latin for spells.

 

27. Iambic pentameter

  • a meter in which there are five feet of unstressed-stressed syllables

  • Ex. Common and super well-known example from Shakespeare: But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? (Romeo and Juliet)

 

28. End stop

  • In poetry, a full thought ended by some form of punctuation.

  • Ex. the song by Isaiah Rashad and SZA "Heavenly father" the hook ends with a question mark, "Heavenly father why you so far away?"

 

29. Enjambment

  • A poetic term that is synonymous with “pauses.” but not the direct end of a quote.

 

30. Aestheticism

  • It challenges ethics, and how texts are always "pretty". Focus on beauty or art over virtue or ethics.

  • Ex. Wes Anderson movies

 

31. Amoebaen Verses

  • Theocritus Idyll 5

 

32. Apollonian v Dionysian

  • Referring to the god Apollo, the rational, ordered, and self-discipline aspects of human nature. Relating to the god Dionysus, the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature. Order vs chaos in literature.

  • Ex.  There is a scene in How to be Single where Alice and Tom who are just friends get very drunk and have sex after reaching a certain number of drinks drank between the two of them.

 

33. Camp

  • Being too serious about things you should not be serious about, over exaggerated.

  • Ex. Rocky Horror Picture Show

 

34. Classicism

  • The use of ancient greek or roman principles and style in art and literature. Harmony restrait and adherence to form of craftsmanship. The period between 1660 and 1780 in England is the neoclassical period.

  • Ex. The Birth of Venus!!! Shakespeare.

 

35. Conceit

  • A fanciful expression in writing or speech, an elaborate metaphor

  • Ex. Dierks Bentley: I’ll Be the Moon.

 

36. Différance

  • Differance means literary elements are always changing, things are always changing

 

37. Dynamic v Static

  • Dynamic are characters that go through changes. While a static character is a character that stays the same from beginning to end.

  • Ex. Harry Potter is a static character and Neville Longbottom is a dynamic character.

 

38. Jouissance

  • Beyond physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy. Pleasure and pain taken together as a package deal essentially.

  • Ex. Romeo and Juliet, risking it all to be in love and dying because of it. 

 

39. Leitmotif/Motif

  • A recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person. A distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition.

  • Ex. Hedwig’s Theme is THE Harry Potter song, a leitmotif, because of the placement of this bird and the song and how it correlates to the movie, it reminds us of Harry Potter. Muggles are a motif in Harry Potter and presents an obvious contrast to the realm of wizardry.

 

40. Literariness

  • The organization of language which through special linguistic and formal properties distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts.

  • Ex. Sticky note from mom inside of lunchbox vs Oxford Dictionary

 

41. Mythology

  • Can be very small or self contained, belief system.

  • Ex. A personal anecdote that may be used as a personal reminder or explanation of how things work.

 

42. Objective correlative

  • the artistic and literary technique of representing or evoking a particular emotion by means of symbols that objectify that emotion and are associated with it.

  • Ex. Voldemort has literally the same emotion associated with him throughout the whole Harry Potter series.

 

43. Old English

  • The Anglo-Saxon language spoken from approximately 450 to 1150 A.D. in what is now Great Britain.

  • Ex. Tolken elfan language or perhaps Beowulf

 

44. Soliloquy

  • When an actor or character is alone and reveals their feelings.

  • Ex. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet gives a famous soliloquy when she finds Romeo dead.

 

45. Syntax

  • The structure of a sentence or word order.

 

46. Volta

  • Italian word for the shift or dispute in a poem.

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