Poetic/Literary Terminology:



Poetic/Literary Terminology:

Conceit:

A conceit is a figure of speech which makes an unusual and sometimes elaborately sustained comparison between two dissimilar things. Related to wit, there are two main types:

1. The Petrarchan conceit, used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons with the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress "a cloud of dark disdain"; or else the lady is a sun whose beauty and virtue shine on her lover from a distance.

2. The metaphysical conceit is characteristic of seventeenth-century writers influenced by John Donne, and became popular again in this century after the revival of the metaphysical poets. This type of conceit draws upon a wide range of knowledge, from the commonplace to the esoteric, and its comparisons are elaborately rationalized.

For instance, Donne's "The Flea" (1633) compares a flea bite to the act of love; and in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (1633) separated lovers are likened to the legs of a compass, the leg drawing the circle eventually returning home to "the fixed foot."

Hyperbole and Understatement:

Hyperbole is figurative language which greatly overstates or exaggerates facts, whether in earnest or for comic effect.

For example, at the burial of Ophelia in Hamlet (1600), her brother Laertes leaps into her grave and asks that the earth be piled on both of them "Till of this flat a mountain you have made"; at which Hamlet then outdoes Laertes figuratively by calling for "millions of acres" to be piled on all three.

On the other hand, understatement purposefully represents a thing as much less significant than it is, achieving an ironic effect.

In Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729), which suggests eating children as a solution for Ireland's poverty, the speaker raises possible objections to dispense with them, saying, "some scrupulous People might be apt to censure such a Practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon Cruelty."

Metaphor:

In a metaphor, a word is identified with something different from what the word literally denotes. A metaphor is distinguished from a simile in that it equates different things without using connecting terms such as like or as. Whereas a simile states, "My love is like a burning flame," a metaphor refers to "the burning flame of my love." An extended metaphor explores a variety of ways in which a metaphor is appropriate to its subject (see conceit).

Technically, the subject to which the metaphor is applied is the tenor ("my love" in the example above), whereas the metaphorical term is the vehicle ("the burning flame"). In an implicit metaphor, the tenor (subject) is not specified but implied: for instance, one may say "I'm burning" with the intended implication that the consuming flame is love.

Metonymy and Synechdoche:

These terms refer to figurative language that uses particular words to represent something else with which they are associated.

In metonymy, a term is substituted for another term with which it is closely associated ("crown" or "sceptre" stands duty for "monarch"). In synechdoche, a part is used to signify the whole, as when a ship's captain calls out, "All hands on deck!" (in which "hand" signifies the whole person of each sailor--we hope).

Oxymoron:

An oxymoron is a type of paradox that combines two terms ordinarily seen as opposites, such as Milton's description of God in Paradise Lost as "Dark with excessive bright."

Personification:

Personification is the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects or abstract concepts.

A reference to thunder booming "angrily" personifies thunder by giving it emotion. When we speak of jealousy "rearing its ugly head," we are personifying jealousy by giving it human form. Personification heightens a reader's emotional response to what is being described by giving it human qualities and therefore human significance.

Simile:

". . . as happy as the day is long."

The use of these terms distinguishes simile from the more indirect metaphor.

Symbol:

Generally speaking, a symbol is a sign representing something other than itself.

In literary criticism, a symbol is an image with an indefinite range of reference beyond itself. Some symbols are conventional ("the sun," "the eagle," "the Good Shepherd"), as they have a range of significance that is commonly understood in a particular culture. Other symbols are private or personal, having a special significance derived from their particular use by an author.

The simile draws a limited comparison between one thing and another ("as fierce as a tiger"--fierceness is the sole quality compared). The metaphor is more open; it states a likeness by implication, leaving it to the reader to make the connection.

When the young Shakespeare gives the Duke of York, who is being taunted by Queen Margaret, the line "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!" his meaning depends on the particular qualities associated at the time with the tiger: that they included not only fierceness but also deviousness is shown by the infamous parody of the line by his jealous contemporary, Robert Greene, who warned others in the literary world that Shakespeare, had a "tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide."

The symbol is yet more open. Blake's tiger is both fierce and beautiful:

Tiger Tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

And as the poem develops the symbol becomes increasingly various and complex in its reference, an exploration of the nature of the tiger's creator:

When the stars threw down their spears

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Writers can develop symbols created by others, and can reinterpret conventional ones; Adrienne Rich, in "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" counterpoints the energy and beauty of a Blakean tiger with the symbol of a wedding ring in such a way that the conventionally threatening tiger becomes attractive as it "paces" in "sleek chivalric certainty," and the conventionally desirable wedding ring becomes oppressive as its "massive weight . . . / sits heavily" on Aunt Jennifer's finger.

Alliteration:

Alliteration is the repetition of consonantal sounds in words close together, particularly using letters at the beginning of words or stressed syllables.

Assonance and Consonance:

Assonance is the sequential repetition of vowel sounds, particularly in stressed syllables, as in the line "Full fathom five thy father lies," in which "fathom" and "father" and "five" and "lies" have paralleled vowel sounds.

Consonance is the repetition of a pattern of consonants within words in which the separating vowels differ, as in the pairs "leaf" and "loaf" or "room" and "roam."

Note that sound, not spelling, is the criterion for consonance, as of alliteration and assonance. It is also true, however, that many critics refer to both assonance and consonance by the more general term "assonance."

Meter:

Meter is the organization of speech rhythms (verbal stresses) into regular patterns, in terms of both the arrangement of stresses and their frequency of repetition per line of verse.

Poetry is organized by the division of each line of verse into "feet," metric units which each consist of a particular arrangement of strong and weak stresses. The most common metric unit is the iambic foot, in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one (as in the words "reverse" and "compose").

Here is a table of meters and their names.

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Meter is also determined by the number of feet in a line. A line with five feet is called pentameter; thus, a line of five iambs is known as "iambic pentameter" (the most common metrical form in English poetry).

The most common line lengths are:

trimeter: three feet

tetrameter: four feet

pentameter: five feet

hexameter: six feet (an "Alexandrine" when iambic)

heptameter: seven feet (a "fourteener" when iambic)

Naturally, there is a degree of variation from line to line, as a rigid adherence to the meter results in unnatural or monotonous language. A skillful poet manipulates breaks in the prevailing rhythm of a poem for particular effects. John Donne, for example, rarely held to the meter of his lines for more than a few feet at a time. These lines from his Holy Sonnet 14 (1633) are written in iambic pentameter, but the stress patterns vary a great deal:

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

Enjambment: 

In poetry, when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning. This is also called a run-on line. The transition between the first two lines of Wordsworth’s poem "My Heart Leaps Up" demonstrates enjambment:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

Envoy See sestina.

Onomatopoeia:

Onomatopoeia refers either to words which resemble in sound what they denote ("hiss," "rattle," "bang"), or to words that correspond in other ways with what they describe.

Rhyme:

Words rhyme when their concluding syllables have a similar sound. Two words are said to rhyme if their last stressed vowel and the sounds that follow it match (as in "afar" and "bizarre," "biology" and "ideology," or "computer" and "commuter").

End-rhymes are words at the end of successive lines which rhyme with each other:

The cow is of the bovine ilk;

One end is moo, the other milk.

(Ogden Nash)

Internal rhymes are rhyming words within a line: "The sails at noon left off their tune" (Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1797]).

A distinction is also made between masculine rhyme, in which only one syllable rhymes ("loud" and "proud"), and feminine rhyme, in which the rhyme extends over more than one syllable, both stressed and unstressed ("cooking" and "looking").

A perfect rhyme is one in which the two sounds correspond exactly ("by hook or by crook"). In partial/slant rhyme the sounds are similar but not identical:

Then say not Man's imperfect, Heaven in fault;

Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought....

(Pope, "An Essay on Man")

Note, however, that differences in dialect and the evolution of the language make some rhymes more or less perfect over time; thus in the seventeenth century "prove" and "love, "brazen" and "reason" were perfect rhymes.

Stanza:

Stanzas are to poetry what paragraphs are to prose. They are groups of lines that have been separated from other groups of lines in the poem.

Often the stanzas within a specific poem have consistent patterns of rhyme and meter, but poems may also be divided into completely irregular stanzas. Specific types of stanzas include the couplet, a pair of rhymed lines (see heroic couplet) ; the tercet, a three-line stanza in which all three lines rhyme; terza rima, a series of tercets in which the rhymes interlock (aba bcb cdc and so on); the quatrain, a four-line stanza; and ottava rima, which rhymes abababcc. (See also sonnet.)

Verse paragraphs are like their prose counterparts. In longer poems in blank verse or heroic couplets, the paragraph becomes the organizing principle.

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