Life Style / Poetry Glossary

Sonnet Sequence: A group of sonnets sharing the same subject matter and sometimes a dramatic situation and persona. Sir philip sidney, edmund spenser, elizabeth barrett browning, and w. H. Auden have written . . . View Full Definition

Spasmodic School: P. J. Bailey, sydney dobell, alexander smith and other late romantic, early victorian minor poets.

Spenserian Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem developed by edmund spenser in his amoretti that varies the english form by interlocking the three quatrains, abab bcbc cdcd ee

Spenserian Stanza: The unit of edmund spenser's faerie queene, consisting of eight iambic-pentameter lines and a final alexandrine, and having the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc, or two interlaced quatrains overlappin . . . View Full Definition

Spondee: A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables / ' ' /. An example of a spondaic word is 'hog-wild.' the di-spondee / ' ' ' ' / is a classical greek and latin metrical foot.

Sprung Rhythm: A metrical system devised by gerard manley hopkins that has 1-to-4-syllable feet, each starting with a stressed syllable (sometimes a foot by itself), where the spondee replaces the iamb as . . . View Full Definition

Stanza : A group of verses separated from other such groups in a poem and often sharing a common rhyme scheme.

Stichomythia : Dialogue in alternate verse-lines.

Stress: A syllable uttered in a higher pitch than others. The language determines how english words are stressed, but sentence structure, semantics, and metre can alter that encoding.

Stretched Sonnet: One extended to sixteen or more lines, such as george meredith's 'modern love.'

Strophe : The section of a greek ode sung when the chorus turns from one side of the orchestra to the other.

Sublime: The main characteristic of great poetry, longinus held, was sublimity or high, grand, ennobling seriousness.

Submerged Sonnet: A sonnet hidden inside a longer poetic work, such as lines 235-48 of t. S. Eliot's the waste land.

Syllabic Verse: Lines whose rhythm arises by the number of its syllables. Examples include thomas nashe's 'adieu, farewell earth's bliss,' robert bridges' 'cheddar pinks,' marianne moore's 'poetry' (whose s . . . View Full Definition

Syllable: A vowel preceded by from zero to three consonants ('awl' ... 'strand'), and followed by from zero to four consonants ('too' ... 'sixths').

Symbol : Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a pointer to) a thing, or what is abstract, otherworldly, or numinous. Samu . . . View Full Definition

Symbolist Movement: Late 19th-century french writers, including mallarmé and valéry, whose verse dealt with transcendental phenomena or with images and actions whose meaning was associative rather than referential.

Synaeresis, Synaloepha: The contraction of two syllables into one, for metrical purposes, by changing two adjacent syllables into a diphthong. Paul fussell gives as an example the first line of john milton's paradi . . . View Full Definition

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