Life Style / Poetry Glossary

Epithalamion: Lyric poem in praise of hymen (the greek god of marriage) or of a particular wedding, such as edmund spenser's 'epithalamion.'

Epitrite: Greek and latin metrical foot consisting of short, long, long, and long syllables / ~ ' ' ' / in any order.

Epizenxis: Repetition of a word several times without connectives.

Epode : The third section (or the stand) of a pindaric ode, after the strophe and antistophe.

Euphony: A pleasing harmony of sounds.

Exemplum: A narrative that teaches a moral.

Eye Rhyme: Words rhyming only as spelled, not as pronounced, and hence not a perfect or true rhyme. An example is 'through' and 'slough.'

Fabliau: A bawdy medieval verse narrative, originally french but adapted by geoffrey chaucer's in 'the miller's tale,' 'the reeve's tale,' 'the merchant's tale,' and others of the canterbury tales.

Falling Metre: Trochees and dactyls, i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables.

Feminine Rhyme: Gendered expression for rhymes ending in one or more unstressed syllables, such as 'fruity' and 'booty.' the expressions light, weak or multi-syllable rhyme avoid the sexist bias.

Figure Of Speech: One of many kinds of word-play, focusing either on sound and word-order (schemes) or on semantics (tropes). A figure of speech usually describes one thing in terms of another.

Flyting: A poem of invective by two speakers trying to out-humiliate one another.

Folk Song: Popular, often anonymous sung lyrics that may be passed on by word-of-mouth originally before being compiled by scholars into literary collections.

Foot: The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in english are ia . . . View Full Definition

Formula: An often repeated phrase, sometimes half-a-line long and metrically distinctive.

Found Poem: A passage in a piece of prose shaped by a reader into quasi-metrical lines and republished as a poem.

Free Verse: Rhythmical but non-metrical, non-rhyming lines. These may have a deliberate rhythm or cadence but seem to disappoint the reader's expectation for a formal metre, such as iambic pentameter.

Georgian: When characterizing poetry, work written in the reigns of the four georges (1714-1830) or in the reign of george v (1910-36).

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21