Poetry Terms︎︎︎

Below are the first few of 270 terms used in poetry techniques and structures. Many are great concepts that can be applied to other materials. See the rest of the terms on the link below.

Abecedarian

Related to acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet. See Jessica Greenbaum, “A Poem for S.” Tom Disch’s “Abecedary” adapts the principles of an abecedarian poem, while Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror/The Terror of Future” sequence also uses the alphabet as an organizing principle. Poets who have used the abecedarian across whole collections include Mary Jo Bang, in The Bride of E, and Harryette Mullen, in Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Accentual verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are accentual; see Ezra Pound’s modern translation of “The Seafarer.” More recently, Richard Wilbur employed this same Anglo-Saxon meter in his poem “Junk.” Traditional nursery rhymes, such as “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,” are often accentual.

Accentual-syllabic verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. From line to line, the number of stresses (accents) may vary, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed. The majority of English poems from the Renaissance to the 19th century are written according to this metrical system.

Acmeism

An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova.

Acrostic

A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. See Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky.”

Alcaic

A four-line stanza invented by the Classical Greek poet Alcaeus that employs a specific syllabic count per line and a predominantly dactylic meter. Alfred, Lord Tennyson imitated its form in his poem “Milton.”

Alexandrine

In English, a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. The last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark” is an alexandrine.

Allegory

An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegory’s meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are two major allegorical works in English.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; “pizza” and “place” alliterate. Example: “With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” Browse poems with alliteration.

Allusion

A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s influential long poem is dense with allusions. The title of Seamus Heaney’s autobiographical poem “Singing School” alludes to a line from W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (“Nor is there singing school but studying /Monuments of its own magnificence”). Browse poems with allusions.

Ambiguity

A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. As poet and critic William Empson wrote in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), “The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.” A poet may consciously join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader’s expectation of meaning, as e.e. cummings does in [anyone lived in a pretty how town]. The ambiguity may be less deliberate, steered more by the poet’s attempts to express something ineffable, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.” At the sight of a bird diving through the air, the speaker marvels, “Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!” The ambiguity of this phrase lies in the exclamation of “buckle”: The verb could be descriptive of the action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. In both cases, the meaning of the word is not obvious from its context. “Buckle” could mean “fall” or “crumple,” or it could describe the act of clasping armor and bracing for battle.

Anachronism

Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeare’s placing of a clock in Julius Caesar is an anachronism, because clocks had not yet been invented in the period when the play is set. In Charles Olson’s epic The Maximus Poems, the central figure encompasses the poet’s alter ego, the second-century Greek philosopher Maximus of Tyre, and the fourth-century Phoenician mystic Maximus. This persona arises from outside of time to reflect on the state of American culture by recounting the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Anagram

A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word; for example, “The teacher gapes at the mounds of exam pages lying before her.”

Anapest

A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words “underfoot” and “overcome” are anapestic. Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” is written in anapestic meter.