Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.

DO NOT underestimate the importancee of this section. There are A LOT of questions on the GRE about forms, verse, meter, etc. You won't need to count feet (probably), but you will need to be able to identify a Spensarian stanza, an alexandrine, etc. Not only will knowing these terms help you get questions that specifically ask you to identify a form, but it will also help you distinguish between different poets. For example, if you see a poem that is written in heroic couplets, you can pretty much be certain that the poet is not going to be anybody modern, that the poet is almost certainly Alexander Pope or John Dryden.

Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.

alexandrine – Another name for iambic hexameter. ETS is going to ask you to identify the final line of a Spenserian stanza as an alexandrine.

Alliterative verse -- Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves - with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.

apostrophe – is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea. In dramatic works and poetry, it is often introduced by the word "O" (not the exclamation "oh").

~ To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?" John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn".

~ "Roll on thou dark and deep blue ocean." Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage".

Aubade – An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn. Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is a famous example.

assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of verse or prose.

Ballad – The ballad stanza is a quatrain where the second and fourth lines rhyme. La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats is in ballad form. It usually features alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad.

Blank verse – a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. It is widely associated with Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was first used by the Earl of Surrey around 1540.

bob and the wheel – this is the mechanism used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It consists of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel).

Breton Lay – is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin's Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example

caesura – an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is especially common and apparent in Old English verse.
Ex. Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum
("Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore...")

chiasmus – a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" –Byron)

conceit – an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets.

elegy – a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies.

End-stopped line – A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment.

Enjambment - the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line.

The following lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown.

epithalamium – refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally. See Spenser’s Epithalamium.

Eclogue – An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.

euphuistic prose: Tending to or resembling euphuism; of the nature of euphuism; characterized by euphuism. Chiefly in inaccurate sense: Abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Highly associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech—a popular form in the late 16th century.

fabliau – comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales.

feminine rhyme – a rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually the final syllable is unaccented. Shakespeare's Sonnet number 20, uniquely among the sonnets, makes use exclusively of feminine rhymes:
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion...

flat and round characters – used to describe characters who do and do not develop over the course of a work respectively. The distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Nov el.

Free verse – a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse.

georgic – a poem dealing with agriculture. Derived from Virgil’s Georgics.

hamartia – tragic mistake or tragic flaw. It is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics.

*Heroic couplets – rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. You should associate heroic couplets almost exclusively with Restoration verse. Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock.

Homeric epithet – A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of recurring epithets, such as the rosy-fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. These epithets were metric stop-gaps as well as mnemonic devices.

Hudibrastic – Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.).

Kunstlerroman – a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are both examples.

Litotes – a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Example: “That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now." (Beowulf)

Masculine rhyme – a rhyme that ends on a final, stressed syllable (as opposed to two final rhyming syllables in feminine rhyme).

monody – an ode sung by one voice (Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas)

Neo-classical unities – principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity and until after the renaissance. The three unities are place, time, and action.

Ottava Rima – The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.. Byron’s Don Juan and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” are examples.

Pathetic fallacy – the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous examples is “The cruel crawling foam.”

Picaresque novel – a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example.

Poetic inversions - An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost)

Prosopopoeia – a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object.

*Rhyme Royal – The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” is a good example.

roman à clef – a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar are all examples.

Sestina – consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind.

*Spensarian – a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem T he Faerie Queene. Each verse contains nine lines in total: eight lines of iambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an "alexandrine," with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” and Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Progress” both employ the Spensarian stanza.

Sprung rhythm – poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously-unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.

Sturm und Drang – a German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe.

Synaethesia – The description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) but in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense e.g. 'a deafening yellow'. Synesthesia is particularly associated with the French symbolist poets. Keats also uses synesthesia in Ode to a Nightingale with the term 'sunburnt mirth'.

Synecdoche: a figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which:
* A part of something is used for the whole,
* The whole is used for a part,
* The species is used for the genus,
* The genus is used for the species, or
* The stuff of which something is made is used for the thing.
Synecdoche, as well as some forms of metonymy, is one of the most common ways to characterize a fictional character. Frequently, someone will be consistently described by a single body part or feature, such as the eyes, which comes to represent their person.

terza rima: a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, etc. Terza rima is especially associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. See also “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley.

“ubi sunt” – a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Ubi Sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf.

Villanelle – The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds ("a" and "b") and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Grammar

On only one practice test of mine was I asked to identify an intransitive verb, but I had no idea how to do so. You will occasionally get grammar questions (i.e. What is the direct object in this involute sentence from Paradise Lost?), so if you don't feel comfortable with those kinds of questions, you may want to do a short refresher.

transitive verb is incomplete without a direct object, as in the following examples:
INCOMPLETE
The shelf holds.

COMPLETE
The shelf holds three books and a vase of flowers.

An intransitive verb, on the other hand, cannot take a direct object:
Ex. This plant has thrived on the south windowsill.
The compound verb "has thrived" is intransitive and takes no direct object in this sentence.

The Sonnet

More than any other form, the sonnet is the most important in the eyes of ETS. Take pains to memorize the differences between the Italian, English, and Spensarian sonnet. This will help you not only on questions that directly address form and authorship, but it will help you contextualize questions generally. I have included in this section the curtal sonnet, which was invented by Gereard Manley Hopkins; however, ETS may not acknowledge the curtal sonnet as equal to other sonnet forms.

Italian Sonnet (Petrarchan)

There are two really important things to know about the Italian sonnet:

rhyme scheme: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e, c-d-e.
Broken up into an octet and a sestet.

The chance of seeing an Italian sonnet on the exam is not great.

The major Italian sonneteers included Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300), but the most famous early sonneteer was Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374).

In its original form, the Italian sonnet was divided into an octave followed by a sestet in the topic or tone of the sonnet. The octave stated a proposition and the sestet stated its solution with a clear break between the two. Typically, the ninth line created a "turn" or volta, which signaled the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don't strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signalling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.

Giacomo da Lentini octave rhymed a-b-a-b, a-b-a-b it became later a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. For the sestet there were two different possibilities, c-d-e-c-d-e and c-d-c-c-d-c. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced.

The first known sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used this Italian scheme, as did sonnets by later English poets including John Milton, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However, these poets tended to ignore the strict logical structure of proposition and solution. (ETS may refer to sonnets with an Italian form but not break between the octet and sestet as a "Miltonic sonnet").

This example, On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three by Milton, gives a sense of the Italian Form:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, (a)
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year! (b)
My hasting days fly on with full career, (b)
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. (a)
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, (a)
That I to manhood am arrived so near, (b)
And inward ripeness doth much less appear, (b)
That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th. (a)
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, (c)
It shall be still in strictest measure even (d)
To that same lot, however mean or high, (e)
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. (d)
All is, if I have grace to use it so, (c)
As ever in my great Task-master's eye. (e)

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