negative capability Keats’s phrase (used in a letter of 1818 and referring to Shakespeare after being inspired by Kean’s performance as Richard III) ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. A phrase now used to describe the poetic ability to efface self and take on the qualities being described.
nonce word A word coined for use on one occasion: not a nonsense word–that would be a false friend q.v.
nonet No, no. Silly verse form of ascending or diminishing syllabic count.
numbers A now archaic word for lines of verse.
objective correlative Phrase coined by T. S. Eliot in a 1919 essay on Hamlet to refer to the context of an emotion, the pattern of events, diction etc. leading to an emotional response. Now often used to mean the poet’s intended emotional effect. Eliot felt that Hamlet lacked an o. c.
octameter A metric line of eight feet.
octave The first eight lines of a (usually Petrarchan or Petrarchan variant) sonnet.
ode Verse form on one theme, now usually applied to lyric poems.
Old English Anglo-Saxon (approx. fifth–twelfth century). Applies to four-stress hemistichal alliterative accentual verse, e.g. Beowulf.
onomatopoei-a, -ic Of words whose sounds imitate their meaning: e.g. ‘click’, ‘hiss’, ‘susurration’ etc.
open form Metrical rhymed verse where issues like the number of stanzas are not fixed, but up to the poet.
ottava rima An open form of eight-line verse rhyming abababcc. Byron’s Don Juan, late Yeats etc.
oxymoron Lit. ‘sharp blunt’ a contradictory phrase: as in Romeo and Juliet’s ‘O loving hate! O heavy lightness!’, or a paradoxical phrase such as ‘eloquent silence’, ‘living death’ or ‘military intelligence’ (ho-ho).
paean A song of praise, encomium.
palilogy Repetition–what a lot of words for it there are.
panegyric Writing in praise of a character’s specific qualities or achievements.
pantoum Malayan closed form with refrained lines. See Chapter Three.
paragram To hide a name or word inside text. ‘A cut and paSTEPHENomenon’, or’ Sui TablE Poetic HiddEN word’.
paralepsis To say something while pretending not to: ‘I shall not mention his appalling table manners’ etc.
para-rhyme Partial rhyme, assonance or consonance rhyming, for example, head/bet, foul/stout, feel/full. Also called slant-rhyme or off-rhyme.
parody Imitation of the style of another.
paronomasia Wordplay, punning.
particle Small word like a conjunction (and, or, but), preposition (for, of, with, by), pronoun (they, his, me, who, that) and so on.
pathetic fallacy John Ruskin’s term for the romantic attribution of life and a soul to inanimate objects or principles, Nature esp.
pattern poem A poem whose physical shape on the page represents an object of some kind. Same as shaped poetry.
pentameter A metrical line of five feet.
periphrasis A roundabout way of speaking, circumlocution.
Petrarchan sonnet A sonnet form adapted from Petrarch’s original cycle of poems to his Laura: the octave rhymes abba abba and the sestet in English can be anything from the original cdecde to cdcdcd, cdcdee and other variations.
phaleucian A Greek metre consisting of a spondee, dactyl and three trochees.
phanopoeia Name Pound gave to Imagism in action–a revelatory or reified image.
phoneme Base unit of sound.
Pindaric Ode From the Greek poet Pindar; celebratory or praise songs that developed into formal triadic odes in English.
pleonasm Tautology, use of redundant words, unnecessary repetition–as in this entry. Not to be confused with ‘neoplasm’ which means a morbid new growth or tissue.
poesie, poesy Now poncey word for poetry.
polyptoton Repetition of the same word, but using different endings and inflexions e.g. ‘It’s socially unacceptable in society to socialise with an unsociable socialist’ etc.
prosody The art of versification: the very subject of this magnificent little book.
prothalamium An epithalamium, specifically one to be recited before entry into the bridal chamber (Spenser).
pyrrhic A binary foot of two unstressed units.
quantitative Of quantity. A word’s quantity is the sum of its vowel lengths. In quantitative verse, feet are not elements of stress but of sound duration (morae q.v.). ‘Smooth’ is long, ‘moth’ is short and so on. The stuff of classical verse, quantitative poetry was never much more than an experiment in the stress-timed English language. Longfellow’s Evangeline and Southey’s dactylic hexameters remain possibly the best-known examples.
