Glossary of Poetic Terms

The appearance of being true, or a likeness to truth. Verisimilitude is related to mimesis or imitation, though it is also connected to ideas of literary decorum and proper use of conventions. Verisimilitude can thus exist in both works of literary realism and fantasy, since readers’s perceptions of the “reality” of a work may depend on the inner consistency of elements (such as character, language, plot) and not just the work’s fidelity to a preexisting outer world. Though more often associated with fiction, the principle of verisimilitude can be seen in poetry from Homer and Virgil, and in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose “willing suspension of disbelief” is also introduced into discussions of the technique.

A French phrase meaning “free verse.”

A group of verse lines that make up a single rhetorical unit. In longer poems, the first line is often indented, like a paragraph in prose. The long narrative passages of John Milton’s Paradise Lost are verse paragraphs. The titled sections of Robert Pinsky’s “Essay on Psychiatrists” demarcate shifts in focus and argument much as prose paragraphs would. A shorter lyric poem, even when broken into stanzas, could be considered a single verse paragraph, insofar as it expresses a unified mood or thought; see Gail Mazur’s “Evening.”

Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) may be referred to as Victorian poetry. Following Romanticism, Victorian poets continued many of the previous era’s main themes, such as religious skepticism and valorization of the artist as genius; but Victorian poets also developed a distinct sensibility. The writers of this period are known for their interest in verbal embellishment, mystical interrogation, brooding skepticism, and whimsical nonsense. The most prolific and well-regarded poets of the age included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde. Browse more Victorian poets.

A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. See “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,”  and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill.”

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Related to concrete poetry, visual poetry is poetry rendered graphically. Sometimes only having a slight resemblance to a traditionally written poem that follows grammar and syntax conventions, visual poetry uses words and letter shapes as visual icons rather than linguistic units. Typography, color, shape, media, and other visual elements are presented as the primary bearers of intent and meaning. As Andrew Venell defines it in his learning prompt, 

A visual poem is one that must be seen to be fully understood, where the verbal and visual draw strength from each other to produce greater meaning. As such, visual poetry invites us to consider not just the typographic elements of verse—the shape of letters, the spaces between words, the overall composition of a page—but also the poetic potential of images.

Geof Huth, in his introduction for the “Visual Poetry Today” portfolio that appeared in the November 2008 issue of Poetry magazine, observes that classical technopaegnia of ancient Greek poems and the pattern poetry of the 16th century are early predecessors of contemporary visual poetry. A notable example of early pattern poetry is the wing-shaped “Easter Wings” by 17th-century English poet George Herbert.

A basic distinction between pattern poetry and visual poetry is that the former can be read aloud and still retain its meaning. In this way, pattern poetry is like concrete poetry, in which the poem takes an image-based shape but is still readable in a more traditional manner. This is often not the case for contemporary visual poetry. 

Jessica Smith, in her introduction to Volta’s Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of PoeticsWomen of Visual Poetry Issue, notes: 

To be a “visual poem” is to remind the reader that the way the words are arranged on the page (and their legibility, color, etc.) is a medial part of the message in every poem and cannot be separated from aurality and meaning. As in music, the poem on the page can operate as a score in myriad ways and need not indicate a traditional lyric performance. By highlighting and problematizing (making decorative, illegible or difficult) the optic elements of poetry, visual poetry reminds us that the eye and ear are inseparable when we parse written language.

For examples of contemporary visual poetry, see Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s “Fake Hula for Alien Tiki” and “Coconut Milk”; Miekal And’s “mi'kmaq book of the dead”; Ava Hofmann’s “[A woman wandered into a thicket]”; Volta’s Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics Women of Visual Poetry Issue (ed. Jessica Smith, 2013); and  The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008 (ed. Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill, Fantagraphics, 2012).

Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet. See Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” and William Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 [“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame”] for examples of voltas of each type.