Glossary of Poetic Terms

The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter. A foot usually contains one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English poetry are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables).

A brief but influential 20th-century critical method that originated in St. Petersburg through the group OPOYAZ, and in Moscow via the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Important Formalists included Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. Formalism viewed literature as a distinct and separate entity, unconnected to historical or social causes or effects. It analyzed literature according to devices unique to literary works and focused on the “literariness” of a text: words were not simply stand-ins for objects but objects themselves. Formalists advanced the concept of ostranenie, or defamiliarization, arguing that literature, by calling attention to itself as such, estranged the reader from ordinary experience and made the familiar seem new. Formalism’s tendency to collapse form and content is somewhat similar to New Criticism’s approach, though its main influence was on structuralism.

A metrical line of 14 syllables (usually seven iambic feet). A relatively long line, it can be found in narrative poetry from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Fourteener couplets broken into quatrains are known as common measure or ballad meter. See also Poulter’s measure.

Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman explored the possibilities of nonmetrical poetry in the 19th century. Since the early 20th century, the majority of published lyric poetry has been written in free verse. See the work of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. Browse more free-verse poems.

A group of Southern poets associated with the Fugitive, a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s. Its prominent ranks included Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. In general, their poetry was formal, featuring traditional prosody and concrete imagery frequently drawn from the rural Southern experience. These poet-critics’ principles gave rise to the method of close reading and textual analysis known as New Criticism. Browse more Fugitive poets.

An avant-garde aesthetic movement that arose in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. Its proponents—predominantly painters and other visual artists—called for a rejection of past forms of expression, and the embrace of industry and new technology. Speed and violence were the favored vehicles of sensation, rather than lyricism, symbolism, and “high” culture. F. T. Marinetti, in his futurist Manifesto (1909), advocated “words in freedom”—a language unbound by common syntax and order that, along with striking variations in typography, could quickly convey intense emotions. Marinetti and other Italian futurists allied themselves with militaristic nationalism, which alienated their cause internationally following World War II. Russian futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky profoundly influenced the development of Russian formalism, while in England the futurist movement was expressed as Vorticism by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis in their magazine BLAST. Listen to “Futurism and the New Manifesto” here. See also Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism”.

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender, sexual categories, and identity. As a discipline, gender studies borrows from other theoretical models like psychoanalysis—particularly that of Jacques Lacan—deconstruction, and feminist theory in an attempt to examine the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity as they relate to class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Like gender studies, queer theory also questions normative definitions of gender and sexuality. As approaches to literary texts, gender studies and queer theory tend to emphasize the power of representation and linguistic indeterminacy.

A poetic movement in England during the reign of George V (1910–1936), promoted in the anthology series Georgian Poetry. Its ranks included Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, and D.H. Lawrence. The aesthetic principles of Georgianism included a respect for formalism as well as bucolic and romantic subject matter. The devastation of World War I, along with the rise of modernism, signaled the retreat of Georgianism as an influential school of poetry. Browse more Georgian poets.

A poem or book dealing with agriculture or rural topics, which commonly glorifies outdoor labor and simple country life. Often takes the form of a didactic or instructive poem intended to give instructions related to a skill or art. The Roman poet Virgil famously wrote a collection of poems entitled Georgics, which has influenced poets since. Read a translated excerpt from Virgil's Georgics Book III or Book IV.

(Pronounciation: “guzzle”) Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poet’s. In the Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. English-language poets who have composed in the form include Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, and Agha Shahid Ali; see Ali’s “Tonight” and Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal.”


Browse more ghazal poems.

The glosa is a poetic form with Spanish origins from the 15th century. A glosa typically consists of four ten-line stanzas each with ten syllables per line. The form also contains a borrowed excerpt from another writer. The borrowed quatrain, known as the cabeza, or “head,” is presented at the beginning of the poem. Following this, each stanza expands upon one line of the cabeza while adhering to the rhyme scheme of ABBAACCDDC. As an example, see Kathleen Ossip’s “Glosa in Middle Age,” which features four lines by the Flamin’ Groovies.

Created by poet Terrance Hayes, this poetic form was designed to allow poets to pay tribute to existing work by poets they admire. A golden shovel borrows a line from the existing poem and uses each word from that line as the last word of each line in a new poem.

The first golden shovel Hayes created, “The Golden Shovel,” borrows its lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” Hayes originally published his poem in Poetry and later in his collection Lighthead, which won the National Book Award in 2010. The bolded words in this excerpt from “Golden Shovel” were borrowed from Brooks:

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we …

A special Poetry folio in 2017 gathered golden shovels by various poets. In 2017, poet-teachers Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith compiled and edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, which was published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Other poets who have experimented with and embraced this poetic form include Raymond Antrobus, John Burnside, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Inua Ellams, Nikki Giovanni, Nikki Grimes, Langston Kerman, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Nick Makoha, Andrew Motion, Jacob Polley, Don Share, and George Szirtes.

Japanese poet Matsuo Basho created this poetic form in which a poet combines prose and haiku to create a prose poem. The prose poem typically describes a setting, scene, or moment in an objective manner and follows the standard formal considerations of haiku.

Some examples of haibun include “Time Traveler’s Haibun: 1989,” by Maureen Thorson; David Cobb’s poetry collection The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore; Oraga Haru, by Kobayashi Issa; The Path of Flowering Thorn, by Yosa Buson; The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, by Yosa Buson and translated by Makoto Ueda; Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, by Masaoka Shiki and translated by Janine Beichman; Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of, by Ken Jones; and No Place, by Jim Kacian.

A Japanese verse form most often composed, in English versions, of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time.

Not popularized in Western literature until the early 1900s, the form originates from the Japanese hokku, or the opening section of a longer renga sequence. In this context, the hokku served to begin a longer poem by establishing a season, often with a pair of seasonal images. Unlike the rest of the renga sequence, which was composed collaboratively, the hokku was often created by a single poet working alone, and was subsequently used as an exercise for students. Over time, the hokku began to be appreciated for its own worth and became distinct as a poetic form, formally mastered by poets such as Basho and Yosa Buson.

In 1905, Paul-Louis Couchoud became one of the first European translators of the form, converting many short Japanese verses into his native French. This began the popularization of haiku in Europe, where the form was translated by French and Spanish poets, such as José Juan Tablada. Throughout the two World Wars and the rise of Modernism, haikus were gradually adapted and celebrated by Imagist poets, such as Ezra Pound, H.D., and T.E. Hulme. In this context, the haiku was appreciated for its linguistic and sensory economy. Most notably Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” though not intended as a haiku, adapts the sparse, visual style of the Japanese form.

Despite its formal history, the haiku’s composition has expanded somewhat over time. This is due in part to the differences between the Japanese language and Western languages. In its original Japanese form, the haiku is often divided into 17 mora (a Japanese unit of syllable weight) and arranged in a single vertical line. However, in English there is no exact equivalent to the mora unit. As a result, in English and other languages, haikus are most frequently adapted into three lines of verse, usually unrhymed, composed of five, seven, and five syllables, adding up to seventeen syllables total. However, many American poets, such as Jack Kerouac, began to gradually depart from this traditional syllable and line count, in favor of depicting images as succinctly as possible.

Despite its many adaptions into multiple languages and styles, the haiku remains a powerful form due to its economic use of language to evoke a specific mood or instance. Most often occurring in the present tense, a haiku frequently depicts a moment by using pair of distinct images working in tandem, as in these lines by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield:

        On a branch
        floating downriver
        a cricket, singing.

(Notice how, in translating from Japanese to English, Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.)

The haiku continues to be a popular form today, and its different qualities have been emphasized and expanded by a wide variety of writers. Poets such as Etheridge Knight emphasize the formal and sonic quality of the verse, as seen in his piece “Haiku,” whereas poets such as Scott Helmes have chosen to emphasize the haiku’s visual arrangement, as seen in his piece, “haiku #62.”

For further examples, see also “Three Haiku, Two Tanka” by Philip Appleman and Robert Hass’s “After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa.” In addition, see the Imagist poets of the early 20th century, most notably Ezra Pound.

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A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation that began in New York’s African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s. The movement was key to developing a new sense of Black identity and aesthetics as writers, visual artists, and musicians articulated new modes of African-American experience and experimented with artistic forms, modernist techniques, and folk culture. Harlem Renaissance artists and activists also influenced French and Caribbean Négritude and Negrismo movements in addition to laying a foundation for future Black Arts champions like Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka. Writing luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Arna Bontemps. Important publications included the anthology The New Negro (1925), edited by Alan Locke, and the magazines Crisis, Opportunity, Fire!!, and the Messenger. See also Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) and Elizabeth Alexander’s more recent historical article “The Black Poet as Canon-Maker”. Browse more Harlem Renaissance poets. 

A meter made up of seven feet and usually 14 syllables total (see Fourteener). George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s the Iliad is written in heptameter, as is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” See also Poulter’s measure.