Glossary of Poetic Terms

A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words “poetry” and “basketball” are both dactylic. Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is written in dactylic meter. (See also double dactyl.)

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada embraces nonsense, irrationality, and intuition instead of the prevailing values of logic and reason. Dada’s nihilism and rejection of traditional aesthetic values were emblematic of the founding group’s rejection of elitism and of the cultural and moral instability following World War I. Founding member Tristan Tzara wrote in his “Dada Manifesto 1918” that “Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity,” recognizing “no theory … (or) [laboratories] of formal ideas.” Tzara’s poems, such as “Speaking Alone,” reflect a mature form evolved from his early Dadaist work. In the visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence; Dadaism also gave rise to surrealism.

An artists group formed in 1987 by Boston poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange and musician Janice Lowe  after they attended the funeral of James Baldwin. Based in a Victorian house near Harvard Square in Cambridge, they were inspired to celebrate living artists of color and to establish a reading series and to create comraderie and mentorships between black writers. Other members included poets Major Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Nehassaiu deGannes, and John Keene, among others. Over time the group grew to include scores of literary and visual artists. You can listen to a recording of the Dark Room Collective's 2012 reunion reading at the Poetry Foundation.

A term originally coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences, which posited a connection between the physical and spiritual realms. Rothenberg and Kelly were inspired by Federico García Lorca’s “deep song.” The idea was later redeveloped by the poet Robert Bly, and deep image became associated with a group of midcentury American poets including Galway Kinnell and James Wright. The new group of deep-image poets was often narrative, focusing on allowing concrete images and experiences to generate poetic meaning.

Poetry that instructs, either in terms of morals or by providing knowledge of philosophy, religion, arts, science, or skills. Although some poets believe that all poetry is inherently instructional, didactic poetry separately refers to poems that contain a clear moral or message or purpose to convey to its readers. John Milton's epic Paradise Lost and Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man are famous examples. See also William Blake’s “A Divine Image,” Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”

A line of verse composed of two feet. “Some go local / Some go express / Some can’t wait / To answer Yes,” writes Muriel Rukeyser in her poem “Yes,” in which the dimeter line predominates. Kay Ryan’s “Blandeur” contains this series of mostly dimeter lines:

               Even out Earth’s
               rondure, flatten
               Eiger, blanden
               the Grand Canyon.
               Make valleys
               slightly higher,
               widen fissures
               to arable land,
               remand your
               terrible glaciers

A form of light verse invented and promoted by Paul Pascal, Anthony Hecht, and John Hollander. The double dactyl consists of two quatrains, each with three double-dactyl lines followed by a shorter dactyl-spondee pair. The two spondees rhyme. Additionally, the first line must be a nonsense phrase, the second line a proper or place name, and one other line, usually the sixth, a single double-dactylic word that has never been used before in any other double dactyl. For example:
         
          Higgledy piggledy,
          Bacon, lord Chancellor.
          Negligent, fell for the
          Paltrier vice.

          Bribery toppled him,
          Bronchopneumonia
          Finished him, testing some
          Poultry on ice.
                             (by Ian Lancashire)
 

A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader. Examples include Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Ai’s “Killing Floor.” A lyric may also be addressed to someone, but it is short and songlike and may appear to address either the reader or the poet. Browse more dramatic monologue poems.

The duplex is a poetic form invented by poet Jericho Brown that subverts or is a “mash-up” of older poetic forms, such as the pantoum, the sonnet, and the ghazal. Brown first used this form in his third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In his blog post, “Invention,” which was featured on Harriet Books, Brown writes, “I decided to call the form a duplex because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses. It is, indeed, a mutt of a form as so many of us in this nation are only now empowered to live fully in all of our identities.” In the same essay, Brown defines the boundaries of the duplex:

Write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem of 14 lines, giving each line 9 to 11 syllables.

The first line is echoed in the last line.

The second line of the poem should change our impression of the first line in an unexpected way.

The second line is echoed and becomes the third line.

The fourth line of the poem should change our impression of the third line in an unexpected way.

This continues until the penultimate line becomes the first line of the couplet that leads to the final (and first) line.

For the variations of repeated lines, it is useful to think of the a a’ b scheme of the blues form.   

For an example of the form, see Jericho Brown’s poem “Duplex (A poem is a gesture toward home).”

A brief, dramatic pastoral poem, set in an idyllic rural place but discussing urban, legal, political, or social issues. Bucolics and idylls, like eclogues, are pastoral poems, but in nondramatic form. See Edmund Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calendar: April,” Andrew Marvell’s “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,” and John Crowe Ransom’s “Eclogue.”

Similar to ethnopoetics in its emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the making of poems—and the environment that produces it, ecopoetics rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster. A multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, ecopoetics is not quite nature poetry. The influential journal Ecopoetics, edited by Jonathan Skinner, publishes writing that explores “creative-critical edges between making and writing” and features poets such as Jack Collom, Juliana Spahr, and Forrest Gander.

“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion:

               What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
            What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

            Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
                     Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
            Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
                     Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
            Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
                     Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
                 Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
            Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
                   She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
                         For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

            Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
                       Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
            And, happy melodist, unwearied,
                       For ever piping songs for ever new. . . .

See W. S. DiPiero’s poem guide on Robert Browning for more on ekphrasis. Browse more ekphrastic poems.

In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subject’s death but ends in consolation. Examples include John Milton’s “Lycidas”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”; and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” More recently, Peter Sacks has elegized his father in “Natal Command,” and Mary Jo Bang has written “You Were You Are Elegy” and other poems for her son. In the 18th century the “elegiac stanza” emerged, though its use has not been exclusive to elegies. It is a quatrain with the rhyme scheme ABAB written in iambic pentameter. Browse more elegies.