Poetry for Students, Volume 31

the kind that comes when someone is telling a frightening story and engaging the listener’s attention through alternations of qu ...

Favorite, sailing from Wiscasset, Maine, foun- dered upon Norman’s Woe. Twenty bodies were found on shore, with one, an older wo ...

Newton Arvin, inLongfellow: His Life and Work, concedes the poem’s charm while denigrating its quality. He remarks, ‘‘Hackneyed ...

(1798). (Coleridge keeps the verb in the present tense because his story focuses on penitence rather than on an irrevocable cata ...

advice and refuses to heed the sailor, despite the fact that just from the way the wind blows the smoke from his pipe, he ought ...

not been transformed into living vegetation by any divine force. She is simply, irrevocably dead. With this vulnerability in min ...

his plans in a letter to George W. Greene, a future member of The Dante Club: I have broken ground in a new field; namely, balla ...

pilgrim-poet making his way from hell to para- dise and in the process building the impressive cathedral-like structure of the p ...

sees, like so many Americans of his time, English literature as the only model available for Ameri- can writers. Although ‘‘The ...

When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807– 1882) was growing up in Portland, Maine, there existed a lively tradition of broadside ba ...

meter consisted of galloping tetrameter arranged in quatrains rhymingaabb. Within the year it ran through three editions and 4,5 ...

appearance of his, and as Maine’s most famous minstrel, Shaw had, for his last broadside ballad, a suitable subject, and inciden ...

19, 1830, in theFamily Reader, which Smith was editing; three years later when he was collecting his Jack Downing letters for pu ...

Jackson, Virginia, ‘‘Longfellow’s Tradition; or, Picture- Writing a Nation,’’Modern Language Quarterly, Decem- ber 1998, Vol. 59 ...

...

Glossary of Literary Terms A Abstract:Used as a noun, the term refers to a short summary or outline of a longer work. As an adje ...

Alliteration:A poetic device where the first con- sonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated. Allusion ...

describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innova- tions in style or content. B Ballad:A ...

profound seriousness or by treating a digni- fied subject frivolously. The word ‘‘burlesque’’ mayalsobeusedasanadjective,asin‘‘b ...

the seventeenth-century English metaphysi- cal poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to the best-known definition o ...