Poetry for Students, Volume 29

of that phrase encapsulates the entire poem, emphasizing the sense that the speaker is in a way frozen within his own bitter emo ...

place in Europe during the late 1700s and the early- to mid-1800s. In particular, the French Revolution, which began in 1789, re ...

Revolution and Byron inherited his mother’s lib- eral politics. The early British romantic poets, Byron’s predecessors and older ...

but because in his greatest work he speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens up a satirical perspective on the ...

CRITICISM Catherine Dominic Dominic is an author and freelance editor. In this essay, Dominic analyzes Byron’s Genevra sonnets ( ...

an air of sadness about the woman. The speaker then refers to a painting by Guido Reni, titled ‘‘The Penitent Magdalen,’’ and co ...

has changed drastically from when the sonnets were written to when Byron penned ‘‘When We Two Parted.’’ She has traded her innoc ...

At the similarly tender age of twenty, in another poem entitled ‘‘To a Lady, on being asked my reasons for quitting England in t ...

dis-jointed time, without certain conjunction’’ is a disruptive challenge to the haunted work. By attuning his later verse to ev ...

Who thundering comes on blackest steed, With slacken’d bit and hoof of speed? Beneath the clattering iron’s sound The cavern’d e ...

Fletcher discusses five autographed poems by Byron, discovered in the papers belonging to Sara Sophia Fane, Fifth Countess of Je ...

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 ...

Allusion:A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. Amerind ...

B Ballad:A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Ballads were origi- nally intended to be sung. Early ...

C Cadence:The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern poetry—nota ...

description that allows the reader to experi- ence an object or concept with the senses. Concrete Poetry:Poetry in which visual ...

Discordia concours: A Latin phrase meaning ‘‘discord in harmony.’’ The term was coined by the eighteenth-century English writer ...

forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Epics are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate meta ...

Fin de siecle:A French term meaning ‘‘end of the century.’’ The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century ...

bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grotesque:In literary c ...