Poetry for Students, Volume 35

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-centuryEnglish metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unre- latedtothebest-knowndefinitionofconce ...

more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds ‘‘overly didactic,’’ that is, ...

of perfection. Corresponding to this essen- tially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority. Epic:A long narrativ ...

language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Figures of Speech:Writing that d ...

Graveyard School: A group of eighteenth- century English poets who wrote long, pic- turesque meditations on death. Their works w ...

Image:A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a repre- sentation helps evoke the feelings ...

the name of the ‘‘Breton lay.’’ In fourteenth- century England, the term ‘‘lay’’ was used to describe short narratives written i ...

Muses:Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Mem- ory). Each muse patronized a specific area of ...

New Criticism:A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpre ...

Parallelism:A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure. Parnassianism:A mi ...

writers Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Tristan Corbiere. In the sense intended by Verlaine, the poet is ‘‘accursed’’ for ...

lines of the poem. Poets who advocate pro- jective verse are against all formal structures in writing, including meter and form. ...

Rhetorical Question:A question intended to pro- voke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly us ...

scheme. The most common system of scan- sion uses accents (slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show stressed syllables, brev ...

process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type ...

T Tanka:A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku.Atankais five lines long, with the lines containing five, seven, five, seven, ...

Foremost among these rules were the three unities of action, time, and place that com- pelled a dramatist to: (1) construct a si ...

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