I realised that probably there are folks who visit this site who may not know all the literary terms used in this site so I offer this glossary in the hope of explaining those terms. It is by no means exhaustive so if anyone feels I have left something of major importance out, do email me, and I will add to the glossary but I have tried to include everything that I felt was not totally obvious. It is highly probable that this listing will be extended as I add more pages to my web site. For a more comprehensive listing I would recommend a dictionary of literary terms such as The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

B
1. Ballad - A folk song or other orally transmitted poem which tells, in a direct and dramatic manner, some popular story that is usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is simply, impersonally told, often with a vivid dialogue. Ballads appeared in many parts of Europe during the late Middle Ages; they flourished strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onwards. Since the 18th century educated poets have written imitations of the ballad's form and style, eg. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

2. Blank Verse - Blank verse is a very flexible English verse form which can attain rhetorical grandeur whilst echoing the natural rhythms of human speech. It was used first by Henry Howard in c. 1540, soon becoming the standard metre for dramatic poetry. It is used widely for narrative and meditative poems. Much of the finest verse in English - by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and others - has been written in blank verse. It should not be confused with free verse, which has no regular metre.

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3. Canon - A body of writing that is recognised by authority. Books of holy scripture accepted by religious leaders as genuine are cannonical, as are works of a literary author which are regarded by scholars as authentic. The canon of a national literature is the body of writings particularly approved by critics and anthologists which are deemed suitable for academic study. The most famous canon is the Western Canon containing literature by DWEMs (Dead White European Males).

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4. Elegy - An elaborately formal lyric poem which laments the death of a friend or a public figure, or reflects seriously on a solemn subject. In Greek and Latin verse the term had particular reference to the metre of a poem rather than its mood or content. John Donne applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in Heroic couplets. However, since Lycidas by Milton (1673), the term in English has usually denoted a lament, while the term 'elegiac' has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems in English. An important English elegy that followed Milton in using pastoral conventions is Adonias by Shelley (1821) on the death of Keats. The pastoral elegy evolved a series of elaborate conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world. As a rule pastoral elegies contain many mythological figures, such as nymphs, who are supposed to guard the dead friend. In Memoriam A. H. H. by Tennyson (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses in the modern sense on the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, whilst When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd by Walt Whitman (1865) commemorates the death of a public figure, Abraham Lincoln, rather than a friend. In a broader sense, an elegy is a poem of melancholy reflection on life's sorrows or transience as in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Gray (1751).

5. Epigram - A short poem with a witty turn of thought or a wittily condensed expression in prose. It was originally a form of monumental inscription in ancient Greece but was developed into a literary form by the poets of the Hellenistic age and by Martial, a Roman poet whose Epigrams (AD 86-102) were often obscenely insulting. The art of the epigram was cultivated in France and Germany by Voltaire, Schiller and others during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of Sassoon's anti-war poems are epigrammatic.

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6. Genre - The French term for a species, type or class of composition. A literary genre is a recognisable, established category of written work which employs such common conventions as will prevent readers from mistaking it for another kind of genre.

7. Georgian Poetry - This is a term that was coined by Edward Marsh in 1911 in order to signal the poetic reaction against Victorianism and to proclaim Marsh's belief that 'English poetry is now once again putting on new strength and beauty', as he said in his Preface to the first volume, Georgian Poetry 1911-1912. Published by Harold Monro and edited by Marsh there were five volumes, the last of which appeared a short while before T S Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922. The group of poets represented in the anthologies included Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, D H Lawrence, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, amongst many others. The Georgian poets are commonly considered to have written lightweight, sentimental lyrics that were driven to oblivion by Modernism - an opinion that is partly due to the chronological accident that saw The Waste Land published shortly after the fifth and final volume of Georgian Poetry. However, within the literary context of their time, the Georgians were considered daring and even revolutionary. In 1960, James Reeves in his Georgian Poetry argued for the exclusion of Lawrence and the inclusion of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, thereby defining Georgianism in terms of style rather than as a label for any poet who appeared in the anthologies.

   H

8. Heroic Couplets - A pair of rhymed iambic pentameter (see metre) lines such as:
   Let Observation with extensive View
   Survey Mankind, from China to Peru. (Johnson)

   Used by Dryden and others in the heroic drama of the late 17th century, the heroic couplet was established much earlier by Chaucer as a major English verse-form for narrative and other kinds of non-dramatic poetry. It dominated English poetry during the 18th century, before declining in importance during the 19th century.

9. Heroic Drama - A kind of tragedy or tragicomedy that came into fashion with the Restoration of the English monarchy (1660). Influenced French classical tragedy and its dramatic unities, it aimed at epic (thus 'heroic') grandeur. The noble hero would be caught in a conflict between patriotic duty and love, leading to emotional scenes that were presented in a manner close to opera. John Dryden was the leading English exponent of heroic drama, his The Conquest of Granada (1670-1) was written in heroic couplets.

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10. Imagism - A poetical movement that was instigated by American poets in London, roughly at the time of the First World War. There were four volumes of an annual anthology 1914-17. Its main associates were the American poets Ezra Pound, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell and the Briton Richard Aldington amongst others. The group was led by Pound until his defection to Vorticism, when it was then led by Lowell. The group rejected most 19th century poetry as cloudy verbiage and instead aimed at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem. The Imagists, influenced by the Japanese haiku and in part by ancient Greek lyrics, cultivated directness and concision, building their short poems round single images. Imagist poems and manifestos appeared in the American magazine Poetry and the London journal The Egoist (edited by T S Eliot for a time). The fulfilment of Imagist promise may be seen best in Pound's Cantos, Eliot's The Waste Land and H. D.'s War Trilogy. At the very least Imagism introduced several prominent features of modernist poetics to the elite audience it sought for itself. (See also Modernism.)

    L

11. Lament - Any poem expressing mournful regret or profound grief over the loss of some person or former state, or for some other misfortune.

12. Literary Savant - a learned man knowing a great deal about books (female form Savante).

13. Lyric - In the modern sense this is any fairly short poem expressing the personal feeling, mood or meditation of a single speaker (who sometimes may be an invented character, not the poet). In ancient Greece, however, a lyric was a song for accompaniment on the lyre. Current since the Renaissance, the modern sense usually refers to a song-like quality in a poem. Lyric poetry is the most extensive category of verse (especially after the decline - since the 19th century - of the other principal kinds such as narrative and dramatic verse.

    M

14. Metre - The pattern of groups of syllables (long and short, stressed and unstressed) in which poetry is usually written. (It is beyond the scope of this glossary to explain this term in any great detail - I recommend that you look it up in a dictionary of literary terms or a specialised book on poetry.)

15. Modernism - A retrospective general term applied to a wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century including Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, Vorticism, Expressionism, Imagism, and Surrealism, together with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Chiefly, Modernist literature is characterised by a rejection of 19th century traditions, and of their consensus between reader and author: the convention of realism was abandoned by novelists as poets rejected traditional metres in favour of free verse. Modernist writing is cosmopolitan and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, together with an awareness of new psychological and anthropological theories. In English its major landmarks are James Joyce's Ulysses and T S Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922). (For more on Modernism see the following web sites: Modernism Timeline; Modernism and the Novel).

    P

16. Parody - A mocking imitation of the style of a literary work or works which ridicules the stylistic habits of an author or school of writers by exaggerated mimicry. Parody is related to Burlesque in its application of serious styles to ridiculous subjects, to satire in its punishment of eccentricities, and even to criticism in its analysis of style. In English two of the leading parodists are Henry Fielding and James Joyce. Poets in the 19th century, such as William Wordsworth and Robert Browning, suffered numerous parodies of their works.

17. Pastoral - A highly conventional mode of writing which celebrates the innocent life of shepherds and shepherdesses in poetry, plays and prose romances. Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of musical shepherds - usually in an idealised Golden Age of rustic innocence and idlesness. English pastorals were written in several forms including the eclogues of Edmund Spenser's The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) and Shakespeare's As You Like It (c. 1599) to lyrics such as Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Sheepheard to his Love (1600). A significant form within the tradition is the pastoral elegy. Pastoral poetry was eventually succeeded by more realistic poetry of country life written by John Clare, George Crabbe and William Wordsworth.

18. Phantasmagoria - A fantastic dreamlike series of illusive images or of real forms.

19. Prosody - The systematic study of versification which covers the principles of metre, rhythm, rhyme and stanza forms; or a particular system of versification. In linguistics the term is applied to patterns of stress and intonation in ordinary human speech. Prosody in the literary sense is also known as metrics.

    S

20. Satire - A mode of writing which exposes the failings of individuals, societies or institutions to ridicule and scorn. Its tone varies from tolerant amusement to bitter indignation (as in Sassoon's war poetry).

    V

21. Vorticism - A short-lived artistic movement that was announced in London in 1914. Led by the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, its literary significance is regarded as neglible except in that Ezra Pound regarded it as an advance upon his previous phase of Imagism. The Vorticist manifestos which appeared in Lewis' magazine Blast (1914-15) celebrated the dynamic energies of the machine age, whilst at the same time accusing Futurism of having romanticised the machine. Vorticism called for an end to all sentimentality. For Pound the 'vortex' was the concentrated energy of the avant-garde, which would blast away the complacency of the established culture. Vorticism was just one of the minor currents of Modernism.

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    (This glossary was compiled by Michèle Fry, 1999. To compile it I referred to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick (Oxford University Press, 1991) and the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford University Press, 1994). You can order both the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms from Amazon UK.)

    http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/litterms.htm

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