Poetry Terms

14 Lines of varying rhyme schemes | Iambic Pentameter 

Focuses on ; male love | the idealised, unresponsive mistress | hope and despair | limited speaker

16th Cnetury onwards - Renaissance period | ****** language 

Lyrical|  Analytical

Set of images to explore theme or idea 

Divide body into parts; lips, hair, skin etc.

Suggest love is not permanent 

Later wriers break love theme; Wordsworth | E.e Cumminhs | Milton | Owen 

English Sonnet; ABAB

Italian word sonetto, meaning “little song"

Traditionally oral | Folk song | Narrative | Element of supernatural | Repetitive

Stanza form; short lines | Iambic pentameter | Stock Phrases e.g. blood red wine 

Romantic Period | 1790's Lyrical ballads; Wordsworth and Coleridge | French revolution | 

Dialect of speaker | Common people 

Gothic | Medieval | Breaking social order | Religion 

Symbolism | Tension; simple surface, underlying complexity 

Plot driven | Dramatic conclusion | ABAB 

Simple in diction and rhythm 

Elegiac meter - alternating hexameter and pentameter lines 

Lyric | Strong narrative | Commemoration | Formal to achieve dignity 

Announces itself in title and every line 

Renaissance 17th century- love poem - changed to to lament for dead person  (mourning and celebrating)

Shifting form | Focuses on individual 

Elegies about death - simple - life is mundane - previous elegies complex 

Death presented different ways e.g. Rites vs Shelley for Keats 

Usually long poems - now referred to as Monody 

Pastoral elegy - represents mourner and the one he mourns (usually another writer/poet) 

17th C Metphysical Poetry - lyric work characterised by use of conceits using topics e.g. love, religion | Donne | Herbert | Marvell 

Conceits - extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem

Shaping language in artful and meaningful ways | Irony | Satire | Outrageous | Pursuasive

18th C Heroic Couplets - Open couplets (punctuation doesn't seal off) | Closed couplets (controlled punctuation and discipline) 

Open - Keats | Closed - Pope

20th C - wit different | metaphor and innuendo | more structure to the form | elements of sadness 

Playing with expectations of poetry, free verse e.g. E.e Cummings - Goatman 

Intelligence and quickness of the mind 

Politics of... Class | Race | Gender | Power | Place

Key poets; Blake, Owen, Rich, Soyinka

Taboo topics, opposing politics or supporting them 

Poems and politics change with time | Changes views on social order | Personal is political

Explored either explicitily or implicitily by loew social figures or outsiders 

Religion | Education | Law | Sate apparatus - Key aspects of society 

Exploring and understanding complex ideas in imaginative way 

Blake and Owen key poets for exploring politics but represent white, male western only 

Milton - Blank verse | Donne - Metaphyiscal | Hopkins - Sprung rhythm | Wright - Free verse 

Until 20th C Britain = religious society 

Patterns in poetry

Challenging conventions

Sprung rhythm = not iambic pentameter