Bacchius - In ancient poetry, a metrical foot consisting of a short syllable followed by two long syllables.

Ballad - A short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain. The story of a ballad can originate from a wide range of subject matter but most frequently deals with folklore or popular legends. They are written in straightforward verse, seldom with detail, but always with graphic simplicity and force. Most ballads are suitable for singing and, while sometimes varied in practice, are generally written in ballad meter, i.e., alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the last words of the second and fourth lines rhyming.

Ballade - Frequently represented in French poetry, a fixed form consisting of three seven or eight-line stanzas using no more than three recurrent rhymes with an identical refrain after each stanza and a closing envoi repeating the rhymes of the last four lines of the stanza. A variation containing six stanzas is called a double ballade.

Baroque - An elaborate, extravagantly complex, sometimes grotesque, style of artistic expression prevalent in the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. The baroque influence on poetry was expressed by Euphuism in England, Marinism in Italy, and Gongorism in Spain.

Bathos - An unintentional shift from the sublime to the ridiculous which can result from the use of overly elevated language to describe trivial subject matter, or from an exaggerated attempt at pathos which misfires to the point of being ludicrous. Bathos can be viewed as an unintentional anticlimax.

Blank verse - Poetry written without rhymes, but which retains a set metrical pattern, usually iambic pentameter (or five iambic feet per line) in English verse. Since it is a very flexible form, the writer not being hampered in the expression of thought or syntactic structure by the need to rhyme, it is used extensively in narrative and dramatic poetry. In lyric poetry, blank verse is adaptable to lengthy descriptive and meditative poems.

Bouts-Rimes - An 18th century parlor game in which a list of rhyming words was drawn up and handed to the players, who had to make a poem from the list keeping the rhymes in their original order.

Broadside Ballad ? A ballad written in doggerel, printed on a single sheet of paper and sold for a penny or two on English street corners in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The name of the tune to which they were to be sung was indicated on the sheet. The subject matter of broadside ballads covered a wide range of current, historical or simply curious events and also extended to moral exhortations and religious propaganda.

Broken Rhyme - Also called split rhyme, a rhyme produced by dividing a word at the line break to make a rhyme with the end word of another line.

Bucolic - Derived from the Greek word for herdsman, an ancient term for a poem dealing with a pastoral subject.

Burden - The central topic or principle idea, often repeated in a refrain.

Burlesque - A work which is intended to ridicule by the use of grotesque exaggeration or by the treatment of a trifling subject with the gravity due a matter of great importance.

Cacophony - Discordant sounds in the jarring juxtaposition of harsh letters or syllables, sometimes inadvertent, but often deliberately used in poetry for effect.

Cadence - The progressive rhythmical pattern in lines of verse; also, the natural tone or modulation of the voice determined by the alternation of accented or unaccented syllables.

Caesura - A rhythmic break or pause in the flow of sound which is commonly introduced in about the middle of a line of verse, but may be varied for different effects. Usually placed between syllables rhythmically connected in order to aid the recital as well as to convey the meaning more clearly, it is a pause dictated by the sense of the content or by natural speech patterns, rather than by metrics. It may coincide with conventional punctuation marks, but not necessarily. A caesura within a line is indicated in scanning by the symbol (||).

Canon - In a literary sense, the authoritative works of a particular writer; also, an accepted list of works perceived to represent a cultural, ideological, historical, or biblical grouping.

Canto - A major division of a long or extended poem. A canto of a poem corresponds to a chapter of a novel.

Canzone - A medieval Italian or Provençal lyric poem of varying stanzaic form, usually with a concluding short stanza or envoi.

Carmina Figurata/Figuratum - See Pattern Poetry

Carpe Diem - Latin for "seize the day," a common motif in lyric verse throughout the history of poetry, with the emphasis on making the most of current pleasures because life is short and time is flying.

Catachresis - Misuse or abuse of words; the use of the wrong word for the context, as atone for repent, ingenuous for ingenious, or a forced trope in which a word is used too far removed from its true meaning, as "loud aroma" or "velvet beautiful to the touch."

Catalectic/Catalexis -  Metrically incomplete; the dropping of one or two unaccented syllables from the end of a line, thus ending with an incomplete foot.

Catalog Verse - A poem comprised of a list of persons, places, things, or abstract ideas which share a common denominator. An ancient form, it was originally a type of didactic poetry.

Cataphora - The use of a grammatical substitute (like a pronoun) which has the same reference as the next word or phrase.

Caudate Ryhme ? See tail rhyme

Cento - Poetry made up of lines borrowed from a combination of established authors, usually resulting in a change in meaning and a humorous effect.

Chain Rhyme - Also called interlocking rhyme, a rhyme scheme in which a rhyme in a line of one stanza is used as a link to a rhyme in the next stanza, as in the aba bcb cdc, etc. of terza rima or the aaab cccb

Chain Verse -  Similar to chain rhyme, but links words, phrases, or lines (instead of rhyme) by repeating them in succeeding stanzas, as in the pantoum, but there are many variations.

Chanson De Geste - Literally, a song of heroic deeds, it refers to a class of Old French epic poems of the Middle Ages.

Chant Royal - An elaborate form of ballade in old French poetry, consisting of five stanzas of eleven lines, an envoi of eight lines, and five rhymes. The rhyme scheme is usually ababccddede.

Chapbook - A small book or pamphlet containing ballads, poems, popular tales or tracts, etc.

Chaucerian Stanza - See Rhyme Royal

Chiasmus - An inverted parallelism; the reversal of the order of corresponding words or phrases (with or without exact repetition) in successive clauses, which are usually parallel in syntax.

Choriamb - In ancient poetry, a metrical foot consisting of four syllables, the first two forming a trochee and the second two an iambus.

Choric Ode ? See Pindaric Verse

Cinquain - A five-line stanza of syllabic verse, the successive lines containing two, four, six, eight and two syllables. The cinquain, based on the Japanese haiku, was an innovation of the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey.

Classicism - The adherence to traditional standards that are universally valid and enduring.

Cliche - well worn or tired phrase

Clerihew - A comic light verse, two couplets in length, rhyming aabb, usually dealing with a person mentioned in the initial rhyme.

Climax - Rhetorically, a series of words, phrases, or sentences arranged in a continuously ascending order of intensity. If the ascending order is not maintained, an anticlimax or bathos results.

Closed Couplet - A couplet in which the sense and syntax is self-contained within its two lines, as opposed to an open couplet.

Close Rhyme - A rhyme of two contiguous or close words, such as in the idiomatic expressions, "true blue" or "fair and square."

Closet Drama - A literary work written in the form of a drama, but intended by the author only for reading, not for performance in the theater.

Closure - The effect of finality, balance, and completeness which leaves the reader with a sense of fulfilled expectations. Though the term is sometimes employed to describe the effects of individual repetitive elements, such as rhyme, metrical patterns, parallelism, refrains, and stanzas, its most significant application is in reference to the concluding portion of the entire poem.

Common Measure - A meter consisting chiefly of seven iambi feet arranged in rhymed pairs, thus a line with four accents followed by a line with three accents, usually in a four-line stanza. It is also called common meter.

Companion Poem - A poem that is associated with another, which it complements.

Conceit - An elaborate metaphor, often strained or far-fetched, in which the subject is compared with a simpler analogue usually chosen from nature or a familiar context.

Concrete Poetry - Poetry which forms a structurally original visual shape, preferably abstract, through the use of reduced language, fragmented letters, symbols and other typographical variations to create an extreme graphic impact on the reader's attention. The essence of concrete poetry lies in its appearance on the page rather than in the written text; it is intended to be perceived as a visual whole and often cannot be effective when read aloud.

Connotation - The suggestion of a meaning by a word beyond what it explicitly denotes or describes. The word, home, for example, means the place where one lives, but by connotation, also suggests security, family, love and comfort.

Consonance - A pleasing combination of sounds; sounds in agreement with tone. Also, the close repetition of the same end consonants of stressed syllables with differing vowel sounds.

Content - The substance of a poem; the impressions, facts and ideas it contains--the "what-is-being-said."

Controlling Metaphor - a symbolic story, where the whole poem may be a metaphor for something else.

Conventions - In a literary sense, established "codes" of basic principles and procedures for types of works that are recurrent in literature. The prevailing conventions of their time strongly influence writers to select content, forms, style, diction, etc., which is acceptable to the cultural expectations of the public.

Couplet - Two successive lines of poetry, usually of equal length and rhythmic correspondence, with end-words that rhyme. The couplet, for practical purposes, is the shortest stanza form, but is frequently joined with other couplets to form a poem with no stanzaic divisions.

Courtly Love - A late medieval idealized convention establishing a code for the conduct of amorous affairs of ladies and their lovers. Expressed and spread by the minnesingers and troubadours, it became associated with the literary concept of love until the 19th century.

Crambo - A game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to be matched in rhyme by the other players.

Cretic - Used in ancient poetry, a metrical foot consisting of a short syllable between two long syllables, as in thirty-nine.

Criticaster - An inferior or petty critic.

Cross Rhyme - A rhyme scheme of abab, also called alternate rhyme. The term derives from long-line verse such as hexameter in which two lines have caesural words rhymed together and end words rhymed together, as in Swinburne's.

Cycle - The aggregate of accumulated literature, plays or musical works treating the same theme. In poetry, the term is typically applied to epic or narrative poems about a mythical or heroic event or character.

Fable - A poetic story that illustrates a moral or teaches a lesson, usually in which animals or inanimate objects are represented as characters.

Fabliau - A ribald and often cynical tale in verse, especially popular in the Middle Ages.

Facetiae - Witty or humorous writings or remarks.

Fatal Flaw ? See Hamartia

Feminine Ending - An extra unaccented syllable at the end of an iambic or anapestic line of poetry, often used in blank verse.

Feminine Rhyme - A rhyme occurring on an unaccented final syllable, as in dining and shining or motion and ocean. Feminine rhymes are double or disyllabic rhymes and are common in the heroic couplet.

Fescennine Verses - Poetry of a personal nature, lacking moral or sexual restraints, commonly extemporized at rustic weddings in Fescennia, Rome and other ancient Italian cities.

Figurative Language - The use of words, phrases, symbols, and ideas in such as way as to evoke mental images and sense impressions. Figurative language is often characterized by the use of figures of speech, elaborate expressions, sound devices, and syntactic departures from the usual order of literal language.

Figure of Speech - A mode of expression in which words are used out of their literal meaning or out of their ordinary use in order to add beauty or emotional intensity or to transfer the poet's sense impressions by comparing or identifying one thing with another that has a meaning familiar to the reader. Some important figures of speech are: simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole and symbol.

Fit or Fytte - An archaic term for the division of a poem, i.e., a stanza or canto.

Foot - A unit of rhythm or meter, the division in verse of a group of syllables, one of which is long or accented. For example, the line, "The boy | stood on | the burn | ing deck," has four iambic metrical feet. The fundamental components of the foot are the arsis and the thesis. The most common poetic feet used in English verse are the iamb, anapest, trochee, dactyl and spondee, while in classical verse there are 28 different feet. The other metrical feet are the amphibrach, antibacchius, antispast, bacchius, choriamb, cretic, diiamb, dispondee, dochmius, molossus, proceleusmatic, pyrrhic and tribrach, plus two variations of the ionic, four variations of the epitrite, and four variations of the paeon. The structure of a poetic foot does not necessarily correspond to word divisions, but is determined in context by the feet which surround it.

Form - The arrangement, manner or method used to convey the content, such as free verse, ballad, haiku, etc. In other words, the "way-it-is-said."

Found Poem - A poem created from prose found in a non-poetic context, such as advertising copy, brochures, newspapers, product labels, etc. The lines are arbitrarily rearranged into a form patterned on the rhythm and appearance of poetry.

Fourteener - An iambic line of fourteen syllables, or seven feet, widely used in English poetry in the middle of the 16th Century.

Free Verse - A fluid form which conforms to no set rules of traditional versification. The free in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of meter and rhyme, but writers of free verse employ familiar poetic devices such as assonance, alliteration, imagery, caesura, figures of speech etc., and their rhythmic effects are dependent on the syllabic cadences emerging from the context. The term is often used in its French language form, vers libre.

Galliambus - In classic poetry, a lyric meter consisting of four iambic dipodies, the last of which is catalectic, dropping the final accent, or a line of four lesser Ionic feet catalectic, varied by anaclasis.

Genre - A category of artistic, musical or literary composition characterized by a particular form, style or content. Poetry, for example, is a literary genre.

Georgic - A poem dealing with a rural or agricultural topic, but differing from pastoral poetry in that the primary intention of a georgic is didactic.

Ghazal - A monorhymed Middle Eastern lyric poem in which the first two lines rhyme with a corresponding rhyme in the second line of each succeeding couplet, thus a rhyme scheme of aa, ba, ca, etc.

Gleeman - An old English minstrel. Gleemen sometimes composed their own verses, but often recited poetry written by a scop.

Gnome - An aphorism, a short statement of proverbial truth. Composers of such verse are known as gnomic poets.

Goliardic Poetry - Satiric verse which flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries, usually consisting of a stanza of four 13-syllable lines in feminine rhyme, sometimes with a concluding hexameter. The satire was characteristically a defiance of authority, most particularly directed against the Church.

Gongorism - Named for the 17th century Spanish poet, Luis de Gongora y Argote, a literary style characterized by stilted obscurity and the use of affected devices of embellishment.

Grave - In poetry, a mark ( ` ) indicating that the e in the English ending ed is to be pronounced for the sake of meter.

Haiku - A Japanese form of poetry, also known as hokku. It consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. The elusive flavor of the form, however, lies more in its touch and tone than in its syllabic structure. Deeply imbedded in Japanese culture and strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, haiku are very brief descriptions of nature that convey some implicit insight or essence of a moment. Traditionally, they contain either a direct or oblique reference to a season.

Half Rhyme - A near rhyme; also, an apocopated rhyme in which the rhyme occurs only on the first syllable of the rhyming word, as in blue and truly or sum and trumpet.

Hamartia -  In literature, the tragic hero's error of judgement or inherent defect of character, usually less literally translated as a "fatal flaw." This, combined with essential elements of chance and other external forces, brings about a catastrophe. Often the error or flaw results from nothing more than personal traits like probity, pride, and overconfidence, but can arise from any failure of the protagonist's action or knowledge ranging from a simple unwittingness to a moral deficiency.

Head Rhyme ? See Alliteration 

Helicon - A part of the Parnassus, a mountain range in Greece, which was the home of the Muses. The name is used as an allusion to poetic inspiration.

Hemistich - The approximate half of a line of poetic verse, usually divided by a caesura. In dramatic poetry it is used whenever characters exchange short bursts of dialogue rapidly, heightening the effect of quarrelsome disagreement; in classical poetry such a series is called hemistichomythia. Other types of poetry may use an occasional hemistich to give the effect of emotionally disturbed thought or action.

Hendecasyllable - A metrical line of eleven syllables.

Hendiadys - The use of a pair of nouns joined by and where one has the effect of a modifier.

Heptameter - A line of verse consisting of seven metrical feet. It is also called a septenarius, especially in Latin prosody.

Heroic Couplet - Two successive lines of rhymed poetry in iambic pentameter, so called for its use in the composition of epic poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries. In neo-classical usage the two lines were required to express a complete thought, thus a closed couplet, with a subordinate pause at the end of the first line. Heroic couplets, which are well-suited to antithesis and parallelism, are also often used for epigrams.

Heroic Quatrain or Heroic Verse - So named because it is the form in which epic poetry of heroic exploits is generally written, its rhyme scheme is abab, composed in ten-syllable iambic verse in English, hexameter in Greek and Latin, ottava rima in Italian.

Heterometric composition - a poem written in meter but with lines of differing length, e.g. one line of tetrameter, one of pentameter, one of dimeter etc.

Heteronym ? See Homonym

Hexameter - A line of verse consisting of six metrical feet; the term, however, is usually used for dactylic hexameter, consisting of dactyls and spondees, the meter in which the Greek and Latin epics were written.

Hiatus ? See Elision

Higgledy-Piggledy ? See Double Dactyl

Homonym - One of two or more words which are identical in pronunciation and spelling, but different in meaning, as the noun bear and the verb bear.

Horatian Ode - An ode relating to or resembling the works or style of the Roman poet, Horace, consisting of a series of uniform stanzas, complex in their metrical system and rhyme scheme. The Greek form is called an Aeolic ode. Horatian odes are characteristically less elaborate and more restrained than Pindaric odes.

Hovering Accent - In scansion, a stress which is thought of as being equally distributed over two adjacent syllables, a concept proposed to cover an accent not in alignment with the expected metrical ictus.

Hudibrastic Verse - A mock-heroic humorous poem written in octosyllabic couplets, after Hudibras, a satirical poem by Samuel Butler.

Hymn - A song or ode of praise, usually addressed to gods, but sometimes to abstractions such as Truth, Justice, or Fortune.

Hypallage - A type of hyperbaton involving an interchange of elements in a phrase or sentence so that a displaced word is in a grammatical relationship with another that it does not logically qualify.

Hyperbaton - An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes of syntactic displacement. Specific types of hyperbaton are anastrophe, hypallage, and hysteron proteron.

Hyperbole - A bold, deliberate overstatement, e.g., "I'd give my right arm for a piece of pizza." Not intended to be taken literally, it is used as a means of emphasizing the truth of a statement.

Hypercatalectic - Having an additional syllable after the final complete foot in a line of verse. A verse marked by hypercatalexis is called hypermetrical.

Hypermetrical - A line which contains a redundant syllable or syllables at variance with the regular metrical pattern.

Hysteron Proteron - Related to the hyperbaton, a figure of speech in which the natural or logical order of events is reversed.

Iamb - The most common metrical foot in English, German and Russian verse, and many other languages as well; it consists of two syllables, a short or unaccented syllable followed by a long or accented syllable.

Ictus - The recurring stress or accent in a rhythmic or metrical series of sounds; also, the mark indicating the syllable on which such stress or accent occurs.

Idealism - The artistic theory or practice that affirms the preeminent values of ideas and imagination, as compared with the faithful portrayal of nature in realism.

Identical Rhyme ? See Perfect Rhyme

Idyll or Idyl - A pastoral poem, usually brief, stressing the picturesque aspects of country life, or a longer narrative poem generally descriptive of pastoral scenes and written in a highly finished style.

Imagery,Image - The elements in a literary work used to evoke mental images, not only of the visual sense, but of sensation and emotion as well. While most commonly used in reference to figurative language, imagery is a variable term which can apply to any and all components of a poem that evoke sensory experience, whether figurative or literal, and also applies to the concrete things so imaged.  Basically, it is the representation of one thing by another.

Imagism - A 20th century movement in poetry advocating free verse, new rhythmic effects, colloquial language and the expression of ideas and emotions with clear, well-defined images, rather than through romanticism or symbolism.

Imitation- See Mimesis

Imperfect Rhyme ? See Near Rhyme

Impressionism- As applied to poetry, a late 19th century movement embracing imagism and symbolism, which sought to portray the effects (or poet's impressions), rather than the objective characteristics of life and events.

Improvisatore - An improviser of verse, usually extemporaneously.

Incremental Repetition - The repetition in each stanza--of a ballad, for example--of part of the preceding stanza, usually with a slight change in wording for effect.
Initial Rhyme ? See Alliteration

In Medias Res - The literary device of beginning a narrative, such as an epic poem, at a crucial point in the middle of a series of events. The intent is to create an immediate interest from which the author can then move backward in time to narrate the story.

Interior Monologue - A narrative technique in which action and external events are conveyed indirectly through a fictional character's mental soliloquy of thoughts and associations.

Interlocking rhyme ? See Chain Rhyme

Internal Rhyme - Also called middle rhyme, a rhyme occurring within the line. The rhyme may be with words within the line but not at the line end, or with a word at the line end and a word within the line.

Invective ? See Lampoon

Inversion ? See Hyperbaton

Invocation ? See Apostrophe

Ionic - A metrical foot of four syllables, either two long syllables followed by two short syllables (greater Ionic) or two short syllables followed by two long syllables (lesser Ionic); also, a verse or meter composed of Ionic feet.

Irony - Verbal irony is a figure of speech in the form of an expression in which the use of words is the opposite of the thought in the speaker's mind, thus conveying a meaning that contradicts the literal definition, as when a doctor might say to his patient, " the bad news is that the operation was successful." Dramatic or situational irony is a literary or theatrical device of having a character utter words which the the reader or audience understands to have a different meaning, but of which the character himself is unaware. Irony of fate is when a situation occurs which is quite the reverse of what one might have expected.

Isometric composition - the opposite of 'heterometric', i.e. verse that has lines all of the same number of feet.

Italian Sonnet - a fourteen-line verse form consisting of rhyme scheme a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a for the first 8 lines, followed by any rhyme scheme for the final 6 lines so long as it consists of 3 rhyme pairs and it avoids a final rhymed couplet. (eg a-c-c-d-e-d-e)

Jingle - A short poem marked by catchy repetition.

Jongleur - A public entertainer in the Middle Ages who recited or sang chansons de geste, fabliaux, and other poems, sometimes of their own composition, but more often those written by the trouveres.

Kenning - A compound word or phrase similar to an epithet, but which involves a multi-noun replacement for a single noun, such as wave traveller for boat or whale-path for ocean, used especially in Old English, Old Norse and early Teutonic poetry. A type of periphrasis, some kennings are instances of metonymy or synecdoche.

King?s English - The standard, pure or correct English speech or usage, also called Queen's English.

Lai - A medieval narrative or lyric poem which flourished in 12th century France, consisting of couplets of five-syllabled lines separated by single lines of two syllables. The number of lines and stanzas was not fixed and each stanza had only two rhymes, one rhyme for the couplets and the other for the two-syllabled lines. Succeeding stanzas formed their own rhymes.

Lampoon - A bitter, abusive satire in prose or verse attacking an individual. Motivated by malice, it is intended solely to reproach and distress.

Language-centered Poetry - where the forms of the words themselves are more significant than the sense or meanings of the words.

Lay - Originally the Anglicized term for the French lai. It became popular in 14th century England as the Breton lay, written in a spirit similar to the French lais. In the 19th century the term, lay, was sometimes used by English poets for short historical ballads or narrative poetry of moderate length.

Leonine Verse - Named for a 12th century poet, Leonius, who first composed such verse, it consists of hexameters or of hexameters and pentameters in which the final syllable rhymes with one preceding the caesura, in the middle of the line.


Light Verse - A loose catch-all term describing poetry written with a relaxed attitude and ordinary tone on trivial, mundane, or frivolous themes. It is intended to amuse and entertain and is frequently distinguished by sophistication, wit, word-play, elegance, and technical competence. Among the numerous forms of light verse are clerihews, double dactyls, epigrams, limericks, nonsense poetry, occasional poetry, parodies, society verse, and verse with puns or riddles.

Limerick - A light or humorous verse form of five chiefly anapestic verses of which lines one, two and five are of three feet and lines three and four are of two feet, with a rhyme scheme of aabba. The limerick, named for a town in Ireland of that name, was popularized by Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense published in 1846.

Line -  A unit in the structure of a poem consisting of one or more metrical feet arranged as a rhythmical entity.

List Poem ? See Catalog Verse

Litotes - A type of meiosis (understatement) in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary.  

Lyric Verse - One of the main groups of poetry, the others being narrative and dramatic. By far the most frequently used form in modern poetic literature, the term lyric includes all poems in which the speaker's ardent expression of a (usually single) emotional element predominates. Ranging from complex thoughts to the simplicity of playful wit, the power and personality of lyric verse is of far greater importance than the subject treated. Often brief, but sometimes extended in a long elegy or a meditative ode, the melodic imagery of skillfully written lyric poetry evokes in the reader's mind the recall of similar emotional experiences.

Macaronic Verse - Originally, poetry in which words of different languages were mixed together or, more strictly, words in the poet's venacular were given the inflectional endings of another language, usually for humorous or satiric effect. In modern times, however, in recognition of the multilingual relationships of sound and sense between different languages, it is used most often with serious intent, thus transformed from a species of comic or nonsense verse into poetry characterized by scholarly techniques of composition, allusion, and structure.

Madrigal - A short medieval lyric or pastoral poem expressing a simple delicate thought.

Malapropism - A mistaken substitution of one word for another that sounds similar, generally with humorous effect, as in "arduous romance" for "ardent romance."

Marinism - Excessive ornateness marked by the use of extravagant metaphors, so named from the 17th century Italian poet, Giambattista Marino, and his school of followers.

Masculine Rhyme - A rhyme occurring in words of one syllable or in an accented final syllable, such as light and sight or arise and surprise.

Measure - Poetic rhythm or cadence as determined by the syllables in a line of poetry with respect to quantity and accent; also, meter; also, a metrical foot.

Meiosis - An understatement; the presentation of a thing with under emphasis in order to achieve a greater effect.   

Meistersingers - Members of various German trade guilds formed in the 15th and 16th centuries by merchants and craftsmen for the cultivation of poetry and music, succeeding the Minnesingers.

Melic Verse - Capable of being sung. The term is derived from an ornate form of Greek lyric poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.

Mesostich ? See Acrostic Poem

Metaphor - A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one object or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them.

Metaphysical - Of or relating to a group of 17th century poets whose verse was distinguished by an intellectual and philosophical style, with extended metaphors or conceits comparing very dissimilar things.

Meter or Metre - A measure of rhythmic quantity, the organized succession of groups of syllables at basically regular intervals in a line of poetry, according to definite metrical patterns. In classic Greek and Latin versification, meter depended on the way long and short syllables were arranged to succeed one another, but in English the distinction is between accented and unaccented syllables. The unit of measure is the foot. Metrical lines are named for the type of constituent foot and for the number of feet in the line: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7) and octameter (8); thus, a line containing five iambic feet, for example, would be called iambic pentameter. Rarely does a metrical line exceed six feet.

Metonymy - A figure of speech involving the substitution of one noun for another of which it is an attribute or which is closely associated with it, e.g., "the kettle boils" or "he drank the cup." Metonymy is very similar to synecdoche.

Metrical Pause - A "rest" or "hold" that has a temporal value, usually to compensate for the omission of an unstressed syllable in a foot.

Metrical Substitution - small variations within a metrical pattern

Metrics - The branch of prosody concerned with meter.

Middle Rhyme ? See Internal Rhyme

Miltonic - Pertaining to the poetry or style of the poet, John Milton, one of the most respected figures in English literature.

Mimesis - Literally, imitation or realistic representation -- but its poetic significance is more specific: it refers to the combination of sound in phonetic symbolism and onomatopoeia (sound suggestion) with the connotative, symbolic, and synesthetic effects of the words themselves and their syntactic arrangement to resemble, reinforce, shape, and temper their lexical sense in a manner that mirrors the meaning.      

Minnesingers - Lyric poets of Germany in the 12th to 14th centuries, all men of noble birth who received royal patronage and who wrote mainly of courtly love. They were succeeded by the Meistersingers.

Minstrel - In the Middle Ages, the general term for a performer who subsisted by reciting verse and singing, usually accompanied by a harp. Some minstrels were travelling entertainers; others were permanently employed by nobles.

Minstrelsy - The art and occupation of minstrels; also, a collection of minstrel songs or a group of musicians or minstrels.

Mixed Metaphor - A metaphor whose elements are either incongruent or contradictory by the use of incompatible identifications, such as "the dog pulled in its horns" or "to take arms against a sea of troubles." 

Mock-Epic or Mock-Heroic - A satiric literary form that treats a trivial or commonplace subject with the elevated language and heroic style of the classical epic.

Modulation - In poetry, the harmonious use of language relative to the variations of stress and pitch. 

Molossus - In Greek and Latin verse, a metrical foot consisting of three long syllables.

Monody - A poem in which one person laments another's death.  

Monometer - A line of verse consisting of a single metrical foot or dipody.

Monorhyme -  A poem in which all the lines have the same end rhyme.

Monostich - A poem or epigram of a single metrical line.

Monosyllable - A word of one syllable.

Mood ? See Tone

Mora  pl. Morae - The minimal unit of rhythmic measurement in quantitive verse, equivalent to the time it takes to pronounce an ordinary or average short syllable; two morae are equivalent to a long syllable.

Mosaic Rhyme - A rhyme in which two or more words produce a multiple rhyme, either with two or more other words, as go for / no more, or with one longer word, as cop a plea / monopoly. It is usually used for comic effect.

Motif - A thematic element recurring frequently in literature, such as the dawn song of an aubade or the carpe diem motif.

Muse - A source of inspiration, a guiding genius.

Narrative - The narration of an event or story, stressing details of plot, incident and action. Along with dramatic and lyric verse, it is one of the main groups of poetry.

Near Rhyme - Also called approximate rhyme, slant rhyme, off rhyme, imperfect rhyme or half rhyme, a rhyme in which the sounds are similar, but not exact, as in home and come or close and lose. Most near rhymes are types of consonance.

Neologism - The use of new words or new meanings for old words not yet included in standard definitions, as in the recent application of the word cool to denote, very good, excellent or fashionable. Some disappear from usage, others like hip and feedback, for example, remain in the language.

Nonce Word - From the expression, for the nonce, a word coined or used for a special circumstance or occasion only.

Nonsense Poetry - Poetry which is absurd, foolish or preposterous, usually written in a catchy meter with strong rhymes. It often contains neologisms or portmanteau words. 

Normative rhyme - the duplication, at the ends of two or more lines of a given poem, for SOME of the sounds in the last stressed syllable of those lines, plus duplication of ALL the sounds in any weakly stressed syllables that might follow the stressed syllable. The vowel of the stressed syllable, and any consonant sound that might follow it, must be the same in both rhyming words. But the consonant sound that precedes the vowel of the stressed syllable should be DIFFERENT on each rhyming word. Eg 'so/go', 'round/abound', 'lotion/motion', but NOT 'relate/late'.

Numen - A spiritual source or influence, often identified with a natural object, phenomenon or place.

Nursery Rhyme - A short poem for children written in rhyming verse and handed down in folklore.

Objectivism - A type of 20th century poetry in which objects are selected and portrayed for their own particular value, rather than their symbolic quality or the intellectual concept of the author.

Occasional Poem - A poem written for a particular occasion, such as a dedication, birthday, or victory. The encomium, elegy, prothalamium, and epithalamium are examples of occasional poems.

Octameter - A line of verse consisting of eight metrical feet.

Octave - A stanza of eight lines, especially the first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet.

Octosyllable - A metrical line of eight syllables, such as iambic, tetrameter, or a poem composed of eight-syllable lines.

Ode - A type of lyric or melic verse, usually irregular rather than uniform, generally of considerable length, and sometimes continuous, sometimes divided in accordance with transitions of thought and mood in a complexity of stanzaic forms; it often has varying iambic line lengths with no fixed system of rhyme schemes and is always marked by the rich, intense expression of an elevated thought, often addressed to a praised person or object.

Odeon or Odeum - A small roofed theater in ancient antiquity devoted to the presentation of musical and poetic works to the public in competition for prizes.

Off Rhyme - a near rhyme, such as 'down/noon', 'seat/fate'

Onomatopoeia - Strictly speaking, the formation or use of words which imitate sounds, like whispering, clang and sizzle, but the term is generally expanded to refer to any word whose sound is suggestive of its meaning.

Open Couplet - A couplet of the Romantic period with run-on lines, in which the thought was carried beyond the rhyming lines of the couplet. Ottava Rima - Originally Italian, a stanza of eight lines of heroic verse, rhyming abababcc.

Ottava Rima - verse form of eight lines in rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. Eg Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' and Byron's 'Don Juan'

Oxymoron - The conjunction of words which, at first view, seem to be contradictory or incongruous, but whose surprising juxtaposition expresses a truth or dramatic effect, such as, cool fire, deafening silence, wise folly, etc.

Paean - A hymn of praise, joy, triumph, etc.

Paeon - In ancient poetry, a metrical foot consisting of four syllables, one long and three short. The position of the long syllable can be varied in four ways, thus the foot can be called a primus, secundus, tertius or quartus paeon.

Palindrome - A word, verse, or sentence in which the sequence of letters is the same forward and backward, as the word, madam, or the sentence, "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama