Glossary of Poetic Terms (1)1.poetry (诗歌) : a form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with itssubject. To read a great poem is to bring out the perfect marriage of its sound and thought in a silent or voiced performance. At least from the time of Aristotle's Poetics, drama was conceived of as a species of poetry.2.verse(诗,诗行): as a mass noun, poetry in general; and, as a regular noun, a line of poetry..(注意中文里诗行与诗句的区别)3.foot(韵步): the basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter, usually thought tocontain one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English are iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic.4.meter (韵律): the rhythm of verse, reduceable to one of four kinds, accentual, syllabic,accentual-syllabic, and quantitative. Also sometimes called `number(s).'a)Falling meter: trochees and dactyls, i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or twounstressed syllables.b)Rising meter: iambs and anapests, i.e., one or two unstressed syllables followed by astressed one.c)Monometer, dimeter, trimester, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter,octameter, nonameter, decameter.5.stanza (诗节):a group of verses separated from other such groups in a poem and oftensharing a common rhyme scheme.a)couplet: a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed"when they form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, andholding a complete thought.b)quatrain: a four-line stanza, rhyming.c)tercet(triplet), quintain (cinquain), sexain (sextet/sestet), septet, octave (octet).6.sonnet (十四行诗):(略)7.rhyme(押韵): normally end-rhyme, that is, lines of verse characterized by the consonance ofterminal words or syllables. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word's last stressed syllable. rhyme scheme(押韵格式)8.persona(人物): the speaker of a poem, a dramatic character distinguished from the poet.9.lyric(抒情诗):short poem in which the poet, the poet's persona, or a speaker expressespersonal feelings, and often addressed to the reader.Glossary of Poetic Terms (2)Epic:an extended narrative poem with a heroic or superhuman protagonist engaged in an action of great significance in a vast setting (often including the underworld and engaging the gods). Examples of epic poems are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, John Milton's Paradise Lost, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Elizabeth Barret Browning's Aurora Leigh, and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."Blank verse:unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse, a ten-syllable line and the usual rhythm of English dramatic and epic poetry from its introduction by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in his translation of Books II and IV of Virgil's Certain Books of Virgil's Æneis.Shakespeare's Hamlet II.2.339: "The Lady shall say her minde freely; or the blanke Verse shall halt for't." Poems such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Wallace Steven's "Sunday Morning" use blank verse.Couplet:a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed" when theyform a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in 17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, and holding a complete thought.Metaphor:a comparison that is made literally, either by a verb (for example, John Keats' "Beauty istruth, truth beauty" from his "Ode on a Grecian Urn") or, less obviously, by a combination of adjective and noun, noun and verb, etc. (for example, Shakespeare's sonnet on the "the marriage of true minds"), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as "as," "like," or "than."Motif:an image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and that is sometimesthought to belong to a collective unconsciousness.Theme:a prevailing idea in a work, but sometimes not explicitly statedGlossary of Poetic Terms (3)Bard:originally a Celtic name for a poet-singer.Ballad:a popular song, often recited aloud, narrating a story, and passed down orally. Over 300traditional English ballads, in up to 25 versions each, were edited as the so-called "Child ballads" (named after the editor, F. J. Child) 1882-98. Examples of the form include "Sir Patrick Spens," "Twa Sisters of Binnorie," "The Three Ravens," the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats.Ballad stanza:quatrain rhyming abcb and alternating four-stress and three-stress lines.Alliteration:using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syll= ables in a phrase or verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence.Alliteration need not re-use all initial consonants: words like "train" and "terrific"alliterate.。