Glossary of Poetic Terms

Harsh or discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination of consonants within a group of words. The opposite of euphony. Writers frequently use cacophony to express energy or mimic mood. See also dissonance.

The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse).

Literally “song” in Italian, the canzone is a lyric poem originating in medieval Italy and France and usually consisting of hendecasyllabic lines with end-rhyme. Early versions include Petrarch’s five to six-line stanzas plus an envoi, as well as Dante’s modification: five twelve-line stanzas with repeated end words, finished by a five-line envoi. The canzone influenced the development of the sonnet and later writers such as James Merrill, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound took up the form. See Daryl Hine’s “Canzone” and “About the Canzone,” by John Hollander.

From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer. Centos had a resurgence in popularity with the rise of collage as a compositional device among Modernist writers and can be seen in works such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In “Lepidopteran: A Cento,” poet Linda Bierds weaves together lines and phrases from Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, and Alan Turing. See also “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” by John Ashbery; Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014), by Simone Muench; and “on naming yourself,” by Jamila Woods.

A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “twice five miles of fertile ground” (i.e., 10 miles) in “Kubla Khan.” Like periphrasis, which also involves the use of more words to convey what could be said in fewer, circumlocution is a way of saying something in a less direct manner. 

Italian term for “theater of professional artists.” A theater form that emerged in northern Italy in the 15th century and spread throughout Europe. Commedia dell’arte relied on masked stock characters who improvised dialogue within a basic, often familiar plotline or story (such as the struggles of young lovers or marital infidelity). The commedias were performed by itinerant troupes of actors who could respond to contemporary events through extemporized commentary and impromptu asides. Stock characters developed specific attributes, props, costumes, and gestures; masks meant that dialect and movement rather than facial expression were important to their portrayal. Zanni (servants) for instance were subversive characters who stirred up trouble; the most famous of these is Harlequin, a gluttonous acrobat dressed in patchwork. Performances of commedias dwindled throughout the 18th century as more realistic forms of drama gained popularity. However, the influence of commedia dell’arte can be seen in theatrical forms such as pantomime, puppetry, and physical theatre.

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in common measure, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and Elinor Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car.” See also Poulter’s measure and fourteener. Browse more common measure poems.

From the Latin term for “concept,” a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Petrarchan (after the Italian poet Petrarch) conceits figure heavily in sonnets, and contrast more conventional sensual imagery to describe the experience of love. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been,” for example, “What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!” laments the lover, though his separation takes place in the fertile days of summer and fall.

Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterize the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the reader’s attention. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donne’s conceits, see Stephanie Burt’s Poem Guide on John Donne's “The Sun Rising.”)

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics. Nonreferential and interested in the materiality of language, conceptual poetry often relies on some organizing principle or information that is external to the text and can cross genres into visual or theoretical modes. Generally interested in blurring genres, conceptual poetry takes advantage of innovations in technology to question received notions of what it means to be “poetic” or to express a “self” in poetry. The ideas and practices of conceptual poetry are associated with a variety of writers including Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to conceptual poetry in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic. Examples include George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” and George Starbuck’s “Poem in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree”. Browse more concrete poems.