7
The Technical Language of Poetry
In this chapter, we’ll be looking at some basic formal elements of poetry. Much of this material is based on sound. It is easier to understand with spoken examples. At the end of this lecture you will find links to videos that reinforce material presented here.
The vocabulary that has been developed to study poetry is elaborate. Although you may feel you’re being exposed to a lot of new words at once, in fact we will only be sampling this vocabulary here. You’ll find a longer reference list of common vocabulary words at the end of this chapter.
The study of the nature, forms, rules, and techniques is called poetics; part of this, the study of poetic meter and sound, is called prosody. The following poetics describes very well the majority of poems written in English from the late 15th century (the time just before Shakespeare) to the present. The major exception is free verse, which is primarily a 20th-century phenomenon. Although you may use this lecture as a supplemental glossary, the entries are not in alphabetical order because concepts described in many entries depend upon a knowledge of those that have been described before. You can’t understand what blank verse is, for example, until you know what meter is. Fortunately, you have a computer and can search for entries easily if you need to refresh your memory.
These are the most basic words anyone needs to know who wishes to discuss poetics:
Foot: We mentioned in a previous lecture that for the most part English poetry is measured by stressed syllables. As we stated there, a stressed syllable and its accompanying unstressed syllables is called a foot. English poetry has four basic feet, the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl and the anapest. Of these four, the iamb (pronounced “I am”) is by far the most common. The iamb consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Traditionally an unstressed syllable is marked by a ˘, and an stressed syllable is marked ´. But, for visual ease we will mark the stressed syllables in bold.
iamb: The bar
A trochee (pronounced “troh-kay”) is a backwards iamb, a two-syllable foot in which the first syllable is stressed:
trochee: bro-ther
The anapest (pronounced as written, “an-a-pest”) and dactyl (pronounced “dak-til”) are three syllable feet thus:
anapest: on the hill
dactyl: dumb as a
In addition to these four basic feet, there are two more, less common, that you should know, the spondee (“spon-day”) and the pyrrhic (“peer-ik”). These feet are common substitutions in poetic lines. In other words, they are not generally the basic meter of the line, but serve to add variation to the regular pattern set up in the meter by repeating one of the four basic feet. The spondee consists of two accented syllables together; the pyrrhic consists of two unaccented syllables together.
pyrrhic: to a
Line and meter: A string of feet is a line. The pattern of stresses in a line is called the meter. It’s obvious from looking