English 337: Nineteenth-Century English Literature
A Guide to Literary Terms
Over the course of the Fall semester, this page will accrue a list of definitions for literary terms discussed in English 337: 19th-Century Poetry. I will attempt to add new terms as they are brought up in class, so that by the end of this semester the guide will provide a useful resource for students preparing for final papers and exams.
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Alliteration:
Alliteration is the repetition of identical consonant or vowel sounds. Here's what C. Hugh Homan's Handbook to Literature has to say about alliteration:
A good example of consonantal alliteration is Coleridge's lines:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.Vowel alliteration is shown in the sentence: "Apt alliteration's artful aid is often an occasional ornament in prose." Alliteration of sounds within words appears in Tennyson's lines:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.Old English versification rested in large measure on alliteration, as did much Middle English poetry.
It’s useful to know the terms for specific consonant sounds. These are called ‘manners of articulation’ and are, in fact, much more complicated than I suggest here; however, for our purposes, the following major divisions should serve:
1) fricatives are caused by forcing air through a narrow channel in your mouth, like when you put your lower lip against your upper teeth to form the [f] of ‘force’; other fricatives include the [v] of ‘vine’; [θ] as in the ‘th’ of ‘thing’; and [ð] as in the ‘th’ of ‘that.’ Usually the [h] of ‘hat’ is included among the fricatives, though [h] is really a ‘pseudo-fricative.‘ A subset of fricatives are sibilants, which include the [s] of ‘sip’; the [z] of ‘zip’; the 'sh' of ‘ship’; and the ‘s’ of ‘vision.’
2) plosives (also called ‘stops’ or ‘occlusives’) are consonants produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. These include the [p] of ‘pot’; the [b] of ‘bat’; the [t] of ‘tick’; the [d] of ‘admit’; the [k] of ‘kiss’; and the [g] of ‘gaggle’.
3) affricates include the ‘ch’ of ‘chance’ and the ‘j’ of ‘jail.’
4) sonorants are produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract and include the ‘l’ of ‘lion’; the ‘m’ of ‘man’; the ‘n’ of ‘not’; and the ‘ng’ of ‘singing.’
5) semivowels include [j] as in the ‘y’ of ‘you’; and the [w] of ‘weep.’
Assonance:
Assonance refers to similar vowel sounds in syllables that end with different consonant sounds, for example the words, "skies," "fire" and "thine." Here's what C. Hugh Homan's Handbook to Literature has to say about assonance:
Assonance differs from rhyme in that rhyme is a similarity of vowel and consonant. "Lake" and "fake" demonstrate rhyme; "lake" and "fate" assonance.
Assonance is a common substitution for end-rhyme in the popular ballad, as in these lines from "The Twa Corbies":
—In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight.Such substitution of assonance for end-rhyme is also characteristic of Emily Dickinson's verse, and is used extensively by many contemporary poets.
As an enriching ornament within the line, assonance is of great use to the poet. Poe and Swinburne used it extensively for musical effect. Gerard Manley Hopkins introduced modern poets to its wide use. The skill with which Dylan Thomas manipulates assonance is one of his high achievements. Note its complex employment in the first stanza of Thomas' "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait":
The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck. INDEX
Ballad:
Here's the definition of "ballad" in C. Hugh Holman's Handbook to Literature:
A form of verse to be sung or recited and characterized by its presentation of a dramatic or exciting episode in simple narrative form.... Though the ballad is a form still much written, the so-called popular ballad in most literatures belongs to the early periods before written literature was highly developed.... Certain common characteristics of these early ballads should be noted: the supernatural is likely to play an important part in events, physical courage and love are freqent themes, the incidents are usually such as happen to common people (as opposed to the nobility) and often have to do with domestic episodes, slight attention is paid to characterization or description, trasitions are abrupt, action is largely developed through dialogue, tragic situations are presented with the utmost simplicity, incremental repetition is common....
I'll finish with a passage from M. H. Abrams's definition of "ballad" in his Glossary of Literary Terms:The most common stanza form--called the ballad stanza--is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress iambic lines; usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. This is the form of "Sir Patrick Spens"; the first stanza of this ballad also exemplifies the conventionally abrupt opening and the manner of proceeding by third-person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition, and spare dialogue:
INDEXThe king sits in Dumerling towne,
....Drinking the blude-red wine:
"O Whar will I get a guid sailor,To sail this schip of mine?"
The collecting and printing of popular ballads began in England, then in Germany, during the eighteenth century. In 1765 Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which, although most of the contents had been rewritten in the style of that time, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk literature....The ballad has had an enormous influence on the form and style of poetry, especially, in England, since Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). A literary ballad is a narrative poem written by a learned poet in deliberate imitation of the form and spirit of the popular ballad. Some of the greatest of these were composed in the Romantic period: Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which, however, is much longer and more elaborately developed than the folk ballad), Scott's "Proud Maisie," and Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci." Wordsworth begins the narration in "We Are Seven" by introducing the narrator as an agent--"I met a little cottage girl"--which is probably one reason that he called it "a lyrical ballad." Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," on the other hand, opens with the abrupt impersonal narration of the traditional ballad:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
Blank Verse:
This is a verse form commonly used in Elizabethan drama and in long narrative poems generally (the Prelude being our main example). The form consists of unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. "Of all English verse forms," writes M. H. Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, blank verse "is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, yet the most flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other type of verse." INDEX
Caesura:
Here's the definition from C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature: "A pause or break in the metrical or rhythmical progress of a line of verse.... Usually the caesura has been placed near the middle of a verse. Some poets, however, have sought diversity of rhythmical effect by placing the caesura anywhere from near the beginning of a line to near the end." The pause is often underlined through the use of some form of punctuation. See, for example, the heroic couplet below. INDEX
Consonance:
Also sometimes termed slant or half rhyme, consonance refers to when consonants in stressed syllables agree but vowels differ (for example, the rhyme "up" and "drop" in the final sestet of Yeats' "Leda and the Swan." INDEX
Conversation Poem:
A "conversation poem" is a sustained blank-verse lyric of description and meditation, in the mode of conversation addressed to a silent auditor. Examples include Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "The Eolian Harp." The form is an important precursor of the Victorian dramatic monologue. INDEX
Dramatic Monologue:
Here's the definition of "dramatic monologue" from M. H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms:
A monologue is a long speech by a single person; the dramatic device, in which a character in a play utters a monologue that expresses the character's private thoughts, is called a soliloquy. What is called a dramatic monologue is not an element in a play, but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form, as represented in Browning's "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Andrea del Sarto," and many other poems, the dramatic monologue has the following features; (1) A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the entire poem in a specific situation at a critical moment: the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more attempts wistfully to believe his wife's lies. (2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditor's presence and what they say and do only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker. (3) The principle controlling the poet's selection and organization of what the lyric speaker says is the speaker's unintentional revelation of his or her temperament and character.
Even Browning, in monologues such as "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" and "Caliban upon Setebos," omits the second attribute, the presence of a silent auditor; but attributes (1) and (3) are essential distinctions between the dramatic monologue and the dramatic lyric, which is also a monologue uttered in a specified situation at a dramatic moment. Thus John Donne's "The Canonization" and "The Flea" (1613) are dramatic lyrics that, although very close to the dramatic monologue, lack one essential feature: the focus of interest is primarily on the speaker's elaborately ingenious argument, rather than on the character he inadvertently reveals in the course of arguing. And although Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) is spoken by one person to a silent auditor (his sister) in a specific situation at a significant moment in his life, it si not properly a dramatic monologue, both because we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself, and because the organizing principle is not the revelation of the speaker's distinctive temperament so much as the evolution of his observation, thought, memory, and feelings.
Tennyson wrote "Ulysses" (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and the form has been used by Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of this century. The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915).
End-stopped line:
An end-stopped line is one in which both the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion at the end of the line. In other words, this is the opposite of an enjambement. The following is a good example from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (this one's in your Reader):
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good.INDEX
Enjambement:
Here's the definition from C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature:
The continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a verse or couplet on to the next verse or couplet. Enjambement occurs in run-on lines and offers contrast to end-stopped lines. The first and second lines from Milton given below, carried over to the second and third for completion, are illustrations of enjambement:
Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flow'd
Fast by the opracle of God. INDEX
Epiphany:
The revelation of a god to a particular character. Athena, for example, often reveals herself to Odysseus throughout the Odyssey (though she often begins in disguise). This convention is connected to the convention of supernatural machinery in the traditional epic. The term gets re-worked by James Joyce who makes it apply to the quotidian world. Here's what M. H. Abrams says of "epiphany" in his Glossary of Literary Terms:
INDEXEpiphany means "a manifestation," and by Christian thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sense of a sudden radiance and revelation while observing a commonplace object. "By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation." "Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object... seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." Joyce's short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies....
"Epiphany" has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, however, merely substituted this word for what earlier authors had called "the moment." Thus Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry (1821), described the "best and happiest moments... arising unforeseen and departing unbidden," "visitations of the divinity" which poetry "redeems from decay." William Wordsworth was a preeminent poet of what he called "moments," or in more elaborate instances, "spots of time." For instances of his short poems which represent a moment of revelation, see Wordsworth's "The Two April Mornings" and "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth's Prelude, like Joyce's narratives, is constructed as a sequence of such visionary encounters. Thus in Book VIII, lines 539-59, Wordsworth describes the "moment" when he for the first time passed in a stagecoach over the "threshold" of London and the "trivial forms/ Of houses, pavement, streets" suddenly manifested a profound power and significance:
'twas a moment's pause,--
All that took place within me came and went
As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells,
And grateful memory, as a thing divine.
Heroic Couplet:
This verse form consists of iambic pentameter lines with rhymed couplets. In the eighteenth century, when this verse form was most popular, poets tended also to write in closed couplets, which is to say that the end of each couplet, and even each line, tended to coincide with the end of a sentence or a self-sufficient unit of syntax. The form became the predominant English measure in the eighteenth century and is in some ways reflective of eighteenth-century ideals of order, balance, and closure. That sense of balance was also achieved by a strong caesura usually right in the center of each verse line. A good example is the last lines of the First Epistle of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man:
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
in medias res:
This is the technical term for the epic convention of beginning "in the middle of things," rather than at the very start of the story. In the Odyssey, for example, we first learn about Odysseus' journey when he is held captive on Calypso's island, even though, as we find out in Books IX through XII, the greater part of Odysseus' journey actually precedes that moment in the narrative. INDEX
Invocation:
An invocation is any address to a deity, usually for help of some sort. The epic traditionally begins with an invocation to the Muse (a request for help in the telling of the tale). In fact, in an oral culture, the storyteller or "rhapsode" is considered merely a vessel through which the gods (and particularly the Muses) speak. (This is the reason Plato makes fun of oral storytellers in Ion.) There are traditionally nine Muses, each presiding over a different genre of literature. The traditional Muse of epic poetry is Calliope, although Homer does not address her by name in his invocation at the beginning of the Odyssey. INDEX
Meter:
Here's an excerpt from M. H. Abrams' definition of "meter" in A Glossary of Literary Terms (fifth edition):
In all sustained spoken English we feel a rhythm, that is, a recognizable through variable pattern in the beat of the stresses in the stream of sound. If this rhythm of stresses is structured into a recurrence of regular--that is, approximately equivalent--units, we call it meter. Compositions written in meter are known as verse....
We attend, in reading verse, to the individual line, which is a separate entity on the printed page. The meter of a line is determined by the pattern of stronger and weaker stresses in its component syllables; often, the stronger stress is called the "stressed" and the weaker one the "unstressed" syllable.... There are three major factors that determine where the stresses (in the sense of the relatively stronger stresses, or "accents") will fall in a line of verse: (1) Most important is the "word accent" in polysyllabic words; in the noun "accent" itself, for example, the stress falls on the first syllable. (2) There are also many monosyllabic words in the language, and on which of these--in the sentence or a phrase--the stress will fall depends on the grammatical function of the word (we normally put stronger stress on nouns, verbs, and adjectives, for example, than on articles or prepositions), and also on the "rhetorical accent," or the emphasis we give a word because we want to enhance its importance in a particular utterance. (3) Another determinant of stress is the prevailing "metrical accent," which is an expected pulsation, in accordance with the stress pattern which was established earlier in the metrical line or passage.
Here are the major metrical feet, as given (with some changes by me) in Abrams:
(1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Póet, géntle Créature ás he ís" (Wordsworth, Prelude, 1.135).
(2) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. Example: "Thére they áre, my fífty mén and wómen" (Browning, "One Words More"). Note that most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable; the technical term for such a line is "catalectic." Example: "Tíger! Tíger! búrning bríght/ Ín the fórest óf the níght" (Blake, "The Tiger").
(3) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Assy´rian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld" (Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib").
(4) Dactyllic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables. Example: "Éve, with her básket, was/ Déep in the bélls and grass" (Ralph Hodgson, "Eve").
Two other feet, often distinguished, occur only as occasional variants from standard feet:
(5) Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses, as in the first two feet of this line: "Góod stróng thíck stúpefy´ing íncense smóke" (Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb").
(6) Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): two successive syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second and fourth feet in this line: "My way is to begín with the begínning" (Byron, Don Juan). [Note: arguably, "way" in this line could well be considered a stressed syllable.]
A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it:
monometer:
one foot
dimeter:
two feet
trimeter:
three feet
tetrameter:
four feet
pentameter:
five feet
hexameter:
six feet
heptameter:
seven feet
octameter:
eight feet
Now back again to M. H. Abrams and his Glossary of Literary Terms:
To scan a passage of verse is to go through it line by line, analyzing the component feet, and also indicating where any major pauses fall within a line. Here is a scansion... [with the stresses marked] of the first five lines from Keats's Endymion (1818); the passage was chosen because it exemplifies a flexible and variable rather than a highly regular metrical pattern.
(1)A thíng of beáuty ís a jóy for éver;
(2)Its lóveliness incréases; // ít will néver
(3)Páss into nóthingness, // but stíll will kéep
(4)A bówer quíet for us, // and a sléep
(5)Fúll of sweet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing.The prevailing meter is clearly iambic, and the lines are iambic pentameter. As in all fluent verse, however, there are variations upon the basic iambic foot, which are sometimes called "substitutions":
(1) the closing feet of lines 1, 2, 5 end with an extra light syllable, and are said to have a feminine ending. Lines 3 and 4, in which the closing feet, since they are standard iambs, end with a stressed syllable, are said to have masculine endings.
(2) In lines 3 and 5, the opening iambic feet have been "inverted" to form trochees. (These initial positions are the most common place for such inversions in iambic verse.) [Note that, following a different rhetorical accent, one might also scan this line: Full of swéet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing. Such a reading would still fall within the line's pentameter beat.]
(3) I have marked the second foot in line 2, and the third foot of line 3 and line 4, as pyrrhics (two light stresses); these help to give Keats's verses their rapid movement. This is a procedure in scansion with which competent readers often disagree: some will feel enough of a metric beat in all these feet to mark them as iambs; others will mark still other feet (for example, the third foot of line 1) as pyrrhics also.... Notice, however, that these are differences in nuance rather than in essentials: the analysts agree that the prevailing pulse of Keats's versification is iambic throughout.Two other elements are important in the metric movement of Keats's passage: (1) In lines 1 and 5, the pause in the reading--which occurs naturally at the end of a clause or other syntactic unit--coincides with the end of the line; such lines are called end-stopped. Lines 2 through 4, other hand, are called run-on lines (or in a French term, they exhibit enjambement--"a striding-over"), because the pressure of the incompleted syntactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse-line. (2) When a strong phrasal pause falls within a line, as in lines 2, 3, 4, it is called a caesura--indicated in the quoted passage by the conventional symbol, //. The management of these internal pauses is important for giving variety and for providing expressive emphases in the long pentameter line.
Narration:
Here is a strong definition of "narration" from The Harper Handbook to Literature, edited by Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins:
[Narrations] take their names from the grammatical stance employed by the narrator: first-person narration for a narrative perspective inside the story, third-person narration for one outside. The first-person narrator speaks as an "I" and may be identified in one of three roles; first person as protagonist, the hero or heroine of the story; first person as participant, a character in a subsidiary role; first person as observer, a character without essential function except to observe and record, sometimes developed fully as an individual with a name, history, and personality, sometimes almost nonexistent except for the "I" that appears occasionally as a reminder of the individual's personal relation to the story.... [A] third-person narrator... stands outside the story, speaking of those within it in the grammatical third person (he, she, they).... [One kind of third-person narration] is called THIRD-PERSON OMNISCIENCE, because the [third-person] narrator assumes the privileges of omniscience, moving about in time and space, entering freely into the unverbalized thoughts and motives of the characters.... All-knowing should not, however, be confused with all-revealing, in either traditional or modern tales.... [T]he third-person omniscient narrator will seldom reveal the mysteries and secret motives of the story before the moment of greatest effect. Knowing all, the story teller teases the reader with bits and pieces until all comes together at the end. [In other words, the story teller discursively re-orders the chronological events of the story.]
In THIRD-PERSON LIMITED OMNISCIENCE, the narrator frequently limits the revelation of thoughts to those of one character, presenting the other characters only externally. As a result, the reader's experience is conditioned by the mental state, the qualities of perception, ignorance, or bias of the filtering or reflecting mind.
Ode:
Here is a strong definition of "ode" from M. H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms:
A long lyric poem that is serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure.... The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama. His complex stanzas were patterned in sets of three: moving in a dance rhythm to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the antistrophe; then, standing still, the epode.
The regular or Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of Pindar's form, with all the strophes and antistrophes written in one stanza pattern, and all the epodes in another; the typical construction may be conveniently studied in Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy" (1757). The irregular ode was introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitated the Pindaric style and matter but disregarded the recurrent strophic triad, allowing each stanza to establish its own pattern of variable line lengths, nuber of lines, and rhyme scheme. This type of irregular stanzaic structure, which is free to alter in accordance with shifts in subject and mood, has been the most common for the English ode ever since; Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807) is representative.
Pindar's odes wiere encomiastic, or written to praise and glorify someone—in his instance, a victorious athlete in the Olympic games. The earlier English odes, and many later one, were also written to eulogize something; either a person (Dryden's "Anne Killigrew"), or the arts of music or poetry (Dryden's "Alexander's Feast"), or a time of day (Collins' "Ode to Evening"), or abstract concepts (Gray's "Hymn to Adversity" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"). Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate meditation, which is stimulated by (and sometimes reverts to) an aspect of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal emotional problem or a generally human one (Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode, Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind")....
The Horatian ode was originally modeled on the matter, tone, and form of the odes of the Roman Horace. In contrast to the passion and visionary boldness of Pindar's odes, Horatian odes are calm, meditative, and restrained, and they are usually homostrophic—that is, written in a single repeated stanza form—as well as shorter than the Pindaric ode. Examples are Marvell's "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" (1650) and Keats's ode "To Autumn" (1820).
Pantheism:
C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature describes pantheism in the following way:
A philosophic-religious attitude which finds the spirit of God manifest in all things and which holds that whereas all things speak the glory of God it is equally true that the glory of God is made up of all things. Finite objects are at once both God and the manifestation of God. The term is impossible to define exactly since it is so personal a conviction as to be differently interpreted by different philosophers, but for its literary significance it is clearly enough described as an ardent faith in NATURE as both the revelation of deity and deity itself.... Wordsworth in England and Emerson in America may be selected from many as giving typical expression to the pantheistic conception. The following lines from Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" express the idea clearly:
...a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. INDEX
Sonnet:
A sonnet is a lyric poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. There are three main variants to the rhyme scheme in the tradition of English literature:
1) The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. Tthis form is named after the fourteenth-century Italian lyric poet, Petrarch. This sonnet form has two main parts, an opening octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba and a concluding sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variation (for example, cdccdc). Some English practitioners of the form add a new rhyme in the second quatrain of the opening octave in order to ease the difficulties of finding such a tight rhyme scheme in English (as opposed to Italian). Petrarch's sonnets dealt with his love for an idealized female character named Laura and some English examples of the form follow in this lyric tradition, most notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.
2) The English or Shakespearean sonnet. This form was first introduced by the Earl of Surrey and others in the sixteenth century, but it is often named after Shakespeare, who mastered the form in his famous sonnet sequence published at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This stanza is made up of three quatrains of different interlaced rhymes (abab cdcd efef), followed by a concluding couplet.
3) The Spenserian sonnet. In the Renaissance, Edmund Spenser introduced an important variation to the English sonnet by having a rhyme continue between each of the three quatrains, followed by a couplet: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
Here is what M. H. Abrams has to say about the sonnet in A Glossary of Literary Terms:
The stanza is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric development, yet so short and so exigent in its rhymes as to pose a standing challenge to the artistry of the poet. the rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of problem, situation, or incident in the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar division of material, but often presents a repetition-with-variation of a statement in the three quatrains; the final couplet, however, usually imposes an epigrammatic turn at the end....
Following Petrarch's early example, a number of Elizabethan poets wrote sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers, or by indicating a development in that relationship which constitutes a kind of implicit plot.
We'll be looking at one sonnet sequence in its entirety, George Meredith's Modern Love (1862). Although his poems follow a sixteen-line stanza, his sequence of poems is usually referred to as a sonnet sequence. INDEX
Sublime:
The sublime can be best distinguished in relationship to the beautiful. The beautiful is that in nature which can be admired calmly and appreciated for its surface appearance (color, depth, material, balance). The sublime is that in nature which is so much greater than man that its attraction actually includes a certain degree of fear and trepidation on the part of the beholder, although a fear not so immediate that it traumatizes. The stolen boat episode in Book I of the Prelude (starting at line 372) relates Wordsworth's first experience with this terrible, frightening, but nonetheless attractive, side to Nature's otherwise gentle and calming beauty. Natural landscapes that often evoke the sublime include mountains, chasms, Northern wastelands, massive waterfalls, etc.. Consider, for example, J. M. W. Turner's painting "The Passage of the St. Gothard" (1804) to the right of this text. (Note: if you click on the image, you will link to a larger reproduction of the same painting with slightly better resolution.) Here's the definition of the sublime in Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature:
Edmund Burke in 1756 wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful . Kant followed Burke's line of thinking in his Criticique of Judgment (1790), where he linked beauty with the finite and the sublime with the infinite. Burke's doctrine of the sublime was powerfully influential on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. He believed that a painful idea creates a sublime passion and thus concentrates the mind on that single facet of experience and produces a momentary suspension of rational activity, uncertainty, and self-consciousness. If the pain producing this effect is imaginary rather than real, a great aesthetic object is achieved. Thus, great mountains, storms at sea, ruined abbeys, crumbling castles, and charnel houses are appropriate subjects to produce the sublime. INDEX
Last Revised: August 24, 2000
Painting courtesy of
Carol L. Gerten
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