Poetry in Credo: Meter, Structure, & Grammar

In speech, emphasis given a particular sound, called prosodic systems in linguistics. There are three basic accentual methods: stress, tone, and length.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In the quantitative meters of Classical poetry, a metrical foot of two short syllables followed by one long (˘ ˘ –, e.g. dĕĭtās), or, in verse-systems based on accent, two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed (x x /, e.g. interrupt).

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A term that derives from the Lat. verb caedere, "to cut off," and refers to the place in a line of verse where the metrical flow is temporarily "cut off." When this "cut" occurs at the beginning of a line, it is called an "initial caesura"; when it occurs in the middle of a line, it is called a "medial caesura"; and when it occurs at the end of a line, it is called a "terminal caesura.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In Cl. prosody, a metrical foot consisting of one long syllable followed by two short ones.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The chief meter in most cl. and mod. prosody. Iambic meter is based on the iamb, a metrical foot consisting of a short or unstressed syllable followed by a long or stressed syllable. In Lat. poetry, the iamb was comprised of this short and long syllable pair; in Gr. it was a metron consisting of this plus a preceding anceps and long syllable

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
In poetry, the rhythmic pattern of a poetic line. Various principles have been devised to organize poetic lines into rhythmic units. Quantitative verse, the metre of Classical Greek and Latin poetry, measures the length of time required to pronounce syllables, regardless of their stress; combinations of long and short syllables form the basic rhythmic units. Syllabic verse is most common in languages that are not strongly accented, such as French or Japanese; it is based on a fixed number of syllables within a line. Accentual verse occurs in strongly stressed languages, such as the Germanic; only stressed syllables within a line are counted. Accentual-syllabic verse is the usual form in English poetry; it combines syllable counting and stress counting. The most common English metre, iambic pentameter, is a line of 10 syllables, or 5 iambic feet; each foot contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
in prosody, a line to be scanned in five feet (see versification). The third line of Thomas Nashe's "Spring" is in pentameter: "Cold doth / not sting, / the pret / ty birds / do sing."

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The act of discovery or interp. of the meter (q.v.) of a poem as realized in one of its lines; also the graphic transcription thereof, usually by symbols, numbers, or letters either above the line or alone. S. is a notation system for meter in metrical poetry just as sheet music notates music or writing notates speech.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In classical prosody, a metrical unit consisting of two long syllables; in the modern accentually based prosodies, a foot of two stressed syllables.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A term used for both metrical units and whole meters having the rhythm “marked—unmarked” in series. In the modern accentual meters, a trochee is a foot (q.v.) comprising a stressed syllable followed by a unstressed.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Two contiguous lines of verse that function as a metrical unit and are so marked either by (usually) rhyme or syntax or both.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A pair of metrical lines, a couplet (q.v.), heterometric in Cl. poetry but usually isometric in modern. In Cl. poetry the most common type is the elegiac d. (q.v.), consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic “pentameter” and often used for epigram.

Short, witty, and pithy saying or short poem. The poem form was common among writers of ancient Rome, including Catullus and Martial. The epigram has been used by English poets Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Alexander Pope, Irish writers Jonathan Swift and W B Yeats, and US writer Ogden Nash.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A rhyming pair of English heroic (that is, iambic pentameter) lines, most often used for epigrams, verse essays, satires, and narrative verse and the dominant form for English poetry from ca. 1640 to ca. 1790.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A stanza of eight lines. Octaves appear as isolable stanzas, such as the It. *ottava rima (rhyming abababcc) and the Fr. *ballade (ababbcbc), as well as the single octave in Fr. called the *huitain and the single ballade stanza in Eng. called the monk's tale stanza after Chaucer's usage.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Though now widely dispersed in various Western languages, largely because of the fame of Lord Byron's masterpiece Don Juan, ottava rima (or ottava toscana; Ger. stanze; Rus. oktava) originated as an Italian prosody, an octave stanza in hendecasyllables rhyming abababcc.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A stanza of 4 lines, normally rhymed. The q. is, with its many variations, the most common stanza form in European poetry, and very probably in the world. It is for the establishment, in the 3rd c. a.d., of the q. as the meter of the hymn.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The minor division or last 6 lines of a sonnet preceded by an octave. Sometimes the octave states a proposition or situation and the s. a conclusion, but no fast rules for content can be formulated.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A verse unit of 3 lines, usually rhymed, most often employed as a stanzaic form. It was first developed systematically in Italian poetry (tertian).

From The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics It. verse form consisting of interlinked tercets, in which the second line of each tercet rhymes with the first and third lines of the one following, aba bcb cdc, etc. The sequence of tercets formed in this way may be of any length and is usually brought to a conclusion by a single final line, which rhymes with the second line of the tercet preceding it, aba a.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Verse in which the first letters of each line read downwards to form a word. If the middle letters do likewise, it is a triple acrostic.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
In poetry and prose, the use, within a line or phrase, of words beginning with the same sound, as in Two tired toads trotting to Tewkesbury. It was a common device in Old English literature, and its use survives in many traditional phrases, such as dead as a doornail and pretty as a picture.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or lines.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In prosody the technical term for one form of elision, namely omission of a word-initial syllable, esp. a vowel, e.g. ’gainst for against, mid for amid, ’neath for beneath. Often the following consonant then clusters with the succeeding word, e.g. ’tis for it is, ’twere for it were.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In prosody the technical term for one form of elision, namely loss of a word-final syllable or vowel, e.g. eve or even for evening. Often the apocopated word then fuses with the one following, e.g. “th’Empyrean” for “the Empyrean,” “th’army,” etc., thereby avoiding hiatus.

From The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences
The repetition of like vowels in neighboring syllables. Rhyme and assonance usually, but not necessarily, involve stressed syllables.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
he tidiest definition of this trope dates back, it has been argued, to the Stoic grammarians: catachresis is the use of a borrowed word for something that does not have a name of its own. We speak thus of the "legs" of a table or the "foot" of a bed.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In addition to its general meaning of harmony (agreement), c. has been used interchangeably in prosody with a wide variety of terms intended to designate certain phonic echoes.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Non-alignment of (end of) metrical frame and syntactic period at line-end: the overflow into the following poetic line of a syntactic phrase (with its intonational contour) begun in the preceding line without a major juncture or pause.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The quality of having pleasant, easily pronounced, or smooth-flowing sounds, free from harshness; the pleasing effect of such sounds; the opposite of cacophony.

From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The transmutation of ideas into images, is the product of the formative power of human cognition and is realized in all the ways in which verbal, mental, perceptual, optical, and graphic images interact.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
In verse, a rhyme in which the consonant sounds are similar but not the vowel sounds.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Refers to the Eng. cover term for a variety of rhymes that occur not at the end of the line but within the line. Internal rhyme, therefore, shifts emphasis away from line endings and often away from the interplay between lines to the interplay between words.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Gr., "change of name"; Lat. denomi- natio). A trope in which one expression is substituted for another on the basis of some material, causal, or conceptual relation. Ex. container for thing contained ("I'll have a glass").

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
Derived from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘mime’ and usually translated as either ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’, mimesis is one of the oldest and most central categories for all art criticism and theory.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Figure of speech that copies natural sounds. For example, the word ‘cuckoo’ imitates the sound that the cuckoo makes. MORE

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
A portmanteau is a type of leather travelling bag for clothes which opens out flat into two parts. A ‘portmanteau word’ is thus a word made up of two others, and expressive of a combination denoted by those parts.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Study of the elements of language, especially metre, that contribute to rhythmic and acoustic effects in poetry.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Figure of speech that uses either the part to represent the whole (‘There were some new faces at the meeting’, rather than new people), or the whole to stand for the part (‘The West Indies beat England at cricket’, using the country to stand for the national teams in question).