Lineation Flashcards
alliterative revival
a handy but inaccurate term for the mid–late fourteenthcentury work of (especially) Langland and the Gawain-poet, distinguished from the ‘London School’ by alliterating hemistiches derived from OE verse and notably public political concerns.
antiphonal
: ‘sounded against’, a/line/s responding to an/other/s ; originally exactly that, choric call-and-response within the liturgy, but by extension (i) a mode (composed or imposed) of verse-lines which creates or displays a bipolar vpattern (not a simple sequence, as in blank verse), & (ii) a quality of voice associated with such lines as protesting or refusing a dominant or demanding position.
area
a term promoted in American poetics by W. C. Williams to refute an implicitly narrow, unyielding, hidebound, and rigidly sequential quality associated with neoclassicism ; lines, poems, poetic practices, and poets’ lives may all be recharacterised as areas rather than progressions.
caesura
the medial pause/s in a line ; if there is no punctuation it will tend
not to occur in lines shorter than a tetrameter, and to occur approximately centrally in tetrametric or longer lines ; it may be forced towards the beginning
or the end of a line by punctuation.
end-stopped
of a line or stanza, having a terminal mark of punctuation
enjambment
of lines, couplets, or stanzas, not end-stopped, with sense and/or syntax continuing into the next line, couplet, or stanza.
hemistich
a half-line, used in pairs typically bound by alliteration and/or
rhythm ; verse in such lines is hemistichic.
Imagists
a school of poetry in the 1910s–1920s, advocating poetry written in
short lines each containing a clear image ; Pound & H.D. were leading members.
lineation
the organization of a poem into lines.
line-break
the turn of one line into the next, notated as ‘/’
oral-formulaism
a mode of bardic composition in pre- or early literate cultures
in which a large stock of hemistiches are learned, and variously combined
(according to various rules) in performance.
prong, pronged-line
my coinage for a line longer than a normative measure ; the opposite of a bob.
prose-poem
one written and printed as prose, without the use of line-breaks
and often with a justified right margin.
rocking lineation
the effect of counterpoint (cæsura-to-cæsura) lines created
by placing cæsurae in the same position in two or more successive lines.
stanza-break
the physical (and syntactical) space (and pause) between stanzas, marked in transcription with a double slash, ‘//’.
