Poetry Genres Flashcards
Ballad
A word that has changed in meaning. Now it signifies an emotive song that usually involves large production and projection. In the literary world, to folklorists a ‘ballad’ is a song that tells a story, whereas to poets the ballad verse-form is a simple AB,AB, rhyme structure with simple rhythms. It was associated with oral culture and carried little cultural prestige.
Classical, or Neo-classical
Movements that believe all writing or art should imitate precedents and genres created by the writers or artists of the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome. In Britain the late 17th to early 18th century from Dryden to Johnson and Pope was dominated by this belief.
Effusion
A word meaning a spontaneous expression. It was a concept valued by the Romantic poets.
Elegy
A poem lamenting a dead person or persons. The term elegiac meaning ‘mournful’ or conveying loss’ derives from this genre.
Epic
A long poem concerned with large events of conflict. An epic is frequently seen as displaying and testing the values of the civilisation that produced it. Consequently it has high cultural prestige.
Epithalamium
A poem celebrating a wedding.
Mock-epic
A poem employing the devices of an epic to create a parody of the epic’s grandeur.
Ode
A lyric address, originally sung to music.
Pastoral
An idealised depiction of rural life, sometimes set in ‘Arcadia’; an Eden-like land. A concept strongly active in the visual arts as well.
Romantic
An almost impossible to define word, applied to movements from the late 18th century onwards who valued feelings above thought and originality above derivation.
Sonnet
Generally refers to a 14 line poem with a strict rhyme scheme. Petrarchan sonnets usually have the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, and either c-d-e-c-d-e, c-d-c-c-d-c, or c-d-c-d-c-d. Shakespearean sonnets end with a couplet: a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.
Lyric
Most narrowly ‘lyric’ refers to words designed to be sung; more generally a ‘lyric poem’ can be one in which the song-like characteristics of poetry predominate.
