Glossary Term of the Day

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Tone in literature is the poet’s attitude toward the poem’s speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader. Often described as a “mood” that pervades the experience of reading the poem, it is created by the poem’s vocabulary, metrical regularity...

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A motif is any central/recurring image or action in a literary work that has serves as symbolic significance. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative (or literary) aspects such as theme or mood. For example, the repeated questions of an ubi...

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A dactyl is a term used in formal English poetry to describe a trisyllablic metrical foot made up of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones. Matador, realize, cereal and limerick as well as the word poetry itself are examples of words that are...

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Gender studies is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender, sexual categories, and identity. As a discipline, gender studies borrows from other theoretical models like psychoanalysis — particularly that of Jacques Lacan — deconstruction, and feminist theory...

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The eclogue is a brief, dramatic pastoral poem, set in an idyllic rural place but discussing urban, legal, political, or social issues. Bucolics and idylls, like eclogues, are pastoral poems, but in nondramatic form. The form of the word in contemporary English...

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An ode is a formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552–442 B.C.E.) ode -- originally poetic pieces accompanied by symphonic orchestras -- was...

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Black Mountain poets -- sometimes called projectivist poets -- was a group of progressive, avant-garde or postmodern poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These poets, including Charles Olson...

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A stanza is a grouping of lines separated from others in a poem. In modern Free Verse, the stanza, like a prose paragraph, can be used to mark a shift in mood, time, or thought. In traditional English-language poems, stanzas can be identified and grouped...

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New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. Like Formalism, new criticism tended to consider texts as autonomous and “closed,” meaning that everything that is needed to understand...

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A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words “poetry” and “basketball” are both dactylic. Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is written in dactylic meter. I. Half a league, half a league, ...