Glossary of Poetic Terms
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Gender studies
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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 in an attempt to examine the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity as they relate to class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Like gender studies, queer theory also questions normative definitions of gender and sexuality. As approaches to literary texts, gender studies and queer theory tend to emphasize the power of representation and linguistic indeterminacy.
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Genre
- A class or category of texts with similarities in form, style, or subject matter. The definition of a genre changes over time, and a text often interacts with multiple genres. A text’s relationship to a particular genre—whether it defies or supports a genre’s set of expectations—is often of interest when conducting literary analysis. Four major genres of literature include poetry, drama, nonfiction, and fiction. Poetry can be divided into further genres, such as epic, lyric, narrative, satirical, or prose poetry. For more examples of genres, browse poems by type.
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Georgianism
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A poetic movement in England during the reign of George V (1910–1936), promoted in the anthology series Georgian Poetry. Its ranks included Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, and D.H. Lawrence. The aesthetic principles of Georgianism included a respect for formalism as well as bucolic and romantic subject matter. The devastation of World War I, along with the rise of modernism, signaled the retreat of Georgianism as an influential school of poetry. Browse more Georgian poets.
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Georgic
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A poem or book dealing with agriculture or rural topics, which commonly glorifies outdoor labor and simple country life. Often takes the form of a didactic or instructive poem intended to give instructions related to a skill or art. The Roman poet Virgil famously wrote a collection of poems entitled Georgics, which has influenced poets since. Read a translated excerpt from Virgil's Georgics Book III or Book IV.
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Ghazal
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(Pronounciation: “guzzle”) Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poet’s. In the Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. English-language poets who have composed in the form include Adrienne Rich, John Hollander, and Agha Shahid Ali; see Ali’s “Tonight” and Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal.”
Browse more ghazal poems. -
Glosa
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The glosa is a poetic form with Spanish origins from the 15th century. A glosa typically consists of four ten-line stanzas each with ten syllables per line. The form also contains a borrowed excerpt from another writer. The borrowed quatrain, known as the cabeza, or “head,” is presented at the beginning of the poem. Following this, each stanza expands upon one line of the cabeza while adhering to the rhyme scheme of ABBAACCDDC. As an example, see Kathleen Ossip’s “Glosa in Middle Age,” which features four lines by the Flamin’ Groovies.
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Gnomic verse
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Poems laced with proverbs, aphorisms, or maxims. The term was first applied to Greek poets in the 6th century BCE and was practiced in medieval Germany and England. See excerpts from the Exeter Book. Robert Creeley explored the genre in his contemporary “Gnomic Verses.”
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Golden shovel
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Created by poet Terrance Hayes, this poetic form was designed to allow poets to pay tribute to existing work by poets they admire. A golden shovel borrows a line from the existing poem and uses each word from that line as the last word of each line in a new poem.
The first golden shovel Hayes created, “The Golden Shovel,” borrows its lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” Hayes originally published his poem in Poetry and later in his collection Lighthead, which won the National Book Award in 2010. The bolded words in this excerpt from “Golden Shovel” were borrowed from Brooks:
When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we …
A special Poetry folio in 2017 gathered golden shovels by various poets. In 2017, poet-teachers Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith compiled and edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, which was published by the University of Arkansas Press.
Other poets who have experimented with and embraced this poetic form include Raymond Antrobus, John Burnside, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Inua Ellams, Nikki Giovanni, Nikki Grimes, Langston Kerman, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Nick Makoha, Andrew Motion, Jacob Polley, Don Share, and George Szirtes.
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