Glossary of Poetic Terms

T.S. Eliot used this phrase to describe “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader (“Hamlet,” 1919). There must be a positive connection between the emotion the poet is trying to express and the object, image, or situation in the poem that helps to convey that emotion to the reader. Eliot thus determined that Shakespeare’s play Hamlet was an “artistic failure” because Hamlet’s intense emotions overwhelmed the author’s attempts to express them through an objective correlative. In other words, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was unable to provoke the audience to feel as Prince Hamlet did through images, actions, and characters, and instead only inadequately described his emotional state through the play’s dialogue. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative is closely related to the Imagist movement.

The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 and developed from his reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925). Williams described Objectivism as looking at a poem “with a special eye to its structural aspect, how it has been constructed.”

See the related term Objectivist poets.

Note: The term Objectivism is also used to describe a philosophical system developed by author Ayn Rand. While they share a name, these two movements are unrelated to each other.

The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 and developed from his reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925). Williams described Objectivism as looking at a poem “with a special eye to its structural aspect, how it has been constructed.” The Objectivist poets were a loosely affiliated group of Modernist American poets who were interested in these concepts and were writing in the 1930s and ’40s.

Harriet Monroe famously solicited an edition of Objectivist work for Poetry guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky, who expanded the term and attempted to articulate its principles in the February 1931 issue. Zukofsky noted that the Objectivist poets were imagists rather than symbolists, and they were concerned with creating a poetic structure that could be perceived as a whole, rather than a series of imprecise but evocative images. He included Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting in the issue. The poet Lorine Niedecker later became closely associated with the movement. 

Some critics and scholars believe that the Objectivist poets did not see themselves as a coherent “movement,” but rather as a group of poets with some shared interests and ideas about poetry, art, and politics. Zukofsky claimed in Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (Wesleyan University Press, 1967) that they only used the term Objectivism because Monroe insisted they have a name for their movement in the issue of Poetry. Regardless, not only was the movement tremendously influential on American and British poetry, but that issue of Poetry magazine served as a blueprint for other movements.

Although the movement was short-lived and did not receive much critical attention in the 1940s and ’50s, groups of younger poets in the United States and England “rediscovered” the Objectivist poets in the 1960s. Objectivist poets would influence The San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s, the Beat poets, Language Poetry, the Black Mountain poets, and the British Poetry Revival, among others. 

For more on Objectivism, read Peter O’Leary’s feature, “The Energies of Words”. Browse Objectivist poets.

An eight-line stanza or poem. See ottava rima and triolet. The first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet are also called an octave.

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 was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. (See Stephen Burt’s article “And the Winner Is . . . Pindar!”) English odes written in the Pindaric tradition include Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode” and William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood.” Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65–8 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner; see Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. See Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Sapphics.”

The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,”) or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn”). Browse more odes.

Old English poetry dates from the 5th to the 11th centuries and embodies the earliest form of English literature. Works from this era reflect the history, belief systems, and heroic ideals of early Germanic societies. This period of literature is characterized by a distinct linguistic and metrical pattern that typically uses a four-stress line, alliterative verse, and complex kennings (compound expressions used as metaphors, such as “whale-road” to refer to the sea). 

Examples of Old English include “Beowulf,” “The Wanderer,” and works by the poet Cynewulf.

Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech in which a word imitates the sound associated with an action or an object, effectively mimicking the sound it describes. Some examples of onomatopoeia are “buzz,” “whack,” “clang,” and “cock-a-doodle-doo.” This literary device is used in poetry to create an auditory effect that mirrors the thing being described, which makes the description more vivid. See “Piano” by D. H. Lawrence as an example.

Originally an Italian stanza of eight 11-syllable lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABABABCC. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form in English, and Lord Byron adapted it to a 10-syllable line for his mock-epic Don Juan. W.B. Yeats used it for “Among School Children” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Browse more ottava rima poems.

Overstatement (see hyperbole) is a figure of speech that involves exaggerating certain aspects of something to create a more noticeable effect or to emphasize a point. Overstatement is not meant to be taken literally, but is used to convey strong feelings or to create a strong impression. An example of overstatement is: “They stretched in never-ending line…” in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth. 

A figure of speech that brings together contradictory words for effect, such as “jumbo shrimp” and “deafening silence.” For instance, John Milton describes Hell as “darkness visible” in Book I of Paradise Lost.