Reference
Sonnet | Definition
September 26, 2026
Sonnet is a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. Just as the ballad gives the poet an opportunity to tell a story briefly...
Italian Sonnet | Definition
September 26, 2026
The Italian poet Petrarch was the pioneer in this direction. The Petrarchan sonnet was a very strict and almost rigid form. Petrarch wrote a series of love poems about an imaginary lady, in a fixed...
English Sonnet | Definition
September 26, 2026
Shakespeare changed the rhyming scheme to abab; cdcd; efef; gg. He used the iambic pentameter. He used three quatrains and a couplet. The concluding couplet is usually an unusual twist given to the argument of...
Satire | Definition
September 26, 2026
Satire is a literary art that uses irony, wit and sometimes sarcasm evoking laughter as a powerful weapon against the vices and follies of the humanity for the purpose of reformation through ridicule. Although satire...
Mock Epic | Definition
September 26, 2026
A type of high burlesque, the mock epic is a lengthy poem written in the lofty and exalted style of the epic but that deals with an utterly trivial subject. Mock epics are not generally...
Rhyme | Definition
September 26, 2026
Rhyme is the repetition of the same unit of sound in a poem, usually at the ends of the lines. Very often people think of poetry as something that rhymes. Poetry with no rhyme, but...
Romantic Poetry | Definition
September 26, 2026
It is generally supposed that the English Romantic Movement began in 1798 with the publication of the “Lyrical Ballads” but it is not a sudden outburst but the result of long and gradual growth and...
Neoclassical Poetry | Definition
September 26, 2026
Neoclassicism as a label is applied to a period of English literature lasting from 1660, the Restoration of Charles II, till about 1800. This period is also designated as the ages of Dryden, Pope and...
Victorian Poetry | Definition
September 26, 2026
The word Victorian suggests a few features of the literature (and poetry) of the nineteenth century. In poetry and literature, it carries the suggestion of pessimistic subject, elegiac tone, lyrical expression, musical poetry, description of...
Modernist Poetry | Definition
September 26, 2026
The word ‘modern’ and even ‘modernism’ are very vague terms whose precise meanings are hard to pin down. In literary criticism, the ‘trend’ called modernism is associated with several features seen in the literature of...
