Literature: Poetry
The poetry questions test prosody (meter, rhyme, stanza form), figurative language, and the ability to place a poet or poem in a period or movement.
Prosody: count the feet, then name them
An iamb is unstressed-stressed; a trochee is the reverse; an anapest is two unstressed plus a stress; a dactyl is a stress plus two unstressed. Line lengths run trimeter (three feet), tetrameter, pentameter. Iambic pentameter therefore has five iambs and ten syllables. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter (Milton's Paradise Lost, most of Shakespeare); free verse has no fixed meter. Enjambment runs the sentence past the line break; a caesura is a pause within the line.
Fixed forms
- Petrarchan sonnet: octave (abbaabba) plus sestet; the volta usually falls at line 9.
- Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains plus a closing couplet (abab cdcd efef gg); the turn often arrives in the couplet.
- Ode (Keats), elegy (Gray), dramatic monologue (Browning's "My Last Duchess"), villanelle (nineteen lines, two refrains), sestina (six repeating end-words), ballad, epic (Homer, Virgil, Milton).
Figurative language
Metaphor asserts identity; simile uses like or as; metonymy substitutes an associated thing (the crown for the monarch); synecdoche substitutes part for whole (all hands on deck); apostrophe addresses an absent person or an object; a conceit is an extended, often startling comparison, as in Donne's compass image. Alliteration, assonance, and consonance are sound repetitions.
Period markers
Metaphysical (Donne, Marvell), Romantic (Lyrical Ballads, 1798; Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley), Victorian (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold), Modernist (Eliot's The Waste Land, 1922; Pound; Stevens), Harlem Renaissance (Hughes), Confessional (Plath, Lowell).
Worked example
A described poem has fourteen lines rhyming abab cdcd efef gg and ends with a couplet that reverses the speaker's earlier stance. The rhyme scheme alone places it in the English sonnet tradition, not the Petrarchan; the reversal is the volta, and in this form it typically arrives in the final couplet rather than at line 9.
Traps
- Answering "sonnet" when the stem asks for the specific type.
- Confusing metonymy with synecdoche.
- Treating blank verse and free verse as synonyms.
- Assuming a first-person poem speaks for the poet.