ode: In its traditional application, “ode” denotes a long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment,

elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure. Norman Maclean said that the term now calls to mind a
lyric which is “massive, public in its proclamations, and Pindaric in its classical prototype” (“From Action to
Image,” in Critic and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane, 1952). The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar,
whose odes were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama. His complex stanzas were patterned in
sets of three: moving in a dance rhythm to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the
antistrophe; then, standing still, the epode.
The regular or Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of Pindar’s form, with all the strophes and antistrophes
written in one stanza pattern, and all the epodes in another. This form was introduced into England by Ben
Jonson’s ode “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Mary and Sir H. Morison”
(1629); the typical construction can beconveniently studied in this poem or in Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of
Poesy” (1757).
The irregular ode, also called the Cowleyan Ode, was introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitated
the Pindaric style and matter but disregarded the recurrent stanzaic pattern in each strophic triad; instead, he
allowed each stanza to establish its own pattern of varying line lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme. This
type of irregular stanzaic structure, which is free to alter in accordance with shifts in subject and mood, has been
the most common for the English ode ever since; Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) is
representative.
Pindar’s odes were encomiastic; that is, they were written to praise and glorify someone—in the instance of Pindar,
the ode celebrated a victorious athlete in the Olympic games. (See epideictic, under rhetoric.) The earlier English
odes, and many later ones, were also written to eulogize something, such as a person john Dryden’s “Anne
Killigrew”), or the arts of music or poetry (Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”), or a time of day (Collins’ “Ode to Evening”),
or abstract concepts (Gray’s “Hymn to Adversity” and Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty”). Romantic poets perfected the
personal ode of description and passionate meditation, which is stimulated by (and sometimes at its close reverts to) an
aspect of the outer scene and tums on the attempt to solve either a personal emotional problem or a generally human one
(Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”). More recent
examples of this latter type are Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at
Key West.” (See descriptive-meditative lyric, in the entry topographical poetry.)
The Horatian ode was originally modeled on the matter, tone, and form of the odes of the Roman Horace. In
contrast to the passion, visionary bold- ness, and formal language of Pindar’s odes, many Horatian odes are calm,
meditative, and colloquial; they are also usually homostrophic (that is, writ- ten in a single repeated stanza form)
and shorter than the Pindaric ode. Examples are Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”
(1650) and Keats’ ode “To Autumn” (1820)
See G. N. Shuster, The Englich Ode from Milton to Keats (1940, reprinted 1964); Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Eine: A
History' of the Ode (196 ee the discussion of the odes of Pindar and Horace in chapter 2); John Heath-Stubbs, The Ode
(1969); Paul H. Fry, The poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980).

onomatopoeia:
“Onomatopoeia,” sometimes called echoism, is used both in a narrow and in a broad sense.
1. In the narrow and most common use, onomatopoeia designates a word, or
a combination of words, whose sound seems to duplicate the sound it
denotes: “hiss,” “buzz,” “rattle,” “bang.”
Two lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Come Down, O Maid” (1847)
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And
murmuring of innumerable bees.
The American critic John Crowe Ransom remarked that by making only two
changes in the speech sounds of the last line, we lose the echoic effect because
we change the meaning drastically: “And murdering of innumerable beeves.”
Robert Browning liked to represent squishy and scratchy sounds, as
in “Meeting at Night” (1845):
As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And
quench its speed i’ the slushy sand. A tap at the
pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a
lighted match....
Alexander Pope recommends extended verbal mimicry in his Essay on
Criticism (1711) when he says that “the sound should seem an echo of the
sense,”

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’ unbending com, and skims along the main.

paradox: A “paradox” is a statement that seems on its face to be logically contradictory or

absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes sense.
An instance is the conclusion to John Donne’s sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
The paradox is used occasionally by almost all poets but was a persistent and central device in seventeenth-century
metaphysical poetry, in both its religious and secular forms.
Donne, who wrote a prose collection titled Problems and Paradoxes, exploited
the figure constantly in his poetry. “The Canonization,” for example, is organized
as an paradoxes,
Paradox is also a frequent com- ponent in verbal wit
If the paradoxical utterance conjoins two terms that in ordinary usage are contraries, it is
called an oxymoron
an example is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “O Death in life, the days that are no
more.”
The oxymoron was a familiar type of Petrarchan conceit in Elizabethan love
poetry, in phrases like “pleasing pains,” “I bum and freeze,” “loving hate.” It is
also a frequent figure in devotional prose and religious poetry as a way of
expressing the Christian mysteries, which transcend human sense and logic. So
John Milton describes the appearance of God, in Paradise Lost (III, 380):
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.
It is in this expanded sense that Cleanth Brooks is able to claim, with some
plausibility, that “the language of poetry is the language of paradox,” in The Well
Wrought km (1947).
deconstruction for the claim that all uses of language disseminate themselves into
the unresolvable paradox called an aporia.

elegy: In Greek and Roman times, “elegy” denoted any poem written in elegiac meter
(alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). The term was also used, how- ever, to
refer to the subject matter of change and loss frequently expressed in the elegiac verse
form, especially in complaints about love. In accordance with this latter usage, “The
Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and other poems in Old English on the transience of all
worldly things are even now called elegies. In Europe and England, the word
continued to have a variable application through the

Renaissance. John Donne’s elegies, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, are love poems,
although they relate to the sense of elegy as lament, in that many of them emphasize mutability and loss. In the
seventeenth century, the term elegy began to be limited to its most common present usage: a formal and sustained
lament in verse for the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation. Examples are the medieval poem
heart and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (elegies in the mode of dream allegory),- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In
Memoriam (1850), on the death of Arthur Hallam; and
W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1940). Occasionally the term is used in its older and broader sense,
for somber meditations on mortality such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1757), and
the Duino Elegies (1912-22) of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on the transience both of poets and of the
earthly objects they write poems about.
The dirge is also a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a particular person’s death but differs from the
elegy in that it is short, is less formal, and is usually represented as a text to be sung; examples are Shakespeare’s
“Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies” and William Collins’ “A Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline” (1749). Threnody
is now used mainly as an equivalent for “dirge,” and monody for an elegy or dirge, which is presented as the
utterance of a single person. John Milton describes his “Lycidas” (1638) in the subtitle as a “monody” in which
“the Author bewails a learned Friend,” and Matthew Arnold called his elegy on A. H. Clough “Thyrsis: A
Monody” (1866).
An important subtype is the pastoral elegy, which represents both the poet and the one he mourns—who is usually
also a poet—as shepherds (the Latin word for shepherd is “pastor”). This poetic form was originated by the Sicilian
Greek poet Theocritus, was continued by the Roman Virgil, was developed in various European countries during
the Renaissance, and remained current in English poetry through the nineteenth century. Notable English pastoral
elegies are Spenser’s “Astrophel,” on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1595); Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638); Shelley’s
“Adonais” (1821); and in the Victorian age, Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” The pastoral elegists, from the Greeks through the
Renaissance, developed a set of elaborate conventions, which are illustrated here by reference to “Lycidas.” In addition
to the fictional representation of both mourner and subject as shepherds tending their flocks (lines 23-36 and
elsewhere), we often find the following conventional features:
1 The lyric speaker begins by invoking the muses and goes on to make frequent reference to other figures from
classical mythology (lines 15-22, and later).
2 All nature joins in mourning the shepherd’s death dines 37—49). (Critics who
stress the mythic and ritual origins of poetic genres claim that this feature is a
survival from primitive laments for the death of Thammuz, Adonis, or other
vegetational deities who died in the autumn to be reborn in the spring.
See myth critics.)
3 The mourner charges with negligence the nymphs or other guardians of the
dead shepherd dines 50-63).

4. There is a procession of appropriate mourners (lines 88-111).

5. The poet raises questions about the justice of fate, or else of Providence, and
adverts to the corrupt conditions of his own times (lines 64—84, 113— 31).
Such passages, though sometimes called “digressions,” are integral to the
evolution of the mourner’s thought in “Lycidas.”
6. Post-Renaissance elegies often include an elaborate passage in which
appropriate flowers are brought to deck the hearse (lines 133-51).
7. There is a closing consolation. In Christian elegies, the lyric reversal from
grief and despair to joy and assurance typically occurs when the elegist
comes to realize that death in this world is the entry to a higher life (lines 165
—85).
In his “Life of Milton” (1779), Samuel Johnson, who disapproved both of pastoralism
and mythology in modem poetry, decried “Lycidas” for “its inherent improbability,”
but in the elegies by Milton and other major poets the ancient rituals provide a
structural frame on which they play variations with originality and power. Some of the
pastoral conventions, although adapted to an industrial age and a non-Christian
worldview, survive still in Walt Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard B1oom’d” (1866).
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a strong revival of the elegy,
especially in America, to mourn the devastation and death wrought by AIDS among
talented young intellectuals, poets, and artists; see Michael Klein, ed., Poets for Life: Sevent
y-six Poets Respond to AIDS (1989)

See conventions and pastoral. On the elegy,

refer to T. P. Harrison, Jr., and
H. J. Leon, eds.,
The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (1939);
Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1985).
On “Lycidas”:
C. A. Patrides, ed.,
Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem (rev. 1983), which includes a
number of recent critical essays; and Scott Elledge, ed., Milton’s “Lycidas” (1966),
which reprints classical and Renaissance pastoral elegies and other texts as
background to Milton’s poem. For both traditional and modern forms of elegy,
see the introductory materials and the poems re- printed in Sandra M. Gilbert, ed.,
Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (2001); and for a wide range of analyses
and critical discussion, refer to The Oxford Companion to the Elegy (2010).

ballad: A short definition of the popular ballad (also called the folk ballad or traditional ballad) is that it is a song,
transmitted orally, which tells a story. Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are
communicated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people. In all probability the initial version of a ballad was
composed by a single author, but he or she is unknown; and since each singer who learns and repeats an oral ballad is apt
to introduce changes in both the text and the tune, it exists in many variant forms. Typically, the popular ballad is
dramatic, condensed, and impersonal: the narrator begins with the climactic episode, tells the story tersely in action and
dialogue (sometimes by means of dialogue alone), and tells it without self-reference or the expression of personal
attitudes or feelings.
The most common stanza form—called the ballad stanza—is a quatrain in
alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second and fourth lines
rhyme. This is the form of “Sir Patrick Spens”; the first stanza also exemplifies the
abrupt opening of the typical ballad and the manner of proceeding by third-
person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition, and spare
dialogue:
The king sits in Dumferling towne, Dririking the
blude-red wine:
“O whar will I get a guid sailor, To sail
this schip of mine?”
Many ballads employ set formulas (which helped the singer remember the course
of the song) including (1) stock descriptive phrases like “blood-red wine” and
“milk-white steed,” (2) a refrain in each stanza (“Edward,” “Lord Randall”), and
(3) incremental repetition, in which a line or stanza is repeated, but with an
addition that advances the story (“Lord Randall,” “Child Waters”). See oral
poetry.
Although many traditional ballads probably originated in the later Middle
Ages, they were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century, first in
England, then in Germany. In 1765, Thomas Percy published his Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry, which, although most of the contents had been revised in
the style of Percy’s era, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk
literature. The basic modem collection is Francis J. Child’s English arid Scottish
Popular Ballads (1882-98), which includes 305 ballads, many of them in variant
versions. Bertrand H. Bronson has edited The Traditional Tones of the Child
Ballads (4 vols., 1959—72). Popular ballads are still being sung in the British Isles
and in remote rural areas of the United States. To the songs that early settlers
brought with them from Great Britain, America has added native forms of the
ballad, such as those sung by lumberjacks, cowboys, laborers, and social
protesters. A number of twentieth-century folk singers, including Woody Guthrie,
Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Simon and Garfunkel, adapted or even composed
ballads; most of these, however, such as “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”
(about a notorious gangster and his moll), are closer to the journalistic “broadside
ballad” than to the archaic and heroic mode of the popular ballads in the Child
collection.
A broadside ballad is a ballad that was printed on one side of a single sheet
(called a “broadside”), dealt with a current event or person or issue, and was sung
to a well-known tune. Beginning with the sixteenth century, these broadsides were
hawked in the streets or at country fairs in Great Britain.
The traditional ballad has greatly influenced the form and style of lyric poetry in
general. It has also engendered the literary ballad, which is a narrative poem written
in deliberate imitation of the form, language, and spirit of the traditional ballad. In
Germany, some major literary ballads were composed in the latter eighteenth century,
including G. A. Bürger’s very popular “Lenore” (1774)—which soon became widely
read and influential in an English translation—and Goethe’s “Erikönig” (1782). In
England, some of the best literary ballads were composed in the Romantic Period:
Coleridge’s “Rinne of the Ancient Mariner” (which, how- ever, is much longer and
has a much more elaborate plot than the folk ballad), Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie,”
and Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” In his Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Wordsworth
begins “We Are Seven” by introducing a narrator as an agent and first-person teller of
the story—“I met a little cottage girl”—which is probably one reason he called the
collection “lyrical ballads.” Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” on the other hand, of
which the first version also appeared in Lyrical Ballads, opens with the abrupt and
impersonal third- person narration of the traditional ballad:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three. . ..
See John A. and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934);
W. J. Entwistle, European Balladry (rev. ed., 1951); M. J. C. Hodgart, The
Ballads (2nd ed., 1962); D. C. Fowler, A literary History of the Popular Ballad
(1968). For the broadside ballad see The Common Muse, eds. V. de Sola Pinto and
Allan E. Rodway (1957).

sonnet: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter

lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. (Refer to meter and rhyme.) There are
two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language:
1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century Italian
poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming
a6saa6sa followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such
as cdccdc. Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, in both their
stanza form and their standard subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring
male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century. (See
Petrarchan conceit.) The Petrarchan form was later used, for a great variety of
subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti,
D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier
in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by
introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of the octave.
2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth cen- tury
also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the
Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into
three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was a
notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to
the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
John Donne shifted from the hitherto primary subject, sexual love, to a variety
of religious themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century;
and Milton, in the latter part of that century, expanded the range of the sonnet to
other matters of serious concern. Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic
Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the present day and includes
among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth,
Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
and in the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The stanza
is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric development, yet so short, and
so exigent in its rhymes, as to pose a standing

challenge to the ingenuity and artistry of the poet. The rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan
sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of a problem, situation, or incident in
the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar
division of material but often presents instead a repetition-with-variation of a statement
in each of the three quatrains; in either case, the final couplet in the English sonnet
usually imposes an epigrammatic mm at the end. In Drayton’s fine Elizabethan
sonnet in the English form “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” the
lover brusquely declares in the first quatrain, then reiterates in the second, that he is
glad that the affair is cleanly ended, then hesitates at the finality of the parting in
the third quatrain, and in the concluding couplet suddenly drops his swagger to
make one last plea. Here are the third quatrain and couplet:
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath, When, his
pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When faith is
kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is
closing up his eyes;
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From
death to life thou mightst him yet recover.
Following Petrarch’s early example, a number of Elizabethan authors arranged
their poems into sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets
are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relation- ship between lovers,
or else by indicating a development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of
implicit plot. Shakespeare ordered his sonnets in a sequence, as did Sidney in
Astrophel and Stella (1580) and Spenser in Amoretti (1595). Later examples of the
sonnet sequence on various subjects are Wordsworth’s The River Duddon, D. G.
Rossetti’s House of Life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese,
and the American poet William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives. Dylan Thomas’ Altanuise
by C vl-light (1936) is a sequence of ten sonnets that are abstruse meditations on the
poet’s own life. George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), which concerns a bitterly
unhappy marriage, is sometimes called a sonnet sequence, even though its component
poems consist not of fourteen but of six- teen lines.
On the early history of the sonnet and its development in England through Milton,
see Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (1992).
See also Michael R. G. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of the Strategies (1997);
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997); Stephen Burt and David
Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (2010).
.
epic: In its strict sense, the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets
at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told
in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine
figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the instance of
John Milton’s paradise Lost) the human race.
There is a standard distinction between traditional and literary epics. “Traditional
epics” (also called “folk epics” or “primary epics”) were written versions of what had
originally been oral poems about a tribal or national hero during a warlike age. (See
oral poetry.) Among these are the Iliad and Odyssey that the Greeks ascribed to
Homer; the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the French Chanson de Poland and the Spanish
Poema del Cid in the twelfth century; and the thirteenth- century German epic
Nibelungenlied. “Literary epics” were composed by individual poetic craftsmen in
deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Of this kind

is Virgil’s Latin poem the Aeneid, which later served as the chief model for Milton’s
literary epic Paradise Lost (1667). Paradise Lost in turn became, in the Romantic
Period, a model for John Keats’ fragmentary epic Hyperion, as well as for William
Blake’s several epics, or “prophetic books” (The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem), which
translated into Blake’s own mythic terms the biblical narrative that had been Milton’s
subject.
The epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy and by many
Renaissance critics as the highest of all genres. The literary epic is certainly the
most ambitious of poetic enterprises, making immense demands on a poet’s
knowledge, invention, and skill to sustain the scope, grandeur, and authority of
a poem that tends to encompass the world of its day and a large portion of its
learning. Despite numerous attempts in many languages over nearly 3,000 years,
we possess no more than a half-dozen such poems of indubitable great- ness.
Literary epics are highly conventional compositions which usually share the
following features, derived by way of the Aeneid from the traditional epics of
Homer:
1. The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance. In the mad,
he is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of the sea nymph Thetis;
Virgil’s Aeneas is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. In Paradise Lost, Adam
and Eve are the progenitors of the entire human race, or if we regard Christ
as the protagonist, He is both God and man. Blake’s primal figure is “the
Universal Man” Albion, who incorporates, before his fall, humanity and
God and the cosmos as well.
2. The setting of the poem is ample in scale and may be worldwide or even
larger. Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin (the whole of the
world known at the time), and in Book XI he descends into the under- world
(as does Virgil’s Aeneas). The scope of Paradise Lost is the entire universe,
for it takes place in heaven, on earth, in hell, and in the cosmic space between.
(See Ptolemaic universe.)
3. The action involves extraordinary deeds in battle, such as Achilles’ feats in the
Trojan War, or a long, arduous, and dangerous journey intrepidly
accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to his
homeland in the face of opposition by some of the gods. Paradise Lost
includes the revolt in heaven by the rebel angels against God, the journey of
Satan through chaos to discover the newly created world, and his desperately
audacious attempt to outwit God by corrupting mankind, in which his
success is ultimately frustrated by the sacrificial action of Christ.
4. In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest
or an active part—the Olympian gods in Homer, and Jehovah, Christ, and the
angels in Paradise Lost. These supernatural agents were in the Neoclassic Age
called the machinery, in the sense that they were part of the literary
contrivances of the epic.
5. An epic poem is a ceremonial performance and is narrated in a ceremonial
style, which is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech and

proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject and

architecture. Hence Milton’s grand style his formal diction and elabo- rate,
stylized syntax, which are in large part modeled on Latin poetry, his sonorous
lists of names and wide-ranging allusions, and his imitation of Homer’s epic
similes and epithets.
There are also widely used epic conventions, or formulas, in the choice and
ordering of episodes; prominent among them are these features, as exemplified
in Paradise Lost:
1. The narrator begins by stating that his argument, or epic theme, invokes a
muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in his great undertaking, then addresses
to the muse the epic question, the answer to which inaugurates the
narrative proper (Paradise Lost, I. 1-49).
2. The narrative starts in medias res (“in the middle of things”), at a critical point
in the action. Paradise Lost opens with the fallen angels in hell, gathering their
scattered forces and determining on revenge. Not until Books V—VII does the
angel Raphael narrate to Adam the events in heaven which led to this
situation; while in Books XI—XII, after the fall, Michael foretells to Adam
fixture events up to Christ’s second coming. Thus Milton’s epic, although its
action focuses on the temptation and fall of man, encompasses all time from
the creation to the end of the world.
3. There are catalogues of some of the principal characters, introduced in formal
detail, as in Milton’s description of the procession of fallen angels in Book I
of Paradise Lost. These characters are often given set speeches that reveal
their diverse temperaments and moral attitudes; an example is the debate in
Pandemonium, Book II.
The term “epic” is often applied, by extension, to narratives which differ in
many respects from this model but manifest the epic spirit and grandeur in the
scale, the scope, and the profound human importance of their subjects. In this
broad sense, Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Corned y and Edmund Spenser’s
late sixteenth-century The Faerie Queene (1590—96) are often called epics, as are
conspicuously large-scale and wide-ranging works of prose fiction such as
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Leo Tolstoy’s WAR AND Peace (1869),
and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); this last work achieves epic scope in
representing the events of an ordinary day in Dublin (16 June 1904) by modeling
them on the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. In a still more extended application, the
Marxist critic Georg Lukacs used the term bourgeois epic for all novels,
which, in his view, reflect the social reality of their capitalist age on a broad
scale. In a famed sentence, Lukacs said that “the novel is the epic of a world that
has been abandoned by God” (Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, 1971).
See Lukacs under Marxist criticism.
See mock epic, and refer to W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (1928);
C. S. Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942); C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to
Milton (1945), and Heroic Poetry (1952); Brian Wilkie, Romantic Foets and Epic
Tradition (1965); Paul Merchant, The Epic (1971); Michael Murrin,

The Allegorical Epic (1980); David Quint, Epic and Empire (1993). In Epic: Britain’s
Heroic Muse, J 790— J9J 0 (2008), Herbert F. Tucker reveals how very widely the
epic form continued to be composed long after it was held to have been displaced by
the prose novel. For an archetypal conception of the epic, see Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism (1957), pp. 315-26. For references to epic in other entries, see
pages 41, 149, 160, 161. See also heroic drama.

Gothic novel: The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early Germanic
tribe, then came to signify “germanic,” then “medieval.” “Gothic architecture”
now denotes the medieval form of architecture, characterized by the use of the
high pointed arch and vault, flying buttresses, and intricate recesses, which spread
through western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
The Gothic novel, or in an alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose
fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A gothic
Story (1764)—the subtitle denotes its setting in the Middle Ages—and flourished
through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Wal- pole’s example
by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country,
especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with
dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the
sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made
bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and
supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural
explanations). The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by
exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as
period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the
perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the
civilized mind. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)—
the setting of which is both medieval and Oriental and the subject both erotic and
sadistic; Ann Radcliffe’s 77ie Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and other highly successful
romances; and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796), which exploited, with
considerable literary skill, the shock effects of a narrative involving rape, incest,
murder, and diabolism. Jane Austen made good-humored fun of the more decorous
instances of the Gothic vogue in Northanger Abbey (written 1798, published 1818).
The term “Gothic” has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks
the exotic setting of the earlier romances but develops a brooding atmosphere of
gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or
melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. In
this extended sense, the term “Gothic” has been applied to William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s remarkable and influential

Frankenstein (1818), and the novels and tales of terror by the German E. T. A.
Hoffmann. Still more loosely, “Gothic” has been used to describe elements of the
macabre and terrifying that are included in such later works as Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane EAre, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
(for example, chapters 11, 16, and 47) and Great Expectations (the Miss Havisham
episodes). Critics have also drawn attention to the many women writers of Gothic
fiction, and have explained features of the mode as the result of the suppression
of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a
male-dominated culture. See feminist criticism and refer to Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, The Madwomen in the Attic (1979), and Juliann
E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (1983).
America, especially the American South, has been fertile in Gothic fiction in
the extended sense, from the novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) and
the terror tales of Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Absalom,
Absalom! and some of the fiction of Truman Capote. The nightmarish realm of
uncanny terror, violence, and cruelty opened by the Gothic novel continued to be
explored in novels such as Daphne du Maurier’s popular Rebecca (1938) and Iris
Murdoch’s The Unicorn; it is also exploited by authors of horror fiction such as H.
P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and by the writers and directors of innumerable
horror movies.
See G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism
(1974); Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the light (1990); Anne Williams, Art of
Darkness (1995); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic
Fiction from 1765 to the Present (1979; 2nd ed., 1996); Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd
Smith, eds., Modem Gothic: A Reader (1996); E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds.,
Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, J 700— J 820 (2000). On “American Gothic”—and
especially the “southern Gothic”—see Chester
E. Eisinger, “The Gothic Spirit in the Sorties,” Fiction iit f/ie Forties (1963). See
thriller, in the entry detective story.

allegory: An “allegory” is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents

and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to
make coherent sense on the “literal,” or primary, level of signification and at the
same time to communicate a second, correlated order of signification.
We can distinguish two main types: (1) Historical and political allegory, in
which the characters and actions that are signified literally in their turn rep- resent, or
“allegorize,” historical personages and events. So in John Dryden’s Absalom and
Achitophel (1681), the biblical King David represents Charles II of England, Absalom
represents his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the biblical story of Absalom’s
rebellion against his father (2 Samuel 13-18) alle- gorizes the rebellion of Monmouth
against King Charles. (2) The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters
represent concepts and the plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis. Both types
of allegory may either be sustained throughout a work, as in Absalom and Achitophel
and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s progress (1678), or else serve merely as an
episode in a nonallegorical

work. A famed example of episodic allegory is the encounter of Satan with his
daughter Sin, as well as with Death—who is represented allegorically as the son
born of their incestuous relationship—in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book II
(1667).
In the second type, the sustained allegory of ideas, the central device is the
personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of
life, and types of character. In explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the
names given to characters and places. Thus Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s progress
allegorizes the Christian doctrine of salvation by telling how the character named
Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way
laboriously to the Celestial City; en route he encounters characters with names like
Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant Despair, and passes through places like the
Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Vanity Fair. A passage
from this work indicates the nature of an explicit allegorical narrative:
Now as Christian was walking solitary by himself, he espied one afar off
come crossing over the field to meet him; and their hap was to meet just as
they were crossing the way of each other. The Gentleman’s name was
Mr. Worldly-Wiseman; he dwelt in the Town of Carnal-Policy,
a very great Town, and also hard by from whence Christian came.
Works that are primarily nonallegorical may introduce allegorical imagery (the
personification of abstract entities who perform a brief allegorical action) in short
passages. Famiiliar instances are the opening lines of Milton’s L’Allegro and I
Penseroso (1645). This device was exploited especially in the poetic diction of authors
in the mid-eighteenth century. An example so brief that it presents an allegoric
tableau rather than an action—is the passage in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard” (1751):
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or
Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Allegory is a narrative strategy, which may be employed in any literary form
or genre. The early sixteenth-century Everyman is an allegory in the form of a
morality play. The pilgrim’s progress is a moral and religious allegory in a prose
narrative; Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96) fuses moral, religious,
historical, and political allegory in a verse romance; the third book of Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the voyage to Laputa and Lagado (1726), is an allegorical
satire directed mainly against philosophical and scientific pedantry; and William
Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1747) is a lyric poem, which
allegorizes a topic in literary criticism—the nature, sources, and power of the
poet’s creative imagination. John Keats makes a subtle use of allegory
throughout his ode “To Autumn” (1820), most explicitly in the second stanza,
which personifies the autumnal season as a female figure amid the scenes and
activities of the harvest.
Sustained allegory was a favorite form in the Middle Ages, when it produced
masterpieces, especially in the verse-narrative mode of the dream vision,
10 A LLE G 0 RY

in which the narrator falls asleep and experiences an allegoric dream; this mode
includes, in the fourteenth century, Dante’s Divine Corned y, the French Roman de la
lose, Chaucer’s House of Fame, and William Langland’s Piers Plowman. But
sustained allegory has been written in all literary periods and is the form of such
major nineteenth-century dramas in verse as Goethe’s Faust, Fart II,- Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound,- and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. In the twentieth century,
the stories and novels of Franz Kafka can be considered instances of implicit
allegory.
Allegory was on the whole devalued during the twentieth century but was
invested with positive value by some theorists in the last quarter of the twentieth
century. The critic Fredric Jameson uses the term to signify the relation of a
literary text to its historical subtext, its “political unconscious.” (See Jameson,
under Marxist criticism.) And Paul de Man elevates allegory, because it candidly
manifests its artifice, over what he calls the more “mystified” concept of the
symbol, which he claims seems to promise, falsely, a unity of form and content,
thought and expression. (See de Man, under deconstruction and aesthetic
ideology.)
A variety of literary genres may be classified as species of allegory in that
they all narrate one coherent set of circumstances which are intended to signify a
second order of correlated meanings:

figurative language: “Figurative language” is a conspicuous departure from what

competent users of a language apprehend as the standard meaning of words, or
else the standard order of words, in order to achieve some special meaning or
effect. Figures are sometimes described as primarily poetic, but they are integral
to the functioning of language and indispensable to all modes of discourse.

Most modern classifications and analyses are based on the treatment of

figurative language by Aristotle and later classical rhetoricians; the Stillest and
most influential treatment is in the Roman Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory (first
century AD), Books VIII and IX. Since that time, figurative language has often
been divided into two classes: (1) Figures of thought, or tropes (meaning “turns,”
“conversions”), in which words or phrases are used in a way that effects a
conspicuous change in what we take to be their standard meaning. The standard
meaning, as opposed to its meaning in the figurative use, is called the literal
meaning. (2) Figures of speech, or “rhetorical figures,” or schemes (from the
Greek word for “form”), in which the departure from standard usage is not
primarily in the meaning of the words but in the order or syntactical pattern of the
words. This distinction is not a sharp one, nor do all critics agree on its
application. For convenience of exposition, how- ever, the most commonly
identified tropes are treated here, and the most commonly identified figures of
speech are collected in the entry rhetorical figures. For opposition to the basic
distinction between the literal and the figurative, see metaphor, theories of.
In a simile, a comparison between two distinctly different things is explicitly
indicated by the word “like” or “as.” A simple example is Robert Bums, “O my
love’s like a red, red rose.” The following simile from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also specifies the feature (“green”) in
which icebergs are similar to emerald:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As
green as emerald.
For highly elaborated types of simiile, see conceit and epic simile.
In a metaphor, a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind
of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a
comparison. For example, if Bums had said “O my love is a red, red rose” he
would have uttered, technically speaking, a metaphor instead of a simile. Here is a
more complex instance from the poet Stephen Spender, in which he applies
several metaphoric terms to the eye as it scans a landscape:
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker
of horizon’s fluid line.
For the distinction between metaphor and symbol, see symbol.
It should be noted that in these examples we can distinguish two elements,
the metaphorical term and the subject to which it is applied. In a widely
adopted usage, I. A. Richards introduced the name tenor for the subject (“my
love” in the altered line from Burns, and “eye” in Spender’s lines), and the
name vehicle for the metaphorical term itself (“rose” in Burns, and the three
words “gazelle,” “wanderer,” and “drinker” in Spender). In an

implicit metaphor, the tenor is not itself specified, but only implied. If one were
to say, while discussing someone’s death, “That reed was too frail to survive the
storm of its sorrows,” the situational and verbal context of the term “reed”
indicates that it is the vehicle for an implicit tenor, a human being, while
“storm” is the vehicle for an aspect of a specified tenor, “sorrows.” Those
aspects, properties, or common associations of a vehicle which, in a given
context, apply to a tenor are called by Richards the grounds of a metaphor.
(See I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936, chapters 5-6.)
All the metaphoric terms, or vehicles, cited so far have been nouns, but other
parts of speech may also be used metaphorically. The metaphoric use of a verb
occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, V. i. 54, “How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank”; and the metaphoric use of an adjective occurs in
Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (1681):
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
A mixed metaphor conjoins two or more obviously diverse metaphoric
vehicles. When used inadvertently, without sensitivity to the possible in-
congruity of the vehicles, the effect can be ludicrous: “Girding up his loins, the
chairman plowed through the mountainous agenda.” Densely figurative poets
such as Shakespeare, however, often mix metaphors in a functional way. One
example is Hamlet’s expression of his troubled state of mind in his soliloquy
(III. i. 59—d0), “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end
them”; another is the complex involvement of vehicle within vehicle, applied to
the process of aging, in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65:
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against
the wrackful siege of battering days?
A dead metaphor is one which, like “the leg of a table” or “the heart of the
matter,” has been used so long and become so common that we have ceased to
be aware of the discrepancy between vehicle and tenor. Many dead
metaphors, however, are only moribund and can be brought back to life.
Someone asked Groucho Marx, “Are you a man or a mouse?” He answered,
“Throw me a piece of cheese and you’ll find out.” The recorded history of
language indicates that a great many words that we now take to be literal were, in
the distant past, metaphors.
Metaphors are essential to the functioning of language and have been the
subject of copious analyses, and sharp disagreements, by rhetoricians, linguists,
literary critics, and philosophers of language. For a discussion of diverse views,
see the entry metaphor, theories of.
Some tropes, sometimes classified as species of metaphor, are more frequently
and usefully given names of their own:
In metonymy (Greek for “a change of name”), the literal term for one thing
is applied to another with which it has become closely associated because of a
recurrent relation in common experience. Thus “the crown” or

“the scepter” can be used to stand for a king and “Hollywood” for the film
industry; “Milton” can signify the writings of Milton (“I have read all of Milton”);
and typical attire can signify the male and female sexes: “doublet and hose
ought to show itself courageous to petticoat” (Shakespeare, As You like It, II.
iv. 6). (For the influential distinction by the linguist Roman Jakobson between the
metaphoric, or “vertical,” and the metonymic, or “horizontal,” dimension, in
application to many aspects of the functioning of language, see under linguistics
in literary criticism.)
In synecdoche (Greek for “taking together”), a part of something is used to
signify the whole, or (more rarely) the whole is used to signify a part. We use the
term “ten hands” for ten workers, or “a hundred sails” for ships and, in current
slang, “wheels” to stand for an automobile. By a bold use of the figure, Milton
describes the corrupt and greedy clergy in “Lycidas” as “blind mouths.” Another
figure related to metaphor is personification, or in the Greek term,
prosopopoeia, in which either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is
spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or
feelings (compare pathetic fallacy). Milton wrote in Paradise Lost
(IX. 1002-3), as Adam bit into the fatal apple,
Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin.
The second stanza of Keats’ “To Autumn” finely personifies the season,
autumn, as a woman carrying on the rural chores of that time of year; and in
Aurora Leith (I. 251-52), Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me.
The personification of abstract terms was standard in eighteenth-century poetic
diction, where it sometimes became a thoughtless formula. Coleridge cited an
eighteenth-century ode celebrating the invention of inoculation against
smallpox that began with this apostrophe to the personified subject of the poem:
Inoculation! heavenly Maid, descend!
See Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime (1985).
The term kenning denotes the recurrent use, in the Anglo-Saxon BeowuJ
and poems written in other Old Germanic languages, of a descriptive phrase in
place of the ordinary name for something. This type of periphrasis, which at times
becomes a stereotyped expression, is an indication of the origin of these poems in
oral tradition (see oral poetry). Some kennings are instances of metonymy (“the
whale road” for the sea, and “the ring-giver” for a king); others of synecdoche
(“the ringed prow” for a ship); still others describe salient or picturesque features
of the object referred to (“foamy-necked floater” for a ship under sail, “storm of
swords” for a battle).
Other departures from the standard use of words, often classified as tropes, are
treated elsewhere in this Glossary: aporia; conceit; epic simile; hyperbole; irony;
litotes; paradox; periphrasis; pun; understatement. Since the mid-twentieth century,
especially in the No Criticism, Russian formalism, and Harold Bloom’s theory of
the anxiety of influence, there has been a great interest in the analysis and functioning
of figurative language, which was once thought to be largely the province of pedantic
rhetoricians. In deconstructive criticism, especially in the writings by Jacques Derrida
and Paul de Man, the analysis of figurative language is one of the primary ways of
establishing what they assert to be the uncertainty and undecidability of meaning;
see deconstruction.
Summaries of the classification of figures that was inherited from the classical
past are Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric/or the Modern Student (3rd ed.,
1990); and Richard A. Lanham, A I-Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed., 1991).
Arthur Quinn’s lucid and amusing booklet, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a
phrase (1993), treats mainly what this Glossary classifies as rhetorical figures. René
Wellek and Austin Warren, in Theory of Literature (rev. 1970), summarize, with
bibliography, diverse treatments of figurative language.