This feature was first published in January 2024 in My Mensa Weekly, our exclusive newsletter for Mensa members. Find out more about becoming a Mensa member here.
Words: Joanna Cummings
Think you know your alcaic from your anaphora or your zeugma from your Zuihitsu? Let’s delve into some key poetic terms…
On 25 January many people in Scotland – as well as those of Scottish descent all over the world – will be celebrating Burns’ Night in honour of one of the most famous Scottish poets, Robert Burns. As well as being an excellent excuse to eat haggis, it is often an opportunity to read and celebrate his poetry, which is known not only for its vivid descriptions of everyday Scottish life but for language that is accessible to people beyond poetry aficionados.
Of course, poetry plays an important role in our daily lives, whether in the rhymes we teach our children, the poems we read aloud for significant life events or, naturally, the verses we study as part of our education. With origins lying in the rhythmic oral traditions of ancient civilizations, it has proven to be an incredibly varied form of expression, from epic ancient Greek poems such as The Iliad to the Japanese 17-syllable haiku; from Shakespeare’s sonnets about love and the human condition to the socio-political critique of competitive slam poetry.
Whatever the format, navigating the world of poetry can require an understanding of various techniques and devices. You may know your meters and metaphors, your stanzas and your similes – but here we explore some of the lesser-known terms that form part of the grand poetic tradition.
Litotes
You are no doubt familiar with the term ‘hyperbole’, but now meet its opposite: litotes. This is a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite. It involves the use of double negatives or a statement that denies the opposite of the intended meaning but does so in a way that emphasises the positive. Clear as mud? An example might be describing a difficult task as “no small feat” or someone’s stylish new outfit as “not half bad”. Perfect for the British, famous for their tendency towards understatement.
Villanelle
Sadly, this does not refer to everyone’s favourite character from Killing Eve but a poetic form originating in 16th-century Italy. A villanelle is verse adhering to a very particular structure: a 19-line poem comprising five groups of three lines (tercets) and concluding with a four-line stanza (quatrain). What distinguishes a villanelle is the use of refrains – two lines that are repeated alternately at the end of each tercet and then both at the end of the concluding quatrain. Typically, the first and third lines of the initial tercet become the alternating refrains. The most famous example of a villanelle is Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night
Spondee
This sounds more like a nonsense word than a technical term, but a spondee is a lesser known ‘metrical foot’ that consists of two stressed syllables – as opposed to an iamb, which stresses the second syllable of two (believe), or a trochee, a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one (garden). Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Break, Break, Break features a spondaic meter, used to convey increased emotion; the last two words “O Sea!” show how a spondee places emphasis on the two connecting syllables:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
Golden shovel
This delightfully prosaic phrase refers to a kind of poetic homage, whereby a poet ‘borrows’ a phrase from another writer and uses words from this phrase as the last word in each line of the new poem. The term originated from a poem (called The Golden Shovel) by Terrance Hayes, in which he created new verse based on poetry by Gwendoline Brooks. Since then it has become an increasingly popular form, and there have even been anthologies published of ‘golden shovel’ poetry.
Concrete poetry
This is a fun one. Concrete verse goes beyond the words of the poem themselves, relying also on the visual arrangement of words on the page to create meaning. Examples would include Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree, which, as you can probably guess, displays a sonnet in the shape of a potted Christmas tree, and a particularly vivid poem by Tishani Doshi, The Comeback of Speedos…
Brush up on your poetic terminology!
