英国文学诗歌术语解释

A Glossary of Poetic TermsAccent（重音）Another word for stress. The emphasis placed on a syllable. Accent is frequently used to denote stress in describing verse.Aestheticism（唯美主义） A literary movement in the 19th century of those who believed in “art for art’s sake” in opposition to the utilitarian doctrine that everything must be morally or practically useful. Key figures of the aesthetic movement were Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.Alexandrine（亚历山大诗体）The most common meter in French poetry since the 16th century: a line of twelve syllables. The nearest English equivalent is iambic hexameter. The Alexandrine being a long line, it is often divided in the middle by a pause or caesura into two symmetrical halves called hemistiches. Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” offers a typical example.Allegory（讽喻）A pattern of reference in the work which evokes a parallel action of abstract ideas. Usually allegory uses recognizable types, symbols and narrative patterns to indicate that the meaning of thetext is to be found not in the represented work but in a body of traditional thought, or in an extra-literary context. Rrepresentative works are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.Alliteration（头韵） A rhyme-pattern produced inside the poetic line by repeating consonantal sounds at the beginning of words. It is also called initial rhyme.Allusion（引喻）A passing reference in a work of literature to something outside itself. A writer may allude to legends,historical facts or personages, to other works of literature, or even to autobiographical details. Literary allusion requires special explanation. Some writers include in their own works passages from other writers in order to introduce implicit contrasts or comparisons. T.S. Eli ot’s The Waste Land is of this kind.Analogy（类比）The invocation of a similar but different instance to that which is being represented, in order to bring out its salient features through the comparison.Anapest（抑抑扬格） A trisyllabic metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.Apostrophe（顿呼） A rhetorical term for a speech addressed to a person, idea or thing with an intense emotion that can no longer be held back, often placed at the beginning of a poem or essay, but also acting as a digression or pause in an ongoing argument.Arcadia（阿卡狄亚）A mountainous region of Greece which was represented as the blissful home of happy shepherds. During the Renaissance Arcadia becamethe typical name for an idealized rural society where the harmonious Golden Age still flourished. Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance is entitled Arcadia.Assonance（半谐音）The repetition of accented vowel sounds followed by different consonant sounds.Aubade（晨曲） A song or salute at dawn, usually by a lover lamenting parting at daybreak, for example, John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”.Augustan Age: may refer to 1) The period in Roman history when Caesar Augustuswas the first emperor; 2) The period in the history of the Latin language when Caesar Augustus was emperor and Golden-age Latin was in use; 3) Augustan literature and Augustan poetry, the early 18th century in British literature and poetry, where the authors highly admired and emulated the original Augustan Age.Avant-garde(先锋派) A military expression used in literature refers to a group of modern artists and writers. Their main concern is deliberate and self-conscious experimentation in writing to discover new forms, techniques and subject matter in the arts.Ballad（民谣）A narrative poem which was originally sung to tell a story in simple colloquial language.Ballad metre (民谣格律）A quatrain of alternate four-stress and three-stress lines, usually roughly iambic.Ballad stanza（民谣体诗节） A quatrain that alternates tetrameter with trimeter lines, and usually rhymes a b c b.Blank verse（无韵诗）Verse in iambic pentameter without rhyme scheme, oftenused in verse drama in the sixteenth century and later used for poetry.Burlesque（诙谐作品）An imitation of a literary style, or of human action, that aims to ridicule by incongruity style and subject. High burlesque involves a high style for a low subject, for instance, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.Byronic hero（拜伦式英雄） A character type portrayed by George Lord Gordon Byron in many of his early narrative poems, especially Child Harold’s Pilgrimage. The Byronic hero is a brooding solitary, who seeks exotic traveland wild nature to reflect his superhuman passions. He is capable of great suffering and guilty of some terrible, unspecified crime, but bears this guilt with pride, as it sets him apart from society, revealing the meaninglessness of ordinary moral values. He is misanthropic, defiant, rebellious, nihilistic and hypnotically fascinating to others.Canto（诗章） A division of a long poem, especially an epic. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Byron’s Don Juan and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos are all divided into these chapter-length sections.Carpe Diem（及时行乐） A poem advising someone to “seize the day” or “seize the hour”. Usually the genre is addressed by a man to a young woman who is urged to stop prevaricating in sexual or emotional matters.Cavalier poets（骑士诗人）English lyric poets during the reign of Charles I. Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew, Edmund Waller and Robert Herrick are the representatives of this group. Cavalier poetry is mostly concerned with love, and employs a variety of lyric forms.Cockney school of poetry （伦敦佬诗派）A derisive term for certain London-based writers, including Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt and John Keats. This term was invented by the Scottish journalist John Gibson Lockhart in an anonymous series of article on The Cockney School of Poetry, in which he mocked the supposed stylistic vulgarity of these writers.Complaint （怨诗）A poetic genre in which the poet complains, often about his beloved. Geoffery Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse”, Edward Young’s “TheComplaint”, or “Night Thoughts”are examples.Conceit（奇思妙喻）Originally it meant simply a thought or an opinion. The term came to be used in a derogatory way to describe a particular kind of far-fetched metaphorical association. It has now lost this pejorative overtone and simply denotes a special sort of figurative device. The distinguishing quality of a conceit is that it should forge an unexpected comparison between two apparently dissimilar things or ideas. The classic example is John Donne’s The Flea and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.Didactic poetry（说教诗）Poetry designed to teach or preach as a primary purpose.Dirge （挽歌）Any song of mourning, shorter and less formal than an elegy. Shakespeare’s Full Fathom Five in The Tempest is a famous example..Dithyramb（酒神颂歌）A Greek choric hymn in honour of Dionysus. In general “dithyrambic” is applied to a wildly enthusiastic song or chant.Eclogue （牧歌）A pastoral poem, especially a pastoral dialogue, usually indebted to the Virgillian tradition.Elegy（挽诗） A poem of lamentation, concentrating on the death of a single person, like Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, or W.B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”.Epic（史诗）A long narrative poem in elevated style, about the adventures of a hero whose exploits are important to the history of a nation. The more famous epicsin western literature are Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid,Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.Epigram（警句诗） A polished, terse and witty remark that packs generalized knowledge into short compass.Epigraph（铭文） A short quotation cited at the start of a book or chapter to point up its theme and associate its content with learning. Also an inscription on a monument or building explaining its purpose.Epitaph（墓志铭）An inscription on a tomb or a piece of writing suitable for that purpose, generally summing up someone’s life, sometimes in praise, sometimes in satire. John Keats wrote an Epitaph for himself. It says, “Here lies one whose name is wri t in water.”Epithet（表述词语）From Latin epitheton, from Greek epitithenai meaning “to add”, an adjective or adjective cluster that is associated with a particular person or thing and that usually seems to capture their prominent characteristics. For example, “Ethelred the unready”, or “fleet-footed Achilles” in Alexander Pope’s version of The Iliad.Folk ballad（民间歌谣） A narrative poem designed to be sung, composed by an anonymous author, and transmitted orally for years or generations before being written down. It has usually undergone modification through the process of oral transmission.Foot（音步） a unit of measure consisting of stressed and unstressed syllables.Free verse（自由诗）Verse released from the convention of meter, with its regular pattern of stresses and line length. Georgian Poetry： the title of a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of English poetry that established itself during the early years of the reign of King George V of the United Kingdom. Edward Marsh was the general editor of the series and the centre of the circle of Georgian poets, which included Rupert Brooke. It has been suggested that Brooke himself took a hand in some of the editorial choices.Graveyard poets（墓园诗人）Several 18th century poets wrote mournfullypensive poems on the nature of death, which were set in graveyards or inspired by gloomy nocturnal meditations. Examples of this minor but popular genre are Thomas Parnell’s “Night-Piece on Death”, Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” and Robert Blair’s “The Grave”. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” owes something to this vogue.Haiku（俳句）A Japanese lyric form dating from the 13th century which consists of seventeen syllables used in three lines: 5/7/5. Several 20th century English and American poets haveexperimented with the form, including Ezra Pound.Heroic couplet（英雄双韵体）Lines of iambic pentameter rhymed in pairs. Alexander Pope brought the meter to a peak of polish and wit, using it in satire. Because this practice was especially popular in the Neoclassic Period between 1660 and 1790, the heroic couplet is often called the “neoclassic couplet” if the poem originates during this time period.Heroic quatrain（英雄四行诗）Lines of iambic pentameter rhymed abab, cdcd, and so on. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Writtenin a Country Churchyard” is a notable example.Hexameter（六音步）In English versification, a line of six feet. A line of iambic hexameter is called an Alexanderine.Iamb（抑扬格）The commonest metrical foot in English verse, consisting of a weak stress followed by a strong stress.Iambic-anapestic meter（抑扬抑抑扬格）A meter which freely mixes iambs and anapests, and in which it might bedifficult to determine which foot prevails without actually counting.Iambic hexameter（六音步抑扬格）A line of six iambic feet.Iambic pentameter（五音步抑扬格）A line of five iambic feet. It is the most pervasive metrical pattern found in verse in English.Iambic tetrameter（四音步抑扬格）A line of four iambic feet.Idyll（田园诗）A poem which represents the pleasures of rural life.Image, imagery（意象） A critical word with several different applications. In its narrowest sense an ‘image’ is a word-picture, a description of some visible scene or object. More commonly, however, ‘imagery’ refers to figurative language in a piece of literature; or all the words which refer to objects and qualities which appeal to the senses and feelings.Imagism（意象派）A self-conscious movement in poetry in England and America initiated by Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme in about 1912. Pound described the aims of Imagism in his essay “APetrospect”as follows:1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. Pound defined an ‘Image’ as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. His haiku-like two-line poem In a Station of the Metro is often quoted as the quintessence of Imagism.Irony（反讽）The expression of a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant.Lake poets（湖畔派诗人）The three early 19th century romantic poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who lived in the Lake District of Cumbria in northern England. This term was often applied in a derogatory way, suggesting the provincialism of their themes and interests.Lyric（抒情诗）A poem, usually short, expressing in a personal manner the feelings and thoughts of an individual speaker. The typical lyric subject matter is love, for a lover or deity, and the mood of the speaker in relation to this love.Metaphysical poets （玄学派诗人）Metaphysics is the philosophy of being and knowing, but this term was originally applied to a group of 17th century poets in a derogatory manner. The representatives are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw and John Cleveland, Andrew Marvell and Abraham Cowley. The features of metaphysical poetry are arresting and original images and conceits, wit, ingenuity, dexterous use of colloquial speech, considerable flexibility of rhythm and meter, complex themes, a liking for paradox and dialectical argument, a direct manner, a caustic humor, a keenly felt awareness of mortality, and a distinguished capacity forelliptical thought and tersely compact expression. But for all their intellectual robustness the metaphysical poets are also capable of refined delicacy, gracefulness and deep feeling, passion as well as wit. They had a profound influence on the course of English poetry in the 20th century.Meter（格律）The regular pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. The line is divided into a number of feet. According to their stress pattern the feet are classed as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic, spondaic or pyrrhic.Metonymy（借代）A figure of speech: the substitution of the name of a thing by the name of an attribute of it, or something closely associated with it.Monometer（单音步诗行）A metrical line containing one foot.Monologue（独白） A single person speaking, with or without an audience, is uttering a monologue. The dramatic monologue is the name given to a specific kind of poem in which a single person, not the poet, is speaking.Dramatic Monologue（戏剧独白） A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener at length. It is similar to the soliloquy in theater, in that both a dramatic monologue and a soliloquy often involve the revelation of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the speaker. Two famous examples are Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.Interior Monologue: A type of stream of consciousness in which the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character's head. The author does not attempt to provide (or providesminimally) any commentary, description, or guiding discussion to help the reader untangle the complex web of thoughts, nor does the writer clean up the vague surge of thoughts into grammatically correct sentences or a logical order. Indeed, it is as if the authorial voice ceases to exist, and the reader directly “overhears” the thought pouring forth randomly from a character’s mind. An example of an interior monologue can be found in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here, Leopold Bloom wanders past a candy shop in Dublin, and his thoughts wander back and forth.The Movement： A term coined by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, in1954 to describe a group of writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, and Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially English in character; poets in Scotland and Wales were not generally included. The Movement poets were considered anti-Romantic, but we find many Romantic elements in Larkin and Hughes. We may call The Movement the revival of the importance of form. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensous content, and traditional, conventional and dignified form.Neoclassicism（新古典主义） This word refers to the fact that some writers, particularly in the 18th century, modeled their own writing on classical, especially Roman literature. Neoclassicism is applied to a period of English literature lasting from 1660, the Restoration of Charles II, until about 1800. The following major writers flourished then, in poetry, John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Oliver Goldsmith; in prose, Jonathan Swift, Addition, Samuel Johnson. Neoclassical writers did not value creativity or originality highly. They valued the various genres, such as epic, tragedy, pastoral, comedy. The meter for most of Neoclassic writings was the heroic couplet.Octameter（八音步诗行）A metrical line containing eight feet; only occasionally attempted in English verse.Octave（八行体）An eight-line stanza or the first eight lines of a sonnet, especially one structured in the manner of an Italian sonnet.Ode（颂歌） A form of lyric poem, characterized by its length, intricate stanza forms, grandeur of style and seriousness of purpose, with a venerable history in Classical and post-Renaissance poetry.Onomatopoeia（拟声词）The use of words that resemble the sounds they denote, fo r example, ‘hiss’, ‘bang’, ‘pop’ or ‘smack’.Oxford Movement: A movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, the members of which were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. They conceived of the Anglican Church as one of three branches of the Catholic Church.Oxymoron（逆喻）A figure of speech in which contradictory terms are brought together in what is at first sight an impossible combination. It is a special variety of the paradox.Paradox（悖论）An apparently self-contradictory statement, or one that seems in conflict with all logic and opinion; yet lying behind the superficial absurdity is a meaning or truth. It is common in metaphysical poetry.Parody（嘲仿）An imitation of a specific work of literature or style devised so as to ridicule its characteristic features.Exaggeration, or the application of a serious tone to an absurd subject, are typical methods. Henry Fielding’s Shamela,Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Lewis Carroll’s version of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha are examples.Pastoral（田园诗）An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealizes shepherds’ lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly,rural people in nature-centered activities. The pastoral is found in poetry, drama, and fiction. Many subjects, such as love, death, religion, and politics, have been presented in pastoral settings.Pattern poetry（拟形诗）The name for verse which is written in a stanza form that creates a picture or pattern on the page. It is a precursor of concrete poetry. George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is a typical example.Pentameter（五音步诗行） A poetic line of five feet and the most common poetic line in English.Personification（拟人） A figure of speech in which things or ideas are treated as if they were human beings, with human attributes and feeling.Poem（诗）An individual composition, usually in some kind of verse or meter, but also perhaps in heightened language which has been given some sense of pattern or organization to do with the sound of its words, its imagery, syntax, or any available linguistic element.Poet （诗人）Originally from the Greek poiein, a person who ‘makes’.Poet laureate （桂冠诗人） A laurel crown is the traditional prize for poets, based on the myth in which Apollo turns Daphne into a laurel tree. Poet laureates have been officially named by the British monarch since John Dryden’s appointment in 1668 by Charles II. They are supposed to stand as the figurehead of British poetry, but in the two centuries after John Dryden, with the exceptions of William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson, most were minor poets. Some indeed were poets of no significance whatever. The poets laureate in the 20th century have been less negligible. Ted Hughes is the present incumbent.Poetic licence（诗的破格）The necessary liberty given to poets, allowing them to manipulate language according to their needs, distorting syntax, using odd archaic words and constructions, etc. It can also refer to the manner in which poets, sometimes through ignorance, or deliberately, make mistaken assumptions about the world they describe.Pre-Raphaelites（前拉斐尔学派）Originally a group of artists (including John Millais, Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) who organized the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ in 1848. Theiraim was a return to the ‘truthfulness’ and simplicity of medieval art. The representatives include Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and William Morris. The typical aspects of their poetry are medievalism, archaism and lush sensuousness combined with religious feeling.Prosody（韵律学）The technical study of versification, including meter, rhyme, sound effects and stanza patterns.Psalm（赞美诗）A sacred song or hymn, especially one from the Book of Psalms in the Bible.Pun（双关语） A figure of speech in which a word is used ambiguously, thus, invoking two or more of its meanings, often for comic effect.Pyrrhic（抑抑格） A metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables. As with the spondee, from a linguistic point of view it is doubtful if the pyrrhic is necessary in English scansion, as two successive syllables are unlikely to bear exactly similar levels of stress.Quatrian（四行诗节）A stanza of four lines. A very common form in English,used with various meters and rhyme schemes..Refrain（叠句）Words or lines repeated in the course of a poem, recurring at intervals, sometimes with slight variation, usually at the end of a stanza. Refrains are especially common in songs and ballads.Rhyme（诗韵）The pattern of sound that established unity in verse forms. Rhyme at the end of lines is ‘end rhyme’; inside a line it is ‘internal rhyme’. End rhyme is clearly the most emphatic and usually relies on homophony between final syllables.Rhyme scheme（韵式）The pattern of rhymes in a stanza or section of verse, usually expressed by an alphabetical code.Rhythm（韵律）Rhythm refers to any steady pattern of repetition, particularly that of a regular recurrence of accented or unaccented syllables at equal intervals.Romance（传奇故事）Primarily medieval fiction in verse or prose dealing with adventures of chivalry and love. Notable English romances include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory’s Le Mor te d’Arthur.Romanticism（浪漫主义）A word used in an appallingly large number of different ways in different contexts.(1) Romantic in popular sense means idealized and facile love. (2) The Romantic Period. A term used to refer to the period dating from 1789 to about 1830 in English literature. Novelists of the period include Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen; essayists such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey are notable for their contributions to the fast-developing literary magazines. There were two generations of Romantic poets: the first included William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge andRobert Southy; the second were George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. (3) Romanticism. It was in contrast to neoclassical literature. Writers showed their concern for feeling and emotion rather than the human capacity to reason. William Wordsworth’s The Prelude is the foremost text of Romanticism. The romantic poets were interested in nature. They saw nature as a way of coming to understand the self and made use of their imagination to create harmony. They also showed their disapproval toward neoclassical rules of poetry.Scansion（韵律分析）Scansion is the process of measuring the stresses in a line of verse in order to determine the metrical pattern of the line. It starts with identifying the standard of its prevailing meter and rhythm.Sestet（六行诗）The last six lines of a Petrarchan sonnet which should be separated by rhyme and argument from the preceding eight lines, called the octave.Sestina（六节诗）A rare and elaborate verse form, consisting of six stanzas, each consisting of six lines of pentameter, plus a three-line envoi. The end words for eachstanza are the same, but in a different order from stanza to stanza. An example is Ezra Pound’s Sestina, Altaforte.Song（歌）A short lyric poem intended to be set to music, though often such poems have no musical setting.Sonnet（十四行诗） A lyric poem of fixed form: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed and organized according to several intricate schemes. Three patterns predominate: (1) The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet is divided into an octave which rhymes abba abba, and a sestet usually rhymes cde cde, or cdc dcd.The sestet usually replies to the argument of the octave. (2) Spenserian sonnet is a nine-line stanza of iambics rhymed abab bcbc cdc dee. The first eight lines are pentameters; the final line is a hexameter;(3) Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a final couplet which usually provides an epigrammatic statement of the theme. The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.Spenserian Stanza（斯宾塞诗节） A nine-line stanza rhyming in an ababbcbcc pattern in which the first eight lines are iambic pentameter and the last line is an iambic hexameter line. The name Spenserian comes from the form’s most。