Glossary of Poetic Terms

An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova.

Affrilachian is a word coined by the poet Frank X. Walker to describe African American people of regions in and near the Appalachian Mountains in North America. Walker founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective in 1991, whose members include poets and fiction writers such as Nikki Finney, Kelly Ellis, Paul Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Coleman, and Shana Smith among others. He coined the term to confront the assumed whiteness associated with the definition of the Appalachian region and its residents…

The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace.

A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder.

A cultural movement conceived of and promoted by Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960s that included Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez.

A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

A dismissive name for London-based Romantic poets such as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The term was first used in a scathing review in Blackwood’s Magazine in October 1817, in which the anonymous reviewer mocked the poets’ lack of pedigree and sophistication.

Italian term for “theater of professional artists.” A theater form that emerged in northern Italy in the 15th century and spread throughout Europe. Commedia dell’arte relied on masked stock characters who improvised dialogue within a basic, often familiar plotline or story (such as the struggles of young lovers or marital infidelity). The commedias were performed by itinerant troupes of actors who could respond to contemporary events through extemporized commentary and impromptu asides. Stock characters…

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics.

Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. The term was first used by M.L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies, the collection in which Robert Lowell revealed his struggles with mental illness and a troubled marriage. Read an interview with Snodgrass in which he addresses his work and the work of others associated with confessionalism. Browse…

A school of poetry that resists an ableist tradition of body representation in favor of explicitly turning to lived disabled experiences.

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada embraces nonsense, irrationality, and intuition instead of the prevailing values of logic and reason.

An artists group formed in 1987 by Boston poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange and musician Janice Lowe  after they attended the funeral of James Baldwin. Based in a Victorian house near Harvard Square in Cambridge, they were inspired to celebrate living artists of color and to establish a reading series and to create comraderie and mentorships between black writers. Other members included poets Major Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Nehassaiu deGannes, and John Keene, among others…

Ecopoetics places emphasis on drawing connections between human activity—specifically the writing of poems—and the environment that produces it. It arose out of the increasing awareness of ecology and concerns over environmental disaster in the late twentieth century.

The period coinciding with the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), considered to be the literary height of the English Renaissance. Poets and dramatists drew inspiration from Italian forms and genres such as the love sonnet, the pastoral, and the allegorical epic. Musicality, verbal sophistication, and romantic exuberance dominated the era’s verse. Defining works include Edmund Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calendar and The Faerie Queene, the sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare…

In linguistics, folkloristics and anthropology, a method of analyzing linguistic structures in oral literature. The term was coined in 1968 by Jerome Rothenberg, whose anthology Technicians of the Sacred is considered a definitive text of the movement. In poetry, ethnopoetics refers to non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often those coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures. In the early 20th century, Modernist and avant-garde poets such as Antonin Artaud and Tristan Tzara used “primitive”…

The Fireside poets were a group of 19th-century American poets, mostly situated in the Northeast United States. Also referred to as the schoolroom or household poets, they wrote in conventional poetic forms to present domestic themes and moral issues. The “fireside” moniker arose out of their popularity, as families would read their books by the fire in their homes. Highly popular among both general readers and critics, the Fireside poets deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity…

Originally a prank on the scam contest sponsored by the organization Poetry.com, the experimental poetry movement flarf has slowly assumed a serious position as a new kind of Internet-based poetic practice. Known for its reliance on Google as a means of generating odd juxtapositions, surfaces, and grammatical inaccuracies, flarf also celebrates deliberately bad or “incorrect” poetry by forcing clichés, swear words, onomatopoeia, and other linguistic aberrations into poetic shape. Original flarf …

A brief but influential 20th-century critical method that originated in St. Petersburg through the group OPOYAZ, and in Moscow via the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Important Formalists included Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky. Formalism viewed literature as a distinct and separate entity, unconnected to historical or social causes or effects. It analyzed literature according to devices unique to literary works and focused on the “literariness” of a text: words were not simply stand-ins for objects…

A group of Southern poets associated with the "Fugitive," a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s.