Glossary of Poetic Terms

Surrealism is an artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris and spread throughout the world in the decades that followed. André Breton outlined his idea of its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Early surrealists were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Through automatic writing and hypnosis, surrealists believed they could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths. The French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Valentine Penrose, and Guillaume Apollinaire embodied early surrealist principles. 

Some contemporaries of the surrealists who did not ascribe to Breton’s manifesto or were not a part of his circle employed similar practices. Surrealist practices were used in the visual arts, particularly in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte, and in the films of Jean Cocteau and Germaine Dulac. A second generation of surrealist writers emerged in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America; see the poems of Joyce Mansour, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Octavio Paz. The surrealist aesthetic has influenced modern and contemporary poets writing in English as well, including Dorothea Tanning, James Tate, John Ashbery, and Michael Palmer.

Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Marianne Moore’s poetry is mostly syllabic. Other examples include Thomas Nashe’s “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss” and Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October.” Browse more poems in syllabic verse.

Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or otherworldly. A rose, for example, has long been considered a symbol of love and affection.

Every word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol (to which a word, of course, may point) has a concreteness not shared by language, and can point to something that transcends ordinary experience. Poets such as William Blake and W.B. Yeats often use symbols when they believe in—or seek—a transcendental (religious or spiritual) reality.

A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must reveal something else transcendental. In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” for instance, Yeats’s image of the rose on the cross symbolizes the joining of flesh and spirit. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write in their book Understanding Poetry (3rd ed., 1960),“The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted.”

See also allegory and imagism.

A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole (for example, “I’ve got wheels” for “I have a car,” or a description of a worker as a “hired hand”). It is related to metonymy.

In description, a blending or intermingling of different sense modalities. While synesthesia appears in ancient literatures, including both the Iliad and Odyssey, it became especially popular in the 19th century through the work of poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and the symbolist movement. Examples of synesthesia include Baudelaire’s “The Ragpickers’ Wine,” where he writes of “the dazzling, deafening debauch / of bugles.” In her heavily synesthetic poem “Aubade,” Dame Edith Sitwell describes the “dull blunt wooden stalactite / Of rain creaks, hardened by the light.” In George Meredith’s “Modern Love: I,” a woman’s heart is made to “drink the pale drug of silence.” Synesthetic effects include textual amplification, complication, and richness. Some poets, notably Percy Bysshe Shelley, have used synesthesia to suggest visionary states.