Glossary of Literary Terms

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ballad: A narrative poem, impersonally related, that is (or originally was) meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases), the earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to person through generations. For example, see "Sir Patrick Spens." Modern literary ballads imitate these folk creations (e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1798]).

ballad stanza: A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as "common meter"; a loose form of it is often used by Emily Dickinson.

blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; for example, see Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842).