Glossary of Literary Terms

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parody: A poem that imitates another poem closely, but changes details for comic or critical effect. For example, "The Dover Bitch" by Anthony Hecht (1968) parodies Matthew Arnold´s "Dover Beach" (1867).

pastoral: A poem (also called an eclogue, a bucolic, or an idyll) that portrays the simple life of country folk, usually shepherds, as a timeless world of beauty, peace, and contentment. From its beginnings (the Greek Idyls of Theocritus, third century B.C.), pastoral has idealized rural life; poets have used the conventions of this highly artificial form to explore subjects having little to do with any actual countryside (for example, see Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" [1599, 1600]). There is also a large subgenre of pastoral elegy (e.g., see John Milton, "Lycidas" [1637]).

pattern poetry: A poem with lines in the shape of the subject of the poem. This form was popular in English poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., George Herbert, "Easter Wings" [1633]) and again in the twentieth century (notably by John Hollander and May Swenson). Compare with concrete poetry.

persona: A voice assumed by the author of a poem. See speaker.

personification: Treating an abstraction as if it were a person, endowing it with humanlike qualities. For an extended example, see Emily Dickinson, #712 (1890; "Because I could not stop for Death").

Petrarchan sonnet: See Italian sonnet.

prosopopoeia: See personification.

protest poem: An attack, sometimes indirect, on institutions or social injustices. For example, see Anna Letitia Barbauld, "The Rights of Woman" (1825).

pyrrhic: two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables.