Keywords Flashcards
Sonnet
made up of 14 lines
- single stanza
- written in iambic pentameter
- about love
- contains a volta (turning point)
- English / Shakespearian and Italian / Petrarchan
Renaissance
the late C14-early C17
- means “rebirth”
- writings about humanism, reformation, the New World / “discovery” of the Americas
English / Shakespearean Sonnet
14 lines, done in iambic pentameter
- 3 quatrains and a couplet; abab cdcd efef gg OR abba cddc effe gg
last couplet is important in resolving or further complicating the plot of the verse
Blazon
list of the beautiful features of a woman;
- goes in body order from head to toe
- goes back to the middle ages
Metaphysical Poets
Donne, Herbert, Marvell
- not an official school (later readers and scholars gave them this name and grouped them together)
- includes surprises, puns, and paradoxes
- surprising metaphors; ie. “flea is like a marriage” / “my love is like the legs of a compass, and I’m joined to you like to legs of a compass are joined together”
- term has fallen out of favor as they authors never identified themselves this way, didn’t necessarily communicate with one another about their poems, just because they are similar doesn’t mean they are related
Aubade
tradition;
- the sun rises or a bird sings, something marks that it is morning and that alerts lovers to the fact that they have to separate
- usually a whiny lamentation on the fact that they will have to part
Pattern Poems
lines of the poem on the page matter in terms of what visual shape they represent;
- lines of the poem represent the shape of the subject of the poem
- now called concrete poetry
Pastoral
idea of an idealized rural life
- deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of shepherds and other rural folk in idealized natural settings
- offers an escape of the urban world by fantasizing about the life of a shepherd
- was probably never written by shepherds, it was probably written by aristocrats imagining what they might have lived like
Epic
a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in formal and elevated style, centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure whose actions the fate of tribes, nations or the human race depend on
Blank Verse
unrhymed iambic pentameter
Heroic Tragedy
like a heroic poem, but set on stage
- during the second half of the 17th century
- epic style and form
- heroic couplets
- love vs. honor
- if it’s a tragedy, it ends in disaster
Theodicy
the part of theology concerned with defending the goodness and omnipotence of God in the face of the suffering and evil of the world
Free Will Defense
the defense that evils in the world are entirely due to the bad, free choices made by humans
- it was good of God to create free beings, but bad of them to misuse their freedom
- gives our choices more value; if we choose to obey him and be loyal our choice gives our obedience more value than if we were compelled to
Ptolemaic Model
earth at the center
- the idea that the outer rings spun and made all the other things rotate around the earth
- MILTON: wasn’t accepted widely at the time as they had begun to accept the Copernican or heliocentric model but Milton chose the older, archaic one
Protoevangelium
the “first gospel”;
- God’s words to the serpent and Adam and Eve about their punishment
- human males were sentenced to agricultural labor, human males were subjected to the labor of childbirth and snakes would forever have to crawl on their belly
- although they will be punished and cursed, the curse comes with the possibility and promise of redemption
