Literary Glossary

A comparison between two seemingly unrelated things, such as the following example from Langston Hughes’ "Dreams":

Life is a broken-winged bird
 
That cannot fly.

A period of time between the 5th century to the 16th century AD; also known as the Middle Ages.

A series stressed and unstressed syllables arranged in patterns called feet. Iambic pentameter, for example, is a line with five feet, each of which has one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as with this line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

The primary types of feet are:

• Iambic - unstressed, stressed
• Trochaic - stressed, unstressed
• Anapestic - unstressed, unstressed, stressed
• Dactylic - stressed, unstressed, unstressed

Metrical lines (the number of feet in a line) are named as follows:

• One foot: Monometer
• Two feet: Dimeter
• Three feet: Trimeter
• Four feet: Tetrameter
• Five feet: Pentameter
• Six feet: Hexameter
• Seven feet: Heptameter
• Eight feet: Octameter

A cultural and artistic movement after World War I characterized by disillusionment with the past and a rampant desire to, in the words of Ezra Pound, "make it new."

A collection of traditional narratives that are passed down through various textual and visual sources and that convey commonly held beliefs in a particular society about natural phenomena, historical events, and proper behavior.