Glossary of Key Terms with Pronunciation Key

(ákmee ìzz m)  A movement in Russian poetry, begun around 1912 by members of the Poets' Guild to promote precise treatment of realistic subjects. The movement's emphasis on exactness of word and clarity of image invites comparison with its Anglo-American contemporary, Imagism. The founders of Acmeism were Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetski. The organized group lasted only a few years, but the influence of its greatest adherents–such as Anna Akhmatova (who was married to Gumilev) and Osip Mandelstam–continues through the present day.

Some titles, especially of poems, suggest that a work was written after the manner of a certain writer, work, or body of literature, or after the reading of a work. These titles are typical: "After a Passage in Baudelaire" (Robert Duncan), "After Anacreon" (Lew Welch), "After Lorca" (both Robert Creeley and Ted Hughes), "After Plotinus" (William Stafford), and "After the Persian" (Louise Bogan). Frank O'Hara wrote "After Wyatt" and "An Airplane Whistle (after Heine)." G. K. Chesterton's "Variations of an Air" consists of three parodic versions of "Old King Cole" subtitled "after Lord Tennyson," "after W. B. Yeats," and "after Walt Whitman." Allen Ginberg's "After Yeats" is joined by Margaret McCann's "After Bob (After Yeats)." A. C. Swinburne wrote a poem called "After Looking into Carlyle's Reminiscences" (calling Carlyle "this dead snake").

(AGG own)  Literally, a contest of any kind. In Greek tragedy it was a prolonged dispute, often a formal debate in which the CHORUS divided and took sides with the disputants. In the OLD COMEDY in Greece this debate, called EPIRRHEMATIC AGON, involved elaborate exchanges between the chorus and the debaters, and addresses to the audience. In discussions of PLOT, agon it has come to mean any conflict. Leading CHARACTERS are classified according to their relationship to this conflict, displayed by the element agon inside their designations: PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST, DEUTERAGONIST, and so on. As its title suggests, Milton's Samson Agonistes belongs in the category of the agon; T. S. Eliot's fragmentary Sweeney Agonistes seems to be a burlesque or caricature of the tradition. In the 1950s Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet called Agon.

( lēl'ō graf)   A variant form of a word used in the vicinity of the basic form itself, as in Wordsworth's line "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep" ("ne'er" and "never") and Pound's "What thou lovest well. … What thou lov'st well" ("lovest" and "lov'st").

( lóozh'n)  A collection of allusions to a writer or a writer's works, sometimes for a specific period. A "Spenser Allusion Book, 1599–1750," for example, would catalgue allusions to Spenser found in works from the period indicated.

A fixture of American life and thought for many decades, "the American Dream," positively or ironically, has to do with a grand ideal of the sort of success made possible by the charters and habits of the United States of America since its establishment in 1776. The dream includes freedom, success, wealth, and fulfillment. An early expression is Benjamin Franklin's life, as recorded in his autobiographical writings; by the modern age, the dream was routinely given a tragic or satiric twist, as in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. George O'Neil wrote American Dream: A Play in Three Acts (1933); Edward Albee wrote a play called The American Dream (1961), followed soon after by Norman Mailer's novel An American Dream (1965).
  [References: Elizabeth Long, The American Dream and the Popular Novel (1985); Stanley A Werner, ed., The American Dream in Literature (1970).]

(àmfiss b'éen )  Named for the monster in Greek FABLE that has a head at each end and can go in either direction, the term is used to describe backward RHYME— that is, two rhyme words or syllables, the second of which inverts the order of the first, as "step" and "pets." While amphisbaenic is an amusingly INKHORN term, it is not really very accurate. A better word may be "BOUSTROPHEDONIC," which means "moving alternately left to right and right to left" and applies to certain ancient methods of writing. Edmund Wilson explored the effects of this sort of rhyme in some of his verse, not all of it light; and Wilson's verse experiments subsequently bore fruit in the work in verse and prose of his sometime friend Vladimir Nabokov.

(ànn k lóo thòn)  The failure, accidental or deliberate, to complete a sentence according to the structural plan on which it was started. It may be a mistake, as in a sentence that loses its way: "The police arrested the man whom they thought was an escaped convict"—in which "whom" begins as a potential object, as its case-ending requires, but becomes the subject of a subordinate clause. In literary practice, however, the device can work as a powerful index of anxiety or disturbed coherence. Something of this sort occurs in the opening lines of Tennyson's "Ulysses":

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race. …

Here "an idle king" promises to function as the subject of a noun clause but turns out to be merely in apposition with the true subject, "I." The end of Yeats's "The Second Coming" begins as a statement but abruptly turns into a question:

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(anagNORisis)  In drama, the DISCOVERY or RECOGNITION that leads to the PERIPETY or REVERSAL. Titles from recent American poetry suggest that the figure persists robustly. Jay Wright's Explications/Interpretations contains a poem called "Anagnorisis," and Richard Howard's Like Most Revelations includes "Centenary Peripeteia and Anagnorisis Beginning with a Line by Henry James."

(Anna 'LEPsis)  In the terminology of Robert Graves's The White Goddess, a type of vision or trance in which something from the past or the unconscious mind is restored to vivid life in the present or conscious mind. Generally, analepsis means any recovery or restoration; a poem by W. H. Auden includes the witty phrase "analeptic swig."

(An' nim')  A word fabricated by spelling another word backward. On the title page of Martin Geldart's Sons of Belial, the author's name appears as "Nitram Tradleg." The place-name "Llareggub" in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood qualifies, as, almost, does Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Walter de la Mare's "Walter Ramal" comes close.

A SONNET combining the rhyme-schemes of the ENGLISH SONNET (ababcdcdefefgg) and the ITALIAN SONNET (abbaabbacdecde), most often with an OCTAVE from the former and a SESTET from the latter. Examples include Thomas Hardy's "Hap" (abab cdcd efeffe), W. B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" (abab cdcd efgefg), and W. H. Auden's "Who's Who" (ababcdcd efggfe).

(ánni mày)  Japanese adaptation of the French for "animated cartoon," applied to set of styles of films and television productions, frequently tales of FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, or HORROR, drawn with extreme stylization and asymmetrical design. Most of the figures have large eyes, unkempt hair, and exaggerated anatomies.

(an tístr fee)  One of the three stanzaic forms of the Greek choral ODE, the others being STROPHE and EPODE. It is identical in meter with the STROPHE, which precedes it. As the chorus sang the strophe, they moved from right to left; while singing the antistrophe, they retraced these steps exactly, moving back to their original positions. (See ODE.) In rhetoric antistrophe is the reciprocal conversion of the same words in succeeding phrases or clauses, as T. S. Eliot's "The desert in the garden the garden in the desert" and I. A. Richards's "Harvard Yard in April, April in Harvard Yard."