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Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words, and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.
The Romaunt of the Rose is a partial translation into Middle English of the French allegorical poem, Le Roman de la Rose. Originally believed to be the work of Chaucer, the Romaunt inspired controversy among 19th-century scholars when parts of the text were found to differ in style from Chaucer's other works. Also the text was found to contain three distinct fragments of translation. Together, the fragments—A, B, and C—provide a translation of approximately one-third of Le Roman.
Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. The form enjoyed significant success in the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century. It has had a more subdued but continuing influence on English verse in more recent centuries.
The ballade is a form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry as well as the corresponding musical chanson form. It was one of the three formes fixes and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries.
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows. The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet.
A triolet is almost always a stanza poem of eight lines, though stanzas with as few as seven lines and as many as nine or more have appeared in its history. Its rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB and often in 19th century English triolets all lines are in iambic tetrameter, though in traditional French triolets, from the 17th century on, the second, sixth and eighth lines tend to be iambic trimeters followed by one amphibrachic foot each. In French terminology, a line ending in an iambic foot was denoted as masculine, while a line ending in an amphibrachic foot was called feminine. Depending on the language and era, other meters are seen, even in French. The first, fourth and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines, thereby making the initial and final couplets identical as well. In a traditional French triolet, the second and third non-repeating lines rhyme with the repeating first, fourth, and seventh lines, while the non-repeating sixth line rhymes with the second and eighth repeating lines. However, especially in German triolets of the 18th and 19th centuries, one will see this pattern often violated.
A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
A rondeau is a form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry, as well as the corresponding musical chanson form. Together with the ballade and the virelai it was considered one of three formes fixes, and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries. It is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition of verse with a refrain. The rondeau is believed to have originated in dance songs involving singing of the refrain by a group alternating with the other lines by a soloist. The term "Rondeau" is used both in a wider sense, covering older styles of the form which are sometimes distinguished as the triolet and rondel, and in a narrower sense referring to a 15-line style which developed from these forms in the 15th and 16th centuries. The rondeau is unrelated to the much later instrumental dance form that shares the same name in French baroque music, which is more commonly called the rondo form in classical music.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
An abecedarius is a special type of acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the letters in the alphabet.
Chanticleer and the Fox is a fable that dates from the Middle Ages. Though it can be compared to Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Crow, it is of more recent origin. The story became well known in Europe because of its connection with several popular literary works and was eventually recorded in collections of Aesop's Fables from the time of Heinrich Steinhowel and William Caxton onwards. It is numbered 562 in the Perry Index.
A roundel is a form of verse used in English language poetry devised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909). It is the Anglo-Norman form corresponding to the French rondeau. It makes use of refrains, repeated according to a certain stylized pattern. A roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, plus a refrain after the third line and after the last line. The refrain must be identical with the beginning of the first line: it may be a half-line, and rhymes with the second line. It has three stanzas and its rhyme scheme is as follows: A B A R ; B A B ; A B A R ; where R is the refrain.
Chaucer's influence on 15th-century Scottish literature began towards the beginning of the century with King James I of Scotland. This first phase of Scottish "Chaucerianism" was followed by a second phase, comprising the works of Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. At this point, England has recognised Scotland as an independent state following the end of the Wars of Scottish Independence in 1357. Because of Scottish history and the English’s recent involvement in that history, all of these writers are familiar with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
"Maiden in the mor lay" or "The Maid of the Moor" is a Middle English lyric of the early 14th century, set to a melody which is now lost. The literary historian Richard L. Greene called it "one of the most haunting lyrics of all the Middle Ages", and Edith Sitwell thought it "a miracle of poetry". It is a notoriously enigmatic poem, perhaps devotional, perhaps secular, which depicts a maiden in the wilderness who lives on flowers and spring-water. Critics are divided in their interpretation of her: she may be the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, a water-sprite, or an ordinary human girl. The 14th-century bishop Richard de Ledrede's dissatisfaction with this song led to an alternative lyric for it being written, a Latin religious poem, Peperit virgo.
References
- 1 2 Greene, Roland, ed. (2017). "Rondel". The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th Online ed.). Princeton, New Jersey.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780190681173.
- ↑ Cocking, J..M. (1951). "The "Invention of the Rondel". French Studies. V (1): 49–55. doi:10.1093/fs/v.1.49. ISSN 0016-1128.
- ↑ Butterfield, Jeremy, ed. (2015). "Rondel.". Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (4nd ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom.: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Bjork, Robert E., ed. (2010). "Rondel". Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Eberhart, Lawrence (2014). "Chaucerian Roundel". Poets Collective.
