Aristophanes was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
The Clouds is a Greek comedy play written by the playwright Aristophanes. A lampooning of intellectual fashions in classical Athens, it was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and was not as well received as the author had hoped, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised between 420 and 417 BC and was thereafter circulated in manuscript form.
An anapaest is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one; in accentual stress meters it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. It may be seen as a reversed dactyl. This word comes from the Greek ἀνάπαιστος, anápaistos, literally "struck back" and in a poetic context "a dactyl reversed".
An iamb or iambus is a metrical foot used in various types of poetry. Originally the term referred to one of the feet of the quantitative meter of classical Greek prosody: a short syllable followed by a long syllable. This terminology was adopted in the description of accentual-syllabic verse in English, where it refers to a foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Thus a Latin word like íbī, because of its short-long rhythm, is considered by Latin scholars to be an iamb, but because it has a stress on the first syllable, in modern linguistics it is considered to be a trochee.
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.
Common metre or common measure—abbreviated as C. M. or CM—is a poetic metre consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The metre is denoted by the syllable count of each line, i.e. 8.6.8.6, 86.86, or 86 86, depending on style, or by its shorthand abbreviation "CM".
The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205–184 BC.
A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot. One form of catalexis is headlessness, where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line.
Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem is an 1855 poetic play, the first published work of Scottish author George MacDonald. It is written mostly in unrhymed iambic pentameter, although portions are written in rhymed iambic pentameter, mixed iambic and anapestic tetrameter, and other forms. In its original printing, the piece is 183 pages long. It is prefaced with a dedicatory poem entitled "To Louisa Powell MacDonald".
Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical foot, or a specific pattern of metrical feet, is used throughout the entire poem; thus one can speak about a poem being in, for example, iambic pentameter. Poets naturally vary the rhythm of their lines, using devices such as inversion, elision, masculine and feminine endings, the caesura, using secondary stress, the addition of extra-metrical syllables, or the omission of syllables, the substitution of one foot for another.
Iambic tetrameter is a poetic meter in ancient Greek and Latin poetry; as the name of a rhythm, iambic tetrameter consists of four metra, each metron being of the form | x – u – |, consisting of a spondee and an iamb, or two iambs. There usually is a break in the centre of the line, thus the whole line is:
| x – u – | x – u – || x – u – || x – u – |
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
Anapestic tetrameter is a poetic meter that has four anapestic metrical feet per line. Each foot has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. It is sometimes referred to as a "reverse dactyl", and shares the rapid, driving pace of the dactyl.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
"Strange fits of passion have I known" is a seven-stanza poem ballad by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Composed during a sojourn in Germany in 1798, the poem was first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). The poem describes the poet's trip to his beloved Lucy's cottage, and his thoughts on the way. Each of its seven stanzas is four lines long and has a rhyming scheme of ABAB. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
A hymn metre indicates the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza (verse) of a hymn. This provides a means of marrying the hymn's text with an appropriate hymn tune for singing.
Zorgamazoo (2008) is Canadian children's author Robert Paul Weston's first novel. The work is a fantasy adventure, written entirely in rhyming anapestic tetrameter.
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
"Tiara" is a poem that appears in Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. Published in 1991, it is the second collection of poems by the American poet, Mark Doty, who lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The poem serves as an elegy for Doty's friend, Peter Holla. Holla was a Drag queen, and the first person Doty knew who died of AIDS. The poem wrestles with the accusation that gay men living through the HIV/AIDS plague years, especially those who ultimately died of HIV/AIDS, had "asked for it" simply by being homosexual and indulging in sexual practice with other men. According to Doty, "I was filled with rage at that ridiculous notion that we invite our own oppression as a consequence of pleasure."
