Edward Hirsch - The Essential Poets Glossary

Copyright 2017 by Edward Hirsch

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-93123-7

Cover design by Jackie Shepherd

Author photograph Julia Dermansky

e ISBN 978-0-544-93209-8
v1.0317

Dont desert me

just because I stayed up last night

watching The Lost Weekend.

I know Ive spent too much time

praising your naked body to strangers

and gossiping about lovers you betrayed.

Ive stalked you in foreign cities

and followed your far-flung movements,

pretending I could describe you.

Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee

and obsessing over your features

year after jittery year.

Im sorry for handing you a line

and typing you on a screen,

but dont let me suffer in silence.

Does anyone still invoke the Muse,

string a wooden lyre for Apollo,

or try to saddle up Pegasus?

Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,

indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,

pleasance and half wonder, hell,

I have loved you my entire life

without even knowing what you are

or howplease help meto find you.

My dear friend and colleague Andr Bernard first convinced me to write a glossary for How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Everything here flows from that initial idea. Special thanks to Jenna Johnson, Deanne Urmy, Jenny Xu, Laura Brady, and their exemplary team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Susanna Brougham did an excellent job copyediting the manuscript. I am also eager to acknowledge my agent, Liz Darhansoff. I am grateful to the many poets, near and far, who have talked over so many of the topics of poetry with me over the years. Their impress is everywhere apparent. My deep gratitude goes out to Lauren Watel, my love, for her keen intelligence and high standards.

This is a book for writers and readers. It lays out, defines, and characterizes the essential terms of poetry. It has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its small devices and large mysterieshow it works. I hope it will be a companion, pleasurable to read, useful to study. Its intended for both initiated and uninitiated readers, something to keep at hand, a compendium of discoveries that has befriended me. Its a book of familiar and unfamiliar terms, old and new, some with long and complicated histories, others freshly minted. The alphabetical format may feel cool, but the hand that made the art was warm, and this book is animated by the practitioners who made poetry their own: the rational and the irrational, the lettered and the unschooled, those who would storm the barricades and tear down the castle, those who would rebuild it, the high priests of art, the irreverent tricksters, the believers and the skeptics, the long-lived purists and the doomed romantics, the holy eccentrics, the critics, the craftsmen, and the seers (singers, chanters, listeners, readers, writers); my quarrelsome friends, an extended family of makers. Ive tried to figure out what theyve been up to over the centuries.

This book is culled from the much larger book A Poets Glossary. That book was as definitive, inclusive, and international as I could make it. This volume is shorter and more focused. It drills down to what I deem the most crucial terms for understanding and appreciating poetry. It is meant to be manageable, though the reader will still find terms from a wide variety of poetries, oral and written, lyric and epic. It is selective and international. Ive also added a few items and rectified some mistakes. Even in its shorter format, this project has something of the madness of a Borgesian encyclopedia, since every culture has its own poetry, usually in its own language. It would be impossible to include all the central terms in all the languages. Ive explained what I can. Im grounded in our moment, in the history of English and American literature, but Ive continued to look for guidance to Hebrew and Arabic poetry, to Greek and Latin poetry, to the European poetries, east and west, to Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poetry, to Russian and Scandinavian poetry, to Chinese and Japanese poetry, to African, South Asian, and Latin American poetry. Ive relied on many different sourcesliterary, historical, folkloric, anthropological, linguistic, and philosophicaland built on the work of others, but the mistakes are my own. I take responsibility for whats here and whats not. This is the result of a lifetime of engagement.

Ive learned a tremendous amount in doing my reseach. As Ive worked, Ive often found myself transported to different time periods and countries, placing myself here and there, wondering what it would have been like to be a poet in the heady days of eighth-century China, or twelfth-century Provence, or thirteenth-century Florence, or fourteenth-century Andalusia, or fifteenth-century Wales, or seventeenth-century Japan, or early nineteenth-century England, or late nineteenth-century Ireland, or early twentieth-century Russia... I move freely among the bards, scops, and griots, the tribal singers, the poets of courtly love who sang for their mistresses, the court poets who wrote for their supper, the traveling minstrels, the revolutionaries, the flneurs, the witnesses. Ive encountered a series of recurring questions and debates about style and language, like the unresolved argument about the merits of the plain and the baroque style, or about the role of poetry in culture and society. There has been an ongoing quarrel, played out in many different countries, between tradition and innovation, the local and the international, the home-grown and the cosmopolitan. What language does one use, what forms does one employ? To whom is the poet responsible, and to what? Poetry too takes part in conversations about identity and nationalism. Ive been surprised in my research by the sheer number of poetic contests throughout history. We may think of poetry as a noncompetitive activity, or as a competition with oneself, a struggle between the poet and the poem, but poetry competitions have kept cropping up over the years. The aesthetic debates, seldom good-natured, have also been fierce. Ive tried to understand the intensities, to figure out whats at stake, and welcomed the contestants into the tent.

The devices work the magic in poetry, and a glossary gives names to those devices. It unpacks them. I believe its purpose is to deepen the readers initiation into the mysteries. Here, then, is a repertoire of poetic secrets, a vocabulary, some of it ancient, which proposes a greater pleasure in the text, deeper levels of enchantment.

abecedarian The word derives from the names of the first four letters of the alphabet plus the suffix -arius (abecedarius). An alphabetical acrostic in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. The abecedarian, which generally starts with the first letter of the alphabet and runs to the final letter, is an ancient form often employed for sacred works. Most of the acrostics in the Hebrew Bible are alphabetical; Psalm 119, for example, consists of twenty-two eight-line stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The first eight lines all begin with the letter aleph, the next eight lines begin with the letter beth,