Literary terms, age and movements notes

An ode is a lyric of some length, serious in subject and elevated in style. Abrams starts from the Greek song of public praise, then names the English types so that “ode” is not “any emotional poem.” A Pindaric ode (after Pindar) moves in a triad: strophe, antistrophe, epode — turn, counter-turn, stand — once meant for a chorus. A Horatian ode (after Horace) uses a regular stanza and a cooler, meditative voice. An irregular or Cowleyan ode varies line-length and rhyme as the feeling rises. All three are still lyrics: they are not plays and not long narrative poems.

This paper sets two odes. Collins’s Ode to Evening addresses Evening as a quiet female presence and asks to be led through dusk; the stanza is unrhymed, the diction hush and landscape, the mood Horatian rather than a victory-chant. Keats’s set lyric is printed here as Ode to Autumn (the 1820 volume titles it To Autumn): three equal stanzas, fruit, bees, stubble, a cider-press, a choir of gnats. It praises a season, not a general. Gray’s churchyard poem is an elegy, not an ode. Shelley’s To a Skylark is a high lyric of address; keep the word ode for the two poems the list actually names as odes unless a question asks you to compare height of style.

Rule: an ode is a public or ceremonial lyric of praise and thought. A sonnet is fourteen locked lines (Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” is a sonnet). An elegy laments or meditates on death (Gray). Name the type from the job of the poem, not from the size of the feeling.

Imagery is language that makes the senses work: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and the inner sense of movement. Abrams uses the word in two close ways: the pictures a passage calls up, and, more loosely, the figurative language (metaphor, personification) that carries those pictures. A definition that only says “beautiful description” is too weak. Ask: which sense is struck, and what cluster of images the poem repeats.

Keats’s autumn ode is a classroom map of imagery: swell of fruit and sticky honey (taste and touch), the winnower’s hair lifted by the wind (sight and motion), gnats “borne aloft or sinking” (sound and motion). Blake’s “The Tyger” forges the animal in fire, hammer, chain and anvil: the maker’s shop becomes the image of creation. Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” binds night-sky and a woman’s face — dark and bright in one person. Wordsworth’s reaper is heard more than seen: the song fills the vale; the image is of sound hanging in air after the girl is gone.

Imagery is not the same as a single metaphor. A metaphor says A is B. Imagery is the whole sensory field. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” is both: fire-metaphor and a visual-tactile cluster. In an answer, quote a short sensory patch and name the sense. Do not write “the poet uses imagery” and stop.

An elegy in classical metre was any poem in the elegiac couplet. In English, from the Renaissance on, Abrams treats it as a lyric of lament, usually for a death, or as a serious meditation that takes loss as its climate. It is not automatically an ode, and it is not a tragedy (tragedy is drama). The voice may mourn one named person, or a class of the dead, or time itself.

The set elegy is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The curfew knell, the lowing herd, the beetle’s drone, then rows of unmarked graves: the poem does not weep one famous friend. It thinks about villagers whose labour, love and possible genius never reached power or print — “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.” That turn from private grief to the obscure dead is why the poem also feeds the Graveyard heading later in this unit. Addison’s Meditations in Westminster Abbey walks among named tombs in the capital; Gray walks among unnamed mounds in a village. Both look at death; only Gray’s poem is the set elegy.

Do not call Keats’s autumn ode an elegy because the day shortens. Season-close is not a funeral unless the poem’s job is lament. Cowper’s “Light Shining out of Darkness” is a hymn of providence, not an elegy. If a question says “elegy,” start with Gray and the country dead.

Personification gives human action, feeling or speech to a thing, a season, or an abstraction. Abrams: an inanimate object or abstract idea is spoken of as though it were a person. It is a kind of metaphor that stays visible as a figure on the page — Evening walking, Autumn sitting — not a full allegory with a second plotted story.

Collins’s Evening is the clear set case: the poet addresses a “nymph,” a “maid,” and asks her to lead him; landscape becomes a companion. Keats’s Autumn “sits careless on a granary floor,” her hair soft-lifted, or sleeps on a furrow, or crosses a brook like a gleaner, or watches a cider-press: the season has a body in four poses. Gray’s elegy lets “Ambition” and “Grandeur” mock the dead, then answers them; abstractions speak so that the argument can be heard. Blake’s Tyger asks what immortal hand or eye framed the beast — the Maker is addressed as a craftsman; that is related, but the burning animal itself is image more than a talking person.

Keep simile apart. “She walks in beauty, like the night” uses like: that is simile (the woman compared to night), not personification of night. Personification would make Night walk and feel. Train the eye: is a non-human given a human verb without like?

Willing suspension of disbelief is Coleridge’s phrase (Abrams traces it to Biographia Literaria, 1817). The reader or audience chooses not to insist on ordinary fact, so that a poem’s supernatural or invented world can work. It is not gullibility. It is a contract: “I know this is made; I will grant it inner truth while I read.” Coleridge used it for his share of the Lyrical Ballads plan — poems of the supernatural that still feel human — beside Wordsworth’s poems of ordinary life.

On this paper the natural illustration is Christabel, lines 1–55 only (the official limit). Midnight, a castle clock, a damsel praying in the wood, a moan the other side of an oak, one red leaf that the wind is too weak to twirl: nothing here is a police report. The verse asks you to take the night as haunted without asking for a magistrate’s proof. Do not tell the rest of the fragment. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe works the opposite contract: dates, tools, seed-count, as if a true journal. You “believe” Crusoe by accumulation of fact; you “believe” the moan, and the mastiff that some say sees a lady’s shroud, by agreeing to the spell. Name the term for the second kind of faith.

Do not confuse it with imagery. Imagery is sensory language. This term is about the reader’s consent. A student who writes “Coleridge uses supernatural images” has not yet said willing suspension of disbelief. Add the reader’s part: we let the disbelief sleep.

Meter (British spelling in older books: metre) is the counted pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. Abrams: a verse line is measured in feet. An iamb is da-DUM (to-DAY). A trochee is DUM-da (TY-ger). Five iambs make iambic pentameter; four trochees make trochaic tetrameter. Meter is not rhyme. Rhyme is matching end-sounds. A line can have meter without rhyme (Collins’s unrhymed evening ode still has a pulse).

Gray’s elegy walks in iambic pentameter, grouped in quatrains. First line: “The CURfew TOLLS the KNELL of PARTing DAY” — five lifts. Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” uses the same five-beat line inside a sonnet. Blake’s “The Tyger” starts stressed: “TYger TYger, BURNing BRIGHT” — trochaic, and the last foot is often short (catalectic), which is why the chant sounds like a hammer. Cowper’s hymn uses the common short-and-long hymn stanza, not pentameter. Name the beat you can tap; do not call every poem “iambic” by habit.

Why Unit 1 lists meter beside couplet: Neo-Classical verse is famous for a regular iambic line; Pre-Romantic and Romantic poems on this paper keep that line (Gray, Wordsworth, Keats) or break into song-chant (Blake). An answer on meter should scan one set line, not only define “rhythm.”

A couplet is two consecutive lines that rhyme with each other (aa). Abrams: when those two lines are iambic pentameter and the sense often closes with the pair, English criticism calls them a heroic couplet — the stock metre of Neo-Classical argument and satire. A couplet is a unit of two; a quatrain is four. Do not translate couplet as हिन्दी दोहा: दोहा has its own 13+11 matra count. Here it only means a rhyming pair.

This paper does not set a Pope satire in couplets. Hold the term from the glossary, then show how the set poems mostly choose another stanza. Gray’s elegy is the heroic quatrain: iambic pentameter rhyming abab, four lines to a unit, not two. Keats’s autumn ode uses a ten-line stanza. Blake’s “The Tyger” uses four-beat chanting quatrains. Wordsworth’s sonnet ends with a sestet, not a Shakespearean gg couplet. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer is spoken prose comedy, not a couplet-play.

So why is couplet in Unit 1? Because the Neo-Classical age, which this paper still introduces, is the age of the closed pair; Pre-Romantic Gray already opens the line into a churchyard quatrain, and the Romantics on this paper write ode, sonnet, hymn and chant. The couplet is the background metre you name; the set page is often the move away from it.

A picaresque novel (from Spanish pícaro, rogue) follows a low-born trickster through episodic adventures on the road. Abrams: a first-person, loosely plotted sequence of tricks, hunger, masters and escapes; society is shown from below, often satirically. The hero is not a tragic prince. The book does not build one tight causal plot like a later “well-made” novel; it strings episodes.

The only novel on this paper is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It is first-person, and it moves by episodes (storm, island, crop, footprint, Friday). It is not a textbook picaresque: Crusoe is not a city rogue living by theft, and the island is not a picaro’s highway. He keeps accounts, prays, plants, and names himself master. Use Crusoe to show what this paper’s novel is (adventure plus spiritual journal). Use the glossary to show what picaresque means. An answer that forces Crusoe into “pícaro” has mixed the term with the set book.

Hold the distinction for the exam: picaresque = rogue + road + episode + social satire from below. Robinson Crusoe = castaway + labour + providence. Related only in first-person episode, not in the rogue’s ethics.

An epistolary novel is a novel written as letters (sometimes letters plus diaries). Abrams: the story reaches us through documents the characters write to each other. The form can give several voices, delay, misunderstanding, and a feeling of “this was found in a desk.” Eighteenth-century English fiction made the form famous; Baldick and Cuddon still treat it as a standard novel-type of that century.

No set novel on this paper is told as a packet of letters. Robinson Crusoe uses a first-person narrative and journal entries — a cousin of the document-novel, not the letter-novel. Teach the term from Abrams so the definition is ready; do not pretend Crusoe writes to a sister every chapter. The periodical essays of Addison and Steele are letters to the town in a looser sense (the Spectator speaks to readers), but they are essays, not a novel.

Keep three document-forms apart: epistolary = letters; journal-novel = dated private record (Crusoe’s island book); periodical essay = short public piece in a magazine (Unit 1’s last prose term).

A bildungsroman (German: novel of formation) traces a young person’s growth from inexperience into a social and moral self. Abrams: education of the inner life, usually through error, work, love or travel, toward a more settled identity. It is a plot-shape, not a German word to drop without English. Cuddon stresses the apprenticeship of the soul as well as of a trade.

Robinson Crusoe can be described as a cousin of this shape, not as the stock European school-example. The young Crusoe disobeys, is shipwrecked, learns to bake, plant, build, read Providence in accidents, and returns altered. That is formation by labour and faith. It is not a city-education among artists and lovers. Say “growth and conversion on the island” if you use the German term at all; do not claim Defoe wrote a textbook bildungsroman.

Lyrics on this paper are not novels: Blake’s child in “The Lamb” is a catechism voice, not a bildungsroman. Keep the word for long prose of becoming. If the question is only “define,” Abrams’s growth-into-maturity is enough; if it says “illustrate from the paper,” Crusoe’s island schooling is the honest illustration, with the cousin-warning attached.

A comedy of manners is a play (sometimes a novel) that laughs at the codes of a polished class: wit, courtship, snobbery, the right word in the drawing-room. Abrams: the plot turns on social convention more than on deep tragic flaw; language is pointed. Restoration comedy is the stock English type in the glossary. This paper’s play is later: Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Goldsmith uses manners — town polish against country house, Marlow’s ease with barmaids and panic with “ladies,” Mrs Hardcastle’s hunger for London fashion, Tony Lumpkin’s alehouse tricks — but the play’s declared enemy is tearful sentimental comedy, not a Restoration rake-play. Kate “stoops” (pretends a lower rank) to conquer Marlow’s shyness. The laughter is at pretence and at the sentimental fashion of rewarding sighs. Call it a comedy of manners and a laughing comedy against sentiment; do not dump it into Restoration 1670 by habit.

It is not an elegy, not an ode, not Crusoe. Drama terms in Unit 1 (comedy of manners, sentimental comedy, satire) meet in this one set play. Unit 4 will walk scenes. Here you only need the genre: social codes, mistaken inn, a girl who lowers herself to raise a man into sense, and laughter instead of tears.

Satire attacks vice or folly in order to correct it, by laugh, irony or scorn. Abrams: a literary art of diminishing a subject; Horatian satire smiles and talks; Juvenalian satire lashes. It is a mode, not one fixed stanza. An ode may not be satire. A comedy may be. An essay may be.

On this paper, Goldsmith’s play satirises sentimental fashion and town-country snobbery without becoming a sermon. Steele’s and Addison’s periodical essays mock clubs, tombs-tourism, and social types with a moral smile (closer to Horatian). Blake’s “The Tyger” is visionary, not a social satire; do not force the word. Defoe can glance at middle-class money-sense, but Crusoe is not a satire-novel in the glossary’s strong sense.

Satire wants a target (a folly you can name) and a weapon (irony, type-character, reversal). Kate’s pretended barmaid is a satiric device against Marlow’s class-eyes. Sir Roger and the Spectator club are satiric-moral types in Steele. If you cannot name the folly, you have probably written “humour,” not satire.

Sentimental comedy is eighteenth-century comedy that rewards goodness with tears and moral speeches more than with wit. Abrams: middle-class virtue is shown as innately touching; villains repent; the audience is asked to feel, not only to laugh. Richard Steele is the glossary’s English name for the fashion (as playwright of this kind). On this paper Steele is set as a periodical essayist (The Spectator Club), not as a writer of a sentimental play. Still the term belongs in Unit 1 because Goldsmith’s set comedy is written against it.

She Stoops to Conquer is “laughing comedy”: mistakes, an alehouse, a girl in disguise, a town-mad stepmother, her idle son Tony. People look foolish; they are not bathed in pity as a proof of virtue. If an answer calls Goldsmith’s play sentimental comedy, it has taken the enemy’s name for the play itself. Sentimental comedy is the fashion Goldsmith refuses; comedy of manners / laughing comedy is what he writes.

Lamb’s Dream-Children; A Reverie is a later personal essay that does move tears; it is not a sentimental comedy. Keep the word for the stage-type of the 1700s. Tears in an essay ≠ sentimental comedy.

A periodical essay is a short prose piece written for a magazine that appears at fixed intervals. Abrams and Baldick: the English type is the early eighteenth-century Tatler and Spectator — moral, social, urban, light enough for the breakfast table, serious enough to form taste. The speaker is often a persona (Mr Spectator) watching clubs, theatres, fashions. It is not a novel chapter and not a Romantic confession.

The set periodical essays are Steele’s The Spectator Club and Addison’s Meditations in Westminster Abbey. Steele lines up types (the country knight, the merchant, the captain, the lawyer, the man of fashion) so that England can see itself in a club. Addison walks the Abbey’s tombs and thinks of fame, dust and equality in death — a graveyard meditation in essay form, still a Spectator paper, not Gray’s poem. Hazlitt’s The Indian Jugglers and Lamb’s Dream-Children are later personal essays (the “I” of memory and opinion). Contrast them: periodical = public, typed, social; personal = private, remembered, singular. Unit 4 prints all four; Unit 1 only needs the genre-split.

A periodical essay can use satire and personification; it remains an essay because its job is to talk to readers of a number, not to stage a five-act plot and not to lament in quatrains.

Neo-Classical (Abrams also uses Neoclassic) names the literary weather after the Restoration, running through the early and mid eighteenth century — Sitter’s “eighteenth-century poetry” in the named Cambridge companion. Writers take Greek and Roman models as a school of order: proportion, decorum, social man in the city, satire and moral essay, a clear closed line. Reason and urban politeness matter more than private rapture. The heroic couplet is the glossary’s stock metre of this climate, even when this paper’s set poems have already begun to leave it.

On this paper the Neo-Classical face is mainly prose and the comic stage: Addison and Steele’s Spectator manners, Defoe’s circumstantial novel (1719), Goldsmith’s laughing comedy (1773). They still believe that literature forms taste and corrects folly. Gray and Collins are already turning toward dusk, the village dead, and the unrhymed ode; they sit on the edge, which the next heading names Pre-Romantic. Do not call Keats or Wordsworth Neo-Classical. Do not call Goldsmith a Romantic just because the paper’s title says “18th Century Literature” and also contains Romantics — the official movements are separate.

Hold three tests: a model in antiquity or in social reason; a public, correcting voice; a style of polish. If the poem trusts imagination, childhood, or the supernatural night (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats), you have crossed into Romantic ground.

The syllabus joins Pre-Romantic and Romantic in one heading; they are not the same weather. Pre-Romantic (often called the poetry of sensibility in the companions) is the mid-century turn away from town couplet toward melancholy, landscape, evening, the churchyard, and a quieter ode. Feeling starts to outrun polish. On this paper: Gray’s elegy, Collins’s evening ode, Cowper’s hymn of inner darkness and light, and, as a hinge, Blake’s songs — child-voice and tiger-fire that already break Neo-Classical decorum. Sitter’s eighteenth-century map still holds Gray and Collins; Wu and Curran already pull Blake toward Romanticism. In answers, call Gray and Collins Pre-Romantic; call Blake the hinge unless the question groups him with Wordsworth.

Romantic in the named companions and in Norton volume D is the climate around the 1790s–1820s: imagination as a power, nature as teacher, the child and the solitary, the lyric “I,” political aftershocks of the age, and (in Coleridge) the supernatural granted by willing suspension of disbelief. Set names: Wordsworth (“The World Is Too Much with Us,” “The Solitary Reaper”), Coleridge (Christabel 1–55), Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), Shelley (“To a Skylark”), Keats (Ode to Autumn). Lyrical Ballads (1798) is the critical landmark Curran and Wu assume; this paper does not set that volume, but Wordsworth’s two lyrics and Coleridge’s fragment belong to that program — ordinary song, and a haunted night.

Contrast to write in one sentence: Pre-Romantic feels the churchyard and the dusk inside an eighteenth-century stanza; Romantic makes imagination and nature the law of the poem. Lamb and Hazlitt are Romantic-age essayists (personal, not Spectator-club). Goldsmith and Addison are not Romantics. Defoe is earlier still. Keep the labels on the right decades.

Realism as a glossary term (Abrams, Baldick) is a mode that represents ordinary life, things, and motives without romance-idealization. It is not yet the later nineteenth-century French school as a named exam heading; on this paper it names a way of writing that trusts circumstance. Detail is not ornament. Detail is how the world is claimed to be there.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the set illustration: dates, latitudes, biscuit, seed, tools, the labour of a fence, the shock of a footprint. The island is made believable by inventory. That is prose realism inside an adventure. Addison’s Abbey essay also walks real stone and named dust; Steele’s club types feel like a street of London. They are still essays. Romantic lyrics on this paper are not “unreal,” but their truth is imaginative (a skylark as spirit, Autumn as a gleaner). Do not call Keats a realist because fruit is sticky. Sensory richness is imagery; realism is the claim that common fact, work and social life are enough for art.

Exam trap: realism ≠ “true story.” Crusoe is fiction that imitates a true journal. Realism ≠ “sad.” Gray’s elegy is grave, not a realist novel. If the question is realism, start with Defoe’s circumstantial method, then, if needed, the social typicality of the Spectator.

Graveyard poetry is a mid-eighteenth-century line of poems set among tombs, night, owls, bells, and the thought of death. Cuddon and Baldick treat it as a recognizable cluster of the age of sensibility: melancholy, the churchyard, the equal dust of the obscure. It is a climate inside Pre-Romantic verse, not a separate century. It is not Gothic fiction (no set novel here is a haunted castle-romance), and it is not tragedy.

Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is the set masterpiece of the line: curfew, beetle, ivy-mantled tower, “mute inglorious” dead. Addison’s Meditations in Westminster Abbey is the essay neighbour: the same mortality, in marble and public names rather than village mounds. Collins’s Ode to Evening is dusk and quiet, not a tomb-poem; mention it for mood, not as a second graveyard elegy. Keats’s autumn ode watches a season die into stubble; that is seasonal close, not Graveyard poetry. Coleridge’s wood at midnight is supernatural-Romantic, not Gray’s moral churchyard.

Write the heading as: night or churchyard + meditation on death + often the unnamed poor. Gray carries the movement; Addison is the prose echo if the question allows the essay.

The paper’s title is 18th Century Literature; the official movements still run into the Romantic decades, which is why Unit 3 prints Wordsworth to Keats. Realism here is a mode, not a separate monarch’s reign. Graveyard poetry is a Pre-Romantic cluster, not a fourth century.