Glossary of Terms

Note: The glossary is ordered from broad to specific terms in literary studies, rather than ordered alphabetically.

Text: In the humanities, a text can take on many forms—a book, poem, movie, commercial, image, and any other form of written, audio, or visual representation

Genre: Refers to types of creative writing: poetry, fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction 

Form: Similar to genre in that it refers to the type of writing but is more specific; an example of form is the sonnet

Hybrid: A form of writing that crosses two or more genres; similar to how the term “hybrid” is used in biology, but, instead of combining the traits of different species, hybrid writing combines different genres; an example is the prose poem which is a poem in paragraph form

Ekphrasis: A written response to art, in the Greek, “description” of visual art, traditionally; contemporary ekphrasis can also mean a visual response to a written work, or a musical response or original musical art—so, art in any medium responding to art in any medium

Literary or poetic devices: visual, auditory, and figurative elements of imaginative writing; including but not limited to: rhyme, meter, metaphor, repetition, and imagery

Stanza: A group of lines in a poem; like a prose paragraph except the lines may be broken mid-phrase and enjambed; a stanza usually denotes verse paragraphs of the same length

Contrapuntal: A poetry form in which there are two vertical stanzas that can be read individually and also together to create another poem, read horizontally across; this type of poem can, thus, consist of three poems in one

Ars Poetica: A piece of writing that offers advice on how to write poetry or a definition of the art of poetry