Bio: Entries: Allelograph - "A variant form of a word used in the vicinity of the basic form itself, as in (...); and Auden's 'I am sorry I'm not sorry' ('I am' and 'I'm')." Alliteration - "In modern verse, alliteration has usually been a secondary ornament, although poets as unlike as Whitman, Swinburne, Hardy, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and Muldoon have made extensive and skillful use of it." Analyzed Rhyme - "The rhyme words in the three quatrains of one of W.H. Auden's 'Five Songs' demonstrate the procedure: 'began /flush /flash / gun // pass / relief / laugh / peace // seen / reproach / reach / own.'" Anglo-Italian Sonnet - "Examples include Thomas Hardy's 'Hap' (abab cdcd efeffe), W. B. Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan' (abab cdcd efgefg), and W. H. Auden's 'Who's Who' (ababcdcd efggfe)." Blason - "Both Gerard Manley Hopkins (in 'The Habit of Perfection') and W. H. Auden (in 'Precious Five') produced blasons addressed to the speaker's own body." Bucolic - "In the present loose usage, the expression connotes simply with a rustic background-- as in W.H. Auden's mixed sequence called Bucolics-- and is not necessarily restricted to verse with the conventional pastoral elements." Calypso - "In 1939, W. H. Auden wrote 'Calypso,' in which accents on certain syllables may suggest Caribbean pronunciation." Canonical Hours - "The seven periods of the day set aside for prayers of a specified sort: matins (with lauds), prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and complin; the structural and thematic basis of W. H. Auden's Horae Canonicae, in which the order is somewhat rearranged to end with "Lauds." Clerihew - "Bentley himself wrote dozens, and some of the best recent examples are the work of W. H. Auden." Commentary - "Infrequently used for creative works; the subtitle of W.H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror is A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest." Commonplace Book - "The term is also sometimes applied to private collections of favorite pieces of literature, such as the poetical miscellanies of Elizabethan times. It is in this sense that W. H. Auden's A Certain World is a commonplace book." Conversation Piece - "Among modern writers, Robert Frost and W. H. Auden-- openly imitating Horace --have produced conversation poems." Detective Story - "The distinguished English poet C. Day Lewis, under the pen name Nicholas Blake, wrote an entertaining series of detective novels with a hero supposedly based on Day Lewis's friend, W. H. Auden." Diminishing Age - "Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden continued as the leading poetic voices, to be joined by Dylan Thomas during his brief, intense career." Eclogue - "W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety is subtitled A Baroque Eclogue." Ekphrasis - "In some cases, such as Robert Browning's 'Fra Lippo Lippi' or Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan,' a real graphic work is involved; in other cases-- sometimes called 'notional ekphrasis' --the work is imaginary, like the shield of Achilles described in the Iliad (XVIII) and Auden's 'The Shield of Achilles.'" Encomium - Appears in list of English poets who have written encomiastic verse. Englyn - "The form has been mentioned in passing from time to time by Robert Graves and W. H. Auden." Epigone - "W. H. Auden's 'The Epigoni' (1955) furnishes a witty and sympathetic glimpse of epigones." Epitaph - "Many prominent writers-- notably Jonson, Milton, Pope, and Auden --have left epitaphs they wrote in tribute to the dead." Galgenhumor - "W. H. Auden mentioned the galgenhumor in the gravedigger's song in Hamlet." Horatian Satire - "Much of Pope's satire is Horatian, as is that common to the comedy of manners or novels like those of John P. Marquand and light verse like that of W. H. Auden." Invention - "If poets devise a new stanza-- as Hardy, Yeats, Auden, and Larkin have done --they have adhered to convention in using a stanza at all but have displayed invention in the creation of something new." Kenning - "Bodies of water seem to challenge poets to find new names to call them, as witness the 'undried sea, / Houses for fishes' in Auden's 'The Wanderer' and the 'whaleroad' in Robert Lowell's 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.'" Letters - "Numerous modern poets have written poems in the form of the letter; (...) W. H. Auden's long funny 'Letter to Lord Byron,' (...)." Limerick - "Limericks have been written by the most distinguished modern poets, including Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, as well as by hundreds of humble, anonymous vernacular writers whose output has been gathered in prodigious collections by Gershon Legman." Lyric - "The tradition has endured into the twenty-first century, from Hardy and Yeats through Auden and Dylan Thomas to Larkin and Geoffrey Hill in England and Louise Gluck and W. S. Merwin in the United States." Modernist Period (English) - "In the works of Years, Eliot, and W. H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose poems were posthumously published in 1918), a new poetry emphatically emerged." Neoclassicism - Appears in list of writers "on many issues at one with neoclassicism." Occasional Verse - "Many poems of our own age, including Yeats's 'September 1913' and 'Easter 1916' and Auden's 'September 1, 1939,' are occasional." Old English Versification - "Some modern poets have attempted to use the measure: (...) W. H. Auden throughout his long poem The Age of Anxiety much more strictly; (...)" Opera - "For later literature in English, the operas of Mozart and Wagner proved to be most influential, particularly for George Bernard Shaw, who wrote a book on Wagner and appropriated certain operatic devices and effects in Man and Superman and other plays, and for W. H. Auden, who wrote translations and also an occasional libretto." Pastoral Elegy - "Accordingly, almost any poet's elegy for another poet-- such as W. H. Auden's for W. B. Yeats-- will display some pastoral elements." Poikilomorphism - "W. H. Auden's 'Leap Before You Look' rhymes abab bbaa baab abba aabb baba-- in effect, turning itself inside out." Quantitative Verse - Appears in list of "English poets [who] have experimented with quanitative verse forms." Quatrain - "W. H. Auden's 'Leap Before You Look' rhymes abab bbaa baab abba aabb baba-- in effect, turning itself inside out."k
Rhyme Royal - Appears in list of poets who have written in rhyme royal. Sapphic - Appears in list of poets who have written in sapphic measure. Satyr Play - "W. H. Auden applied 'miniature satyr play' to the intermezzo called 'The Judgment of Calliope' in The Bassarids." Sestina - Appears in list of those poets who have practiced the sestina with success in English. Sonnet - Syllabic Verse - Terza rima - Tombeau - Translation - Transliteration - Transverse Alliteration -