It at last grew so small

He knew nothing at all,

And now he's a college professor.

(Noam Kuzar)

Mock epic

A mock heroic (or mock epic) poem imitates the elevated style and conventions (invocations of the Gods, descriptions of armour, battles, extended similes etc.) of the epic genre in dealing with a frivolous or minor subject. The mock heroic has been widely used to satirise social vices such as pretentiousness, hypocrisy, superficiality, etc. The inappropriateness of the grandiose epic style highlights the trivial and senseless nature of the writer's target, as in Pope's The Rape of the Lock.

Ode

An ode is a rhymed lyric, often in the form of an address, serious in subject, usually exhalted in style and varied or irregular in metre. The first odes were written by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. A version of the ode which imitated the Pindaric ode in style and matter but simplified the stanza pattern became very popular in seventeenth-century England. The Romantic poets at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote some of their finest verses in the form of odes, for example John Keats and P.B. Shelley. The popularity of the ode continued while the classics formed the basis of English education. By the middle of the Victorian period, however, it was considered old-fashioned and had fallen out of use.

Pastoral

Pastoral poetry is an ancient literary form which deals with the lives of shepherds, and the idyllic aspects of rural life in general, and typically draws a contrast between the innocence of a simple life and the corruption of city and especially court life. Pastorals were first written by the Greek poet Theocritus in the third century BC. Edmund Spenser's Shepherdes Calender (1579) introduced the pastoral into English literature and throughout the Renaissance it was a very popular poetic style. In later centuries there was a reaction against the term 'pastoral' to refer to any work in which the main character withdraws from ordinary life to a place close to nature where he can gain a new perspective on life.

Romance

A form of narrative poetry which developed in twelfth-century France. The word 'romance' refers to the French language which evolved from a dialect of the Roman language, Latin. The plot of these poems usually centres around a single knight who fights at tournaments, slays dragons and undergoes a series of adventures in order to win the heart of his heroine. Romances introduced the idealises and idolises his beloved, who is usually another man's wife (marriage among the medieval nobility was usually for economic or political reasons). The lover suffers agonies for his heroine but remains devoted to her and shows his love by adhering to a rigorous code of behaviour both in battles and in his courtly conduct.

Sonnet

The term sonnet comes from the Italian word 'sonetto', which means 'little song or sound'. In a sonnet a poet expresses his thoughts and feelings in fourteen lines. The sonnet originated in Italy, where it was popularised by the fourteenth- century poet Petrarch. In the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet the first eight lines - the octave - introduce the subject while the last six lines - the sestet - provides a comment and express the personal feelings of the poet. The rhyming scheme is usually ABBA-ABBA-CDC-CDC. The first poet to introduce the Italian sonnet England was Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt's sonnets are largely translations or imitations of those of Petrarch. However, he changed the rhyming scheme of the sestet to CDDC-EE, thus creating a quatrain (four lines) and a couplet (two lines). The Earl of Surrey developed the sestet even further, separating the couplet from the quatrain and using it to comment on the previous twelve lines. The final pattern for the English sonnet comprised of three quatrains (four lines) and a couplet (two lines) with the following rhyming scheme: ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG. This is the sonnet form that Shakespeare inherited, and indeed this form is often referred to as the Shakespearean sonnet.