What is pararhyme? We all know what rhyme is: cat rhymes with mat, love with dove, and other pleasingly overused examples. But pararhyme is a little different, because, as its name suggests, it sits somewhere between full rhyme and no rhyme. The subtleties of pararhyme – sometimes known as slant […]
‘Stream of consciousness’ is a common term in literary criticism, and often used to describe the distinctive style employed by some of the most famous writers of the twentieth century. But what is ‘stream of consciousness’? Why a ‘stream’? A few words of introduction may help to clarify this common, […]
What is the id? And why is it called the ‘id’? To answer these key questions, it’s necessary to think about how the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), thought of the mind. Freud believed that the mind or ‘psyche’ was composed of several different elements: an ego (which we […]
Here’s a question for you: who invented both the Shakespearean sonnet and blank verse? Yes, that’s right: it was a sixteenth-century poet named … Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-47). It was Surrey who adapted the Italian sonnet form, devising the rhyme scheme that would later be used (and […]
T. S. Eliot said it didn’t exist. Robert Frost likened it to playing tennis with the net down. T. E. Hulme thought it was one way in which English verse might reinvent itself for the modern age. Walt Whitman is credited with inventing it. What is free verse? And what’s […]