“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.”
Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
“Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
Emerson, “Concord Hymn”
Iambic – poetic meter of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. The iambic foot is the most common foot in English.
Ideas – views, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, presented by the author in his work, on such subjects as human nature, life, society, politics, philosophy, morality, religion, art, etc. Sometimes these ideas are explicit (plainly and deliberately presented by the author) and occasionally they are implicit (implied or hinted by the author, at times unintentionally).
Idiom – an expression whose meaning as a whole is different from the meaning of the separate words comprising the expression would lead one to expect. (John has to work. How do you do?) Idiom also means a form or forms of expression characteristic of an author. (Henry James’s idiom is often difficult.)
Idyll (also spelled Idyl) – a poem of moderate length presenting in simple fashion the picturesque scenes or incidents, usually of rustic life (Whittier’s “Snowbound”, Burn’s “The Cotter’s Saturday night”).
Image – a way of representing in a literary work a thought, feeling, attitude, or point of view of the author. It is done by some sort of representation or symbol which graphically sets forth the idea. In a sense, it is a form of metaphor, on a larger scale than an ordinary figure of speech, but not so large as an allegory.
“It is a curious thing that the part played by recurrent images in raising, developing, sustaining, and repeating emotions in the tragedies (of Shakespeare) has not, so far as I know, ever been noticed. It is a part somewhat analogous to the action of a recurrent theme or “motif” in a musical fugue or sonata, or in one of Wagner’s operas…
“(In Romeo and Juliet) the beauty and ardour of young love are seen by Shakespeare as the radiating glory of sunlight and starlight in a dark world. The dominant image is light, every form and manifestation of it: the sun, moon, stars, fire, lightening, the flash of gunpowder, and the reflected light of beauty and love; while by contrast we have night, darkness, clouds, rain, mist, and smoke….
“If we look closely (at Hamlet) we see this is partly due to the number of images of sicknesses, disease or blemish of the body, in the play, and we discover that the idea of an ulcer or tumor, as descriptive of the unwholesome condition of Denmark morally, on the whole the domineering image…”
Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us
Imagery – a general term in literature for the main sensory figures of speech . Anything that affects or appeals to the reader’s senses; sight, sound touch, taste or smell.
Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.Richard Wilbur, “A Late Aubade”
Impropriety - the use of words in an incorrect sense. (In “perpetrate an act of kindness”, the use of perpetrate is not correct, for that word should be used only with an offensive result.) Also, using a word in the wrong part of speech is a common kind of impropriety.
Incident – any event or occurrence in a narrative. A series of related incidents when forming a unit in a story is called an episode. Therefore, an incident is usually part of an episode.
Induction or Inductive reasoning – the method of modern science, reasoning from a part to a whole, or drawing a general conclusion from particular cases. (From the many times that I have been wakeful after drinking coffee, I conclude