01697--carpe diem

Carpe diem is a quotation from Horace's Odes (I, xi) meaning 'seize the day', in other words 'make the best of the present moment'. A common theme or  motif in European  lyric poetry, in which the speaker of a poem argues (often to a hesitant virgin) that since life is short, pleasure should be enjoyed while there is still time. The most celebrated examples in English are Marvell's To His Coy Mistress' (1681) and Herrick's To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time' (1648), which begins 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'. In some Christian poems and sermons, the carpe diem motif warns us to prepare our souls for death, rather than our bodies for bed.

01696--Caroline

Caroline means belonging to the period 1625-49, when Charles I reigned as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This period includes the later metaphysical poets, the early work of Milton, and the so-called 'cavalier poets' Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling.

01695--carol

Carol is a song of religious rejoicing, usually associated with Christmas or Easter in the Christian calendar. In the Middle Ages, however, a carol could be a purely secular song of love or satire. A carol in this earlier sense is a song appropriate for a round dance, composed in regular rhyming stanzas with a refrain or burden: a common form was the four-line stanza rhyming aaab with a two-line burden rhyming bb.

01694--carnivalization

Carnivalization is the liberating and subversive influence of popular humour on the literary tradition, according to the theory propounded by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his works Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and Us World (1965). Bakhtin argued that the overturning of hierarchies in popular carnival—its mingling of the sacred with the profane, the sublime with the ridiculous—lies behind the most 'open'  literary genres, notably menippean satire and the novel, especially since the renaissance. Carnivalized literary forms allow alternative voices to dethrone the authority of official culture: Rabelais, for example, subverts the asceticism of the medieval Church by giving free rein to the bodily profanity of folk festivities. 

01693--canzone

Canzone (plural -oni), a term covering various kinds of medieval Provencal and Italian  lyric poem. The most influential form was the petrarchan canzone, which has five or six stanzas and a shorter concluding envoi (or half-stanza); the lengths of the stanzas (equal in each poem) ranged from seven to twenty lines. 

01692--canto

Canto is a subdivision of an  epic or other narrative poem, equivalent to a chapter in a prose work.

01691--canon

Canon is a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonical. Verb: canonize. 

01690--campus novel

Campus novel is a novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set within the enclosed world of a university (or similar seat of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life. Many novels have presented nostalgic evocations of college days, but the campus novel in the usual modern sense dates from the 1950s: Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) began a significant tradition in modern fiction including John Earth's Giles GoatBoy (1966), David Lodge's Changing Places (1975), and Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels (1982).

01689--Cambridge school

Cambridge school is the name sometimes given to an influential group of English critics associated with the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading figures were I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson. Influenced by the critical writings of Coleridge and of T. S. Eliot, they rejected the prevalent biographical and historical modes of criticism in favour of the 'close reading' of texts. They saw poetry in terms of the reintegration of thought and feeling, and sought to demonstrate its subtlety and complexity, notably in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The Leavises achieved great influence through the journal Scrutiny (1932-53), judging literary works according to their moral seriousness and 'lifeenhancing' tendency. 

01688--caesura

Caesura  is a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line ('medial caesura'), but may appear near the beginning ('initial') or towards the end ('terminal'). 

01687--cadence

Cadence is the rising and falling rhythm of speech, especially that of the balanced phrases in free verse or in prose, as distinct from the stricter rhythms of verse  metre. Also the fall or rise in pitch at the end of a phrase or sentence. Adjective: cadent.

01686--cacophony

Cacophony means harshness or discordancy of sound.  It's the opposite of euphony. Usually the result of awkward alliteration as in tongue-twisters, it is sometimes used by poets for deliberate effect, as in these lines from Robert Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos':

And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top.

01685--Byronic

Byronic means belonging to or derived from Lord Byron (1788-1824) or his works. The Byronic hero is a character-type found in his celebrated narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18), his verse drama Manfred (1817), and other works; he is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. 

01684--Burns stanza or Burns metre

Burns stanza or Burns metre is a six-line stanza rhyming aaabab, the first three lines and the fifth having four stresses, and the fourth and sixth having two stresses. Although it was used much earlier in medieval English romances and Provencal poetry, it is named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96), who used it frequently, as in 'A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter':

Welcome! My bonie, sweet, wee dochter!

Though ye come here a wee unsought for;

And though your comin I hae fought for, Baith Kirk and Queir;

Yet by my faith, ye're no unwrought for, That I shall swear!

01683--burlesque

Burlesque is a kind of parody that ridicules some serious literary work either by treating its solemn subject in an undignified style, or by applying its elevated style to a trivial subject, as in Pope's mock-epic poem 'The Rape of the Lock' (1712-14). Often used in the theatre, burlesque appears in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

01682--burden

Burden is the refrain or chorus of a song; or the main theme of a song, poem, or other literary work. A burden is sometimes distinguished from a refrain in that it starts the song or poem, and stands separate from the stanzas whereas a refrain usually appears as the final part of each stanza.

01681--bucolic poetry or bucolics

Bucolic poetry or Bucolics is another term for pastoral poetry, especially for Virgil's Eclogues (42-37 BCE) and later imitations. More loosely, any verse on rustic subjects. 

01680--broken rhyme

broken rhyme is the splitting of a word at the end of a verse line, to allow a rhyme on a syllable other than the final one, which is transferred to the following line. It is a liberty taken for comic effect in light verse, and more rarely used in serious works. Hopkins employed it frequently: the first line of The Windhover' ends with the first syllable of 'king/dom' to rhyme with 'wing' in line four.

01679--broadside

Broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only, often containing a song or ballad, and sold by wandering pedlars in Britain from the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century, when they were superseded by mass-circulation newspapers; they also appeared in the USA in the late 19th century. The broadside ballads were intended to be sung to a well-known tune; often they related topical events, and some were adopted as folk songs. Broadsides are sometimes called broadsheets.

01678--bricolage

Bricolage is a French term for improvisation or a piece of makeshift handiwork. It is sometimes applied to artistic works in a sense similar to collage: an assemblage improvised from materials ready to hand, or the practice of transforming 'found' materials by incorporating them in a new work.