Bathos occurs when elevated language, solemn feeling, or grand subject matter collapses into something disproportionately petty, commonplace, or ridiculous. Unlike a carefully managed anticlimax, bathos is often associated with excessive sentiment or an awkward failure to sustain seriousness, though poets can employ it intentionally for comic or satirical effect. In poetry, it exposes inflated rhetoric and unstable emotions by placing high aspirations beside low realities. The resulting tonal fall can make readers laugh, cringe, or reconsider the value of poetic grandeur.

Bathos is a comic or embarrassing collapse from elevated style into triviality, sentimentality, or absurdity. A solemn elegy that suddenly worries about a misplaced hat might create bathos. It can be intentional satire, but unintentional bathos often signals a mismatch between diction, subject, and emotional scale.