Home › Glossary › Letter E

Elliptical lyric

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A lyric poem deliberately omitting key words or ideas for ambiguity

Detailed Definition
Elliptical lyric is a contemporary poetic mode characterized by syntactic gaps, ambiguous pronouns, and withheld context, inviting active reader interpretation; associated with poets like Jorie Graham, it reflects postmodern skepticism toward transparent meaning and stable subjectivity.
Example
Example in poetry:
Jorie Graham’s “The End of Beauty” omits logical connectors, forcing reader inference; Lucie Brock-Broido’s elliptical lyrics fracture syntax to evoke emotional states; Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” uses gaps to imply absence; Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” employs elliptical lyric to convey racial microaggressions; Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris” uses sparse, fragmented lines to suggest spiritual dialogue
Additional Notes
A lyric poem using syntactic omission and fragmentation to create compressed, suggestive effects. Related to imagism but emphasizes grammatical incompleteness. Contemporary form influenced by modernist compression. Study how deletion creates charged spaces.
Also Known As
Compressed lyric Condensed personal poem Abbreviated subjective verse Truncated emotional poem
Skip to main content