Literary terms, anyone?

[stacer]

There's this term that's at the tip of my tongue, but I can't think of it. I need the word ASAP (for a paper due tomorrow).

I'm reading Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and in it, he's got about 5 or 6 poems directed at a particular person or two. One is the dedication, to his nurse, but the rest are at the end in a section titled "Envoys," which isn't exactly a precise term. The word I keep thinking of is "epigraph," but that's not right, either.

Poem titles include "To My Mother," "To My Name-Child," "To Willie and Henrietta," and "To Any Reader."

Any idea?

[JP Dogberry]

Epithet?

[Fellfrosch]

Epigram, I believe.

[stacer]

Except that I've looked up epigram, and it refers to a short poem, and most of these are pretty long, at least compared to the couplets in the examples.

If anyone else has any ideas, I welcome them. I don't really *need* the term, but it'd be nice to have (if it exists).

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

if it's really long, I"m going back to my "ode" suggestion earlier.

[Oldie Black Witch]

Eponymous, perhaps?

[Fellfrosch]

Aside from the fact that naming different style of poetry is silly, I don't think you should be too worried about the length of an epigram. Rules, more so in literature than anywhere else, are made to be broken.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

well, permit me to disagree. THere comes a point where worrying about what category a poem fits into is useless, but being able to identify things like sonnets and haiku and so forth can be helpful.

And I'm sorry, "epigram" means short. "Epigrammatic" has come to mean someone summarizing an idea into a tight phrase, often without enough substance. WHen you get a lengthy poem, it's no longer sensible to call it an epigram. And that's looking at it from a descriptive linguistic behavior.

[stacer]

At any rate, it was just for the purposes of a category in an ungraded assignment, which is turned in now. So it's no big deal. I called it "To a Reader." It really didn't matter what I called it as long as my teacher understood what I meant.