Raven = D.S. Raven, Latin Metre: an introduction, London 1965

Halporn et al. = J.W. Halporn, M. Ostwald & T.G. Rosenmeyer, The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry, rev. ed., Indianapolis/Cambridge/Norman 1980 (and later reprints).

lyric:  literally “(sung to) the lyre”; this adjective refers generally to poetry that mixes various kinds of rhythmical units, not just repeating the same kind of rhythm over and over, in order to form a larger, rhythmically varied stanza.  The meters used by Roman poets who wrote “lyrics” in Latin were based on meters used by Greek poets, whose poems were in fact usually sung to the lyre or another stringed instrument, hence the name.

carmen, carminis (n.):  Latin word for “sung poem,” often used to refer to lyric poems such as Catullus’ poems, or Horace’s Odes (as opposed to his saturae, epistulae, or epodes—on the last category, see below).

stichic:  literally “by line”; this adjective refers to poetry in the form of repetition of a single rhythmic line, rather than the mixture of different lines within a stanza to form a rhythmically varied unit.  It is sometimes (not always) used to contrast a style of poetry with lyric’s stanza format.  (But of course lyric poetry can include some repeated lines in a particular metrical scheme as well, so the contrast is not complete.)

ode:  Greek word meaning literally “song”; originally a term for a single choral lyric poem with no responding stanza (antistrophe). In Latin lyric it refers to a lyric stanza, or to a series of stanzas that form one poem.  Horace’s Odes, or Carmina, are almost all in the form of groups of stanzas of four lines each.

epode:  Greek word meaning literally “added song” or “additional song”; originally a term for the stanza with no responding stanza sometimes added at the end of a choral stasimon in Greek drama.  In describing some of the poems of the Greek poet Archilochus, and in Latin lyric, it refers to poetry composed in units of two lines, each with a different meter (or at least a different number of feet, metra, of the same general rhythm), and (usually) with the first line longer than the second.

Aeolic meters:  the types of lyric meters used by the Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus (the “Aeolian” poets), and the Athenian dramatists in their choral odes, and imitated by Latin lyric poets (Plautus in his cantica, Catullus, Horace, Seneca in his choral lyrics, Statius, and later poets such as Ambrosius, Boethius and Ausonius).  Aeolic meters are based on a choriambic nucleus, îđî, with the addition of iambic, trochaic or related (e.g. cretics or bacchiacs) elements at the beginning or end of the line; sometimes another choriamb or two is added.  One of the most common Aeolic metrical units is the glyconic line, ňň îđîďî.  Also see Raven, Ch. 9, pp. 133-150 (§§127-145), and Halporn et al. p. 97-102.