Poetry Terms

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Poetry Terms
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Alliteration

• Repetition of the same initial sounds
• Sally sold seashells at the seashore

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Allusion

• Reference to a Person, Place, Thing from that is
  well known (like a historical event or person)
• In the song, Candle in the Wind Norma Jean
  refers to Marilyn Monroe

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Apostrophe

• Words that are spoken to a person who is absent
  or imaginary, or to an object or abstract idea.

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Assonance

• Repetition of the same vowel sounds in a line
• The cat in the hat sat on the mat

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Ballad

• narrative poem written in four-line stanzas,
  characterized by swift action and narrated in a
  direct style.

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Blank Verse

• A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic
  pentameter.
• Here are the opening blank verse lines of
  "Birches" When I see birches bend to left and
  right / Across the lines of straighter darker
  trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging
  them.

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Cacophony

• Harsh, unpleasant sounding words
• Like the sounds of ck

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Caesura

• A pause or break in a line (commas, period, dash)
• The boy, who drank
• He always felt heavy

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Closed Form

• A type of form or structure in poetry
  characterized by regular and consistent elements
  such as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern

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Concrete Poem

• Poem that takes the shape of the object it
  describes.

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Connotation

• Implied meaning of a word
• The word mother caring, kind

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Couplet

• A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not
  constitute a separate stanza in a poem.
• Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as
  in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth
  brings / That then I scorn to change my state
  with kings."

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Denotation

• Dictionary definition of a word

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Dialect

• A sound of language specific to an area

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Diction

• Word Choice in a piece of writing

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Elegy

• A lyric poem that laments the dead.

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Elision

• The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable
  to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
• Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense"
  "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."

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End-stopped Line

• There is some sort of punctuation at the end of
  the line
• After the days journey, he was tired.

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Epic

• A long narrative poem that records the adventures
  of a hero.
• Epics typically chronicle the origins of a
  civilization and embody its central values.

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Epigram

• A brief witty poem, often satirical.

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Euphony

• Euphony is derives from Greek meaning "good
  sound".
• Euphony is refers to pleasant spoken sound that
  is created by smooth consonants such as "ripple'.

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Foot

• A metrical unit composed of stressed and
  unstressed syllables.
• For example, an iamb or iambic foot is
  represented by ?', that is, an unaccented
  syllable followed by an accented one.
• Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I
  know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic
  foot.

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Form

• Poetry takes on many forms.
• One common type of poetry is rhyming couplets
• In free-form poetry, rhyme and meter are loose,
  allowing for complex rhythms and greater
  contextual freedom.
• Poems can be long or short. As a result, the
  "types" of poetry will never be completely
  standardized.

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Free Verse

• Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or
  rhyme.
• The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier
  poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to
  an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme
  scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad.

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Haiku

• A Japanese poem composed of three unrhymed lines
  of five, seven, and five syllables. Haiku often
  reflect on some aspect of nature.

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Hyperbole

• Overexaggeration
• Her butt is as big as New York
• Im just gonna die because know I know he likes me

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Iambic

• An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
  one, as in to-DAY.
• A metrical unit composed of stressed and
  unstressed syllables.

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Ideology

• The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and
  aspirations of an individual, group, class, or
  culture.

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Idiom

• A word or phrase of expression
• Getting in a car, but on a plane

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Imagery

• The ability to see or picture a scene or line
  from the poem through your senses

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Irony

• When one thing is said or done or expected to be
  done and the opposite occurs

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Jargon

• unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing
• language that is characterized by uncommon or
  pretentious vocabulary and convoluted syntax and
  is often vague in meaning
• the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a
  particular trade, profession, or group

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Limerick

• Limericks are short sometimes bawdy, humorous
  poems of consisting of five Anapestic (3
  syllables with stress on 3rd syllable up the
  hill) lines.
• Lines 1, 2, and 5 of a Limerick have seven to ten
  syllables and rhyme with one another.
• Lines 3 and 4 have five to seven syllables and
  also rhyme with each other.

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• Edward Lear
• There was an Old Man with a gong,Who bumped at
  it all day longBut they called out, 'O
  law!You're a horrid old bore!'So they smashed
  that Old Man with a gong.

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Line

• Single line of words in a poem

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Metaphor

• Comparison between 2 unlike things without using
  like or as
• She is a rose

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Meter

• The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems

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Modernism

• refers to the early part of the twentieth century
  sometimes beginning with the First World War in
  1914, and continuing through the 1930s or so
  perhaps up to the Second World War.
• Much experimentation with new forms

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Narrative Ballad

• A poem that tells a story

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Ode

• Odes are long poems which are serious in nature
  and written to a set structure.
• John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode To A
  Nightingale" are probably the most famous
  examples of this type of poem

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Onomatopoeia

• Written like it sounds
• Buzz, Zang, Plop, Crackle

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Open Form

• A type of structure or form in poetry
  characterized by freedom from regularity and
  consistency in such elements as rhyme, line
  length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic
  structure.
• E.E. Cummings

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Paradox

• a statement that seems self-contradictory or
  absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.

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Pastiche

• a work whose style imitates that of another
  writer or period.
• Pastiche differs from parody in that it is
  usually intended as a kind of tribute rather than
  a satire.

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Pastoral

• a  poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful,
  idealized way for example of shepherds or country
  life.

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Persona

• A persona, from the Latin for mask, is a
  character taken on by a poet to speak in a
  first-person poem.
• Margaret Atwood uses the persona of a siren in
  her 'Siren Song', a poem that seduces its
  listeners with dissimulation.

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Personification

• Human quality to non-human things
• The tree screamed when he cut it.

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Poem

• designed to convey experiences, ideas, or
  emotions in a vivid and imaginative way,
  characterized by the use of language chosen for
  its sound and suggestive power and by the use of
  literary techniques such as meter, metaphor, and
  rhyme.
• Written in verse, not prose

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Poet

• A writer of poems

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Poetry

• Poetry is piece of literature written by a poet
  in meter or verse expressing various emotions
  which are expressed by the use of variety of
  techniques including metaphors, similes and
  onomatopoeia.

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Prose Poem

• poem that does not use line breaks.
• This still allows the poet to use alliteration,
  metaphor, ambiguity, personification, and many
  other poetic techniques, but it can still be
  strange to see a poem that goes all the way to
  the right-hand margin.

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Realism

• Realism is an aesthetic attitude stressing the
  truthful treatment of material, the normal and
  everyday, life as it truly is

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Repetition

• deliberate use of the same words or phrases
  multiple times to achieve a sense of expectation.
  
• The reader comes to expect the word to be
  repeated.
• Then the poet can continue to use the word or
  phrase with one effect or choose to not use that
  expected word for another effect.
• In music the refrain or chorus

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Rhyme

• The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds
  in two or more words. The following stanza of
  "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the
  third line rhyming with the first and the fourth
  with the second
• Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people
  on the pavement looked at himHe was a gentleman
  from sole to crownClean favored and imperially
  slim.

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Rhythm

• The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of
  verse. In the following lines from "Same in
  Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and
  syllables are underlined
• I said to my baby,Baby take it slow....Lulu
  said to LeonardI want a diamond ring

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Run-on line

• Also known as enjambment
• There is no punctuation at the end of a line,
  instead the thought continues on to the next line

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Simile

• Comparison using Like or as
• She is like a rose

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Slang (part of diction)

• highly informal speech that is outside
  conventional or standard usage and consists both
  of coined words and phrases and of new or
  extended meanings attached to established terms
• slang develops from the attempt to find fresh and
  vigorous, colorful, pungent, or humorous
  expression, and generally either passes into
  disuse or comes to have a more formal status

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Sonnet

• A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.
• The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged
  as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming
  abab cdcd efef gg.

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Stanza

• A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in
  the same form--either with similar or identical
  patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations
  from one stanza to another.

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Stress

• Stress is the emphasis that falls on certain
  syllables and not others
• the arrangement of stresses within a poem is the
  foundation of poetic rhythm.

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Syntax

• The grammatical order of words in a sentence or
  line of verse or dialogue. The organization of
  words and phrases and clauses in sentences of
  prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following
  example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object
  order) is inverted
• "Whose woods these are I think I know."

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Terza rima

• poetry written in three-line stanzas (or
  tercets) linked by end-rhymes patterned aba,
  bcb, cdc, ded, efe, etc. There is no specified
  number of stanzas in the form, but poems written
  in terza rima usually end with a single line or a
  couplet rhyming with the middle line of the last
  tercet.

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Tone

• The implied attitude of a writer toward the
  subject and characters of a work

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Understatement

• A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker
  says less than what he or she means the opposite
  of exaggeration. The last line of Frost's
  "Birches" illustrates this literary device "One
  could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

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Ut pictura poesis

• As is painting so is poetry