Poetry Terms from the Norton Poetry Anthology.
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| 77489481 | Alliteration | The repetition of sounds in nearby words, most often involving the initial consonants of words (and sometimes the internal consonants in stressed syllables). | |
| 77489482 | Allusion | An indirect reference to a text, myth, event, or person outside the poem itself. | |
| 77489483 | Ambiguity | The ability to mean more than one thing. | |
| 77489484 | Analogy | Resemblance in certain respects between things that are otherwise unlike; also, the use of such likeness to predict other similarities. | |
| 77489486 | Anaphora | Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines. | |
| 77489487 | Assonance | The repetition of vowel sounds in a line or series of lines. | |
| 77489488 | Aubade | A lyric about the dawn | |
| 77489489 | Ballad | A narrative poem, impersonally related, that is (or originally was) meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases), the earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to person through generations. | |
| 77489490 | Ballad Stanza | A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. | |
| 77489491 | Blank Verse | Unrhymed iambic pentameter | |
| 77489492 | Caesura | A sign, used in scansion, that marks a natural pause in speaking a line of poetry. | |
| 77489493 | Concrete Poetry | An attempt to supplement (or replace) verbal meaning with visual devices from painting and sculpture. A true concrete poem cannot be spoken; it is viewed, not read | |
| 77489494 | Confessional Poem | A relatively new (or recently defined) kind of poetry in which the speaker focuses on the poet´s own psychic biography. | |
| 77489495 | Connotation | What is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly and directly describes | |
| 77489496 | Controlling Metaphors | Metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem. | |
| 77489497 | Conventions | Standard ways of saying things in verse, employed to achieve certain expected effects. Conventions may pertain to style or content. | |
| 77489498 | Couplet | A pair of lines, almost always rhyming, that form a unit. | |
| 77489500 | Denotation | The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase | |
| 77489501 | Dramatic Poetry | Poetry written in the voice of one or more characters assumed by the poet. | |
| 77489502 | Dramatic Monologue | A poem written in the voice of a character, set in a specific situation, and spoken to someone. | |
| 77489503 | Echo | A reference that recalls a word, phrase, or sound in another text. | |
| 77489504 | Elegy | In classical times, any poem on any subject written in "elegiac" meter (dactylic couplets comprising a hexameter followed by a pentameter line), but since the Renaissance usually a formal lament for the death of a particular person. | |
| 77489505 | End Stop | A line break that coincides with the end of the sentence | |
| 77489506 | English (Shakespearean) Sonnet | Three four-line stanzas and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. | |
| 77489507 | Enjambment | The use of a line that "runs on" to the next line, without pause, to complete its grammatical sense | |
| 77489509 | Epic | A long poem, in a continuous narrative often divided into "books," on a great or serious subject. Traditionally, it celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, using elevated language and a grand, high style but later epics have been more personal and less formal in structure. | |
| 77489510 | Epigram | Originally any poem carved in stone but in modern usage a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the end/ | |
| 77489511 | Extended Metaphor | Detailed and complex metaphors that extend over a long section of a poem | |
| 77489513 | Figures of Speech | Uses of a word or words that go beyond the literal meaning to show or imply a relationship, evoking a further meaning. | |
| 77489515 | Free Verse | Poetry that does not follow the rules of regularized meter and strict form. | |
| 77489516 | Heroic Couplet | A pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. | |
| 77489518 | Image | A mental representation of a particular thing able to be visualized | |
| 77489519 | Irony | A figure in which what is stated is the opposite of what is meant or expected. | |
| 77489520 | Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet | An octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines); typically rhymed abbaabba cdecde, it has many variations that still reflect the basic division into two parts separated by a rhetorical turn of argument. | |
| 77489521 | Limerick | A five-line light poem, usually in anapestic rhythm. The first, second, and fifth lines are rhymed trimeter; lines three and four are rhymed dimeter. The rhymes are frequently eccentric, and the subject matter is often nonsensical or obscene. | |
| 77489522 | Lyric | Originally a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Now, a lyric is the most common verse form: any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, usually expressing personal concerns rather than describing a narrative or dramatic situation. | |
| 77489523 | Masculine Rhyme* | Rhymes that consist of a single stressed syllable. This is the most common form of end rhyme in English | |
| 77489525 | Metaphor | figure of speech that relies on a likeness or analogy between two things to equate them and thus suggest a relationship between them. | |
| 77489526 | Meter | The formal organization of the rhythm of a line into regular patterns | |
| 77489527 | Metonymy | A figure that relies on a close relationship other than similarity in substituting a word or phrase for the thing meant. | |
| 77489528 | Mnemonic Devices | Forms, such as rhyme, built into poems to help reciters remember the poems. | |
| 77489529 | Motif | A recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects a poem with preexisting patterns and conventions. | |
| 77489530 | Mythologies | Large systems of belief and tradition on which cultures draw to explain and understand themselves. These are often political or religious, and often become conventional over time | |
| 77489531 | Narrative | Poetry that tells a story and is primarily characterized by linear, chronological description. | |
| 77489532 | Occasional Poem | A poem written about or for a specific occasion, public or private | |
| 77489533 | Ode | An extended lyric, usually elevated in style and with an elaborate stanzaic structure | |
| 77489534 | Off-Rhyme | Rhyme that does not perfectly match in vowel or consonant sound | |
| 77489535 | Onomatopoeia | Use of a word or words the sound of which approximates the sound of the thing denoted | |
| 77489536 | Oxymoron | A figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory words | |
| 77489537 | Parody | A poem that imitates another poem closely, but changes details for comic or critical effect. | |
| 77489538 | Pastoral | A poem that portrays the simple life of country folk, usually shepherds, as a timeless world of beauty, peace, and contentment. From its beginnings pastoral has idealized rural life. | |
| 77489539 | Pattern Poetry | A poem with lines in the shape of the subject of the poem. | |
| 77489540 | Persona | A voice assumed by the author of a poem. | |
| 77489541 | Personification | Treating an abstraction as if it were a person, endowing it with humanlike qualities. | |
| 77489542 | Protest Poem | Treating an abstraction as if it were a person, endowing it with humanlike qualities. | |
| 77489545 | Quatrain | A four-line stanza, whether rhymed or unrhymed. This is the most common stanza form in English poetry. | |
| 77489546 | Rhyme | The repetition of the same ("perfect rhyme") or similar sounds, most often at the ends of lines | |
| 77489548 | Scansion | The analysis of a line of poetry (by "scanning") to determine its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, which usually are divided into metrical feet. | |
| 77489549 | Vowel Rhyme | Rhyme words that have only their vowel sounds in common. | |
| 77489550 | Setting | The time and place of the action in a poem. | |
| 77489551 | Simile | A direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another that usually draws the connection with the words "like" or "as." | |
| 77489552 | Situation | The context of the action in a poem; that is, what is happening when the poem begins | |
| 77489553 | Sonnet | A form, usually only a single stanza, that offers several related possibilities for its rhyme scheme; however, it is always fourteen lines long and usually written in iambic pentameter. | |
| 77489554 | Speaker | The person, not necessarily the author, who is the voice of a poem | |
| 77489555 | Spenserian Sonnet | Three four-line stanzas (interwoven by overlapping rhyme) and a couplet; this sonnet is rhymed abab bcbc cdcd ee. | |
| 77489556 | Spenserian Stanza | Eight lines of iambic pentameter and a ninth line of iambic hexameter, called an alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbbc. | |
| 77489558 | Stanza | Groups of lines, usually in some predetermined pattern of meter and rhyme, that are set off from one another by a space. | |
| 77489559 | Subject | The general or specific area of concern of a poem | |
| 77489560 | Syllabic Verse | A form in which the poet establishes a precise number of syllables to a line, without regard to their stress, and repeats them in subsequent stanzas. | |
| 77489561 | Symbol | A word or image that stands for something else in a vivid but indeterminate way: it suggests more than what it actually says. | |
| 77489562 | Symbolic Poem | A poem in which the use of symbols is so pervasive and internally consistent that the larger referential world is distanced, if not forgotten. | |
| 77489564 | Syntax | The formal arrangement of words in a sentence. | |
| 77489565 | Terza Rima | A series of three-line stanzas with interlocking rhymes, (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc.) | |
| 77489566 | Theme | The statement a poem makes about its subject. | |
| 77489567 | Tone | The attitude taken in or by a poem toward the subject and theme. | |
| 77489568 | Tradition | A customary practice or a widely accepted way of viewing or representing things; it usually includes many conventions. | |
| 139025979 | Apostrophe | a technique by which a writer addresses an inanimate object, an idea, or a person who is either dead or absent. | |
| 139025980 | Form | The shape or structure of a literary work. | |
| 139025981 | Image | A verbal approximation of sensory impression, concept, or emotion. | |
| 139025982 | Imagery | consists of the words or phrases that a writer uses to represent persons, objects, actions, feelings, and ideas descriptively by appealing to the senses. | |
| 139025983 | Sestet | a rhythmic group of six lines of verse | |
| 139025984 | Tercet | three line stanza |
