Terms : Hide Images
| 8916204502 | alexandrine | twelve-syllable line written in iambic hexameter, especially popular in French poetry | 0 | |
| 8916206790 | alliteration | the repetition of similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginnings of words | 1 | |
| 8916210167 | allusion | a reference in a work of literature to something outside the work, especially to a well-known historical or literary event, person, or work | 2 | |
| 8916213804 | anaphora | often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry; the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect | 3 | |
| 8916222010 | antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas; a balancing of one term against another for emphases or stylistic effectiveness | 4 | |
| 8916226275 | apostrophe | a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not always absence), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present | 5 | |
| 8916230999 | assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds | 6 | |
| 8916232404 | ballad | song that tells a story in the oral tradition | 7 | |
| 8916234137 | ballad-stanza | a four-line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four | 8 | |
| 8916237196 | blank verse | poetry written in unrhymed but regular meter (nearly always iambic pentameter) | 9 | |
| 8916242178 | cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones; it may be an unconscious flaw in the poet's music, resulting in harshness of sound or difficulty in articulation, or it may be used consciously for effect | 10 | |
| 8916248904 | caesura | a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line, and often greater than the normal pause | 11 | |
| 8916251752 | chiasmus | repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA | 12 | |
| 8916256966 | conceit | an ingenious and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things; may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem | 13 | |
| 8916264158 | consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds within a group of words; usually refers to words in which the ending consonants of a syllable are the same but vowels that precede them are different (e.g., "linger," "longer," and "languor"; "rider," "reader," "raider," and "ruder"); can also refer to shared constants, whether in sequence ("bed" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab") | 14 | |
| 8916282598 | couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same | 15 | |
| 8916284111 | diction | the use of words and phrasing in a literary work (creates tone); may be described as formal (the leel of usage common in serious books and formal discourse), informal (the level of usage found in the relaxed but polite conversation of cultivated people), colloquial (the everyday usage of a group, possibly including terms and constructions accepted in that group but not universally acceptable), or slang (a group of newly coined words which are not acceptable for formal usage as yet) | 16 | |
| 8916296022 | didactic poem | a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson | 17 | |
| 8916297809 | dramatic monologue | poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent/internal listener (sometimes the reader) | 18 | |
| 8916304069 | elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations upon death or another solemn theme | 19 | |
| 8916307659 | ellipsis | the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader's ability to understand the expression | 20 | |
| 8916311395 | end-stopped | a line with a pause at the end; includes lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark | 21 | |
| 8916317189 | English (Shakespearean) sonnet | sonnet containing three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg | 22 | |
| 8916320708 | enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next | 23 | |
| 8916323096 | epic | lengthy/sweeping narrative poem that tells of heroic deeds | 24 | |
| 8916324431 | extended metaphor | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem | 25 | |
| 8916326543 | euphony | a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate; its opposite is cacophony | 26 | |
| 8916329914 | eye rhyme | rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but it is half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the pronunciation; examples include "watch" and "match" and "love" and "move" | 27 | |
| 8916336634 | feminine rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as "waken" and "forsaken" and "audition" and "rendition"; is sometimes called double rhyme | 28 | |
| 8916343461 | figurative language | writing that uses figures of speech (as opposed to literal language or that which is actual or specifically denoted) such as metaphor, irony, and simile; uses words to mean something other than their literal meaning | 29 | |
| 8916349974 | free verse | poetry that has no consistent rhyme or meter (but is still often rhythmical) | 30 | |
| 8916352371 | heroic couplet | two successive rhyming lines in iambic pentameter lines (usually end-stopped in the second line; sometimes strung together aa, bb, cc; commonly used in sonnets and epic narrative poems) | 31 | |
| 8916360230 | hyperbole | a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration; may be used for either serious or comic effect | 32 | |
| 8916362908 | iambic meter | unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable | 33 | |
| 8916364844 | imagery | the images of literary work; the sensory details of a work; the figurative language of a work; has several definitions, but the two that area paramount are the visual auditory, or tactile images evoked by the words of a literary work of the images that figurative languages evokes | 34 | |
| 8916371814 | irony | the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning; differs from sarcasm in that it is usually lighter, less harsh in its wording though in effect probably more cutting because of its indirectness | 35 | |
| 8916373622 | verbal irony | a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning | 36 | |
| 8916383497 | internal rhyme | rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end | 37 | |
| 8916387470 | Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet | contains two main parts--an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc | 38 | |
| 8916393479 | lyric poem | short poem with a single speaker, often speaking in first person, who expresses thoughts and feelings; may be about love but also have been written on subjects as different as religion and reading; sonnets and odes are this type of poem | 39 | |
| 8916399568 | malapropism | from French mal a propos (inappropriate)--use of an incorrect word in place of a similar-sounding word that results in a nonsensical and humorous expression | 40 | |
| 8916404287 | masculine rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme-words; examples include "keep" and "sleep," "glow" and "no," and "spell" and "impel" | 41 | |
| 8916409383 | metaphor | a figurative use of language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a comparative term like "as," "like," or "than" | 42 | |
| 8916416005 | meter | the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry; emphasizes the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem; each unit is known as a foot | 43 | |
| 8916423284 | metonymy | a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself | 44 | |
| 8916426822 | mixed metaphors | the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following with which the first is incongruous | 45 | |
| 8916431398 | narrative poem | a non-dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative (story), whether simple or complex, long, or short; epics and ballads are examples of narrative poems | 46 | |
| 8916436534 | non sequitur | a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement | 47 | |
| 8916440688 | octabe | an eight-line stanza, often in iambic pentameter (in English poetry) or in hendecasyllables (in Italian poetry); most common rhyme scheme is abbaabba; most commonly, this term refers to the first division of an Italian sonnet | 48 | |
| 8916448397 | ode | a long, lyric poem that is serious in subject matter and treatment, elevated in style, and elaborate in stanzaic structure | 49 | |
| 8916450971 | onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning; examples are "buzz," "hiss," and "honk" | 50 | |
| 8916455133 | oxymoron | a form of paradox that combines a pair of seemingly contradictory or contrary terms in to a single expression; this combination usually serves the purpose of shocking the reader into awareness | 51 | |
| 8916461613 | paradox | a situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out to be true or at least to make sense | 52 | |
| 8916465183 | parallelism | a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry | 53 | |
| 8916468907 | paraphrase | a restatement of an ideas in such a way as to retain the meaning while changing the diction and form; often an amplification of the original for the purpose of clarity | 54 | |
| 8916473110 | pastoral | a poetic work portraying an idealized version of country life | 55 | |
| 8916474927 | personification | a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics | 56 | |
| 8916478306 | poetic foot | a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it | 57 | |
| 8916481232 | pun | a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings; can have serious as well as humorous uses | 58 | |
| 8916484290 | quatrain | a four-line stanza or poem with any combination of rhymes | 59 | |
| 8916485916 | raconteur | person who tells anecdotes in a skillful or amusing way | 60 | |
| 8916487598 | refrain | a group of words forming a phrase or sentence an consisting of one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem, usually at the end of stanza | 61 | |
| 8916491242 | rhyme | close similarity or identity of sound between accented syllables occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines of verse; for a true version of this term, the vowels in the accented syllables must be preceded by different consonants, such as "fan" and "ran" | 62 | |
| 8916498327 | rhyme royal | seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc | 63 | |
| 8916500589 | rhythm | the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables; the presence of such patterns lends both pleasure and heightened emotional response to the listener or reader | 64 | |
| 8916504952 | sarcasm | a type of irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it; its purpose is to injure or to hurt | 65 | |
| 8916508408 | satire | writing that seeks to arouse a reader's disapproval of an object by ridicule; usually comedy that exposes errors with an eye to correct vice and folly | 66 | |
| 8916513851 | scansion | a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and they type(s) of feet per line | 67 | |
| 8916518462 | sestet | a six-line stanza; most commonly refers to the second division of an Italian sonnet | 68 | |
| 8916520848 | sestina | a poem of six six-line stanzas in which the end-words in the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in a set order of variation, as the end-words of the stanzas that follow | 69 | |
| 8916526718 | simile | a directly expressed comparison; a figure of speech comparing two objects, usually with "like," "as," or "than" | 70 | |
| 8916530620 | sonnet | normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem | 71 | |
| 8916534231 | sound devices | the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry; among devices of such are rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia; devices are used for many reasons, including to create a general effect of pleasant or of discordant sound, to imitate another sounds, or to reflect a meaning | 72 | |
| 8916542426 | stanza | usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme | 73 | |
| 8916546603 | strategy (or rhetorical strategy) | the management of language for a specific effect; is planned placing of elements to achieve an effect | 74 | |
| 8916550263 | structure | the arrangement of materials withing a work; the relationship of the parts of a work to the whole; the logical divisions of a work; most common units in a poem are line and stanza | 75 | |
| 8916556638 | style | the mode of expression in language; the characteristic manner of expression of an author; many elements contribute to this, including diction, syntax, figurative language, imagery, selection of detail, sound effect, and tone | 76 | |
| 8916563002 | symbol | something that is simultaneously itself and a sign of something else | 77 | |
| 8916565539 | synecdoche | a form of metaphor which in mentioning a part signifies the whole | 78 | |
| 8916567904 | syntax | the ordering of words into patterns or sentences; if a poet shifts words from the usual word order, you know you are dealing with an older style of poetry or a poet who wants to shift emphasis onto a particular word | 79 | |
| 8916573454 | tercet | a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme | 80 | |
| 8916574846 | terza rime | poetic form of interlocking three-line stanzas rhymed aba, bcb, cdc, etc. | 81 | |
| 8916579096 | theme | the main thought expressed by a work; it is the abstract concept which is made concrete through its representation in person, action, and image in the work | 82 | |
| 8916583103 | tone | the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning (remember that the "voice" need not be that of the poet); described by adjecties, and the possibilities are nearly endless; often a single adjective will be enough, and tone may change from stanza to stanza or even line to line; result of allusion, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, symbol, syntax, and style | 83 | |
| 8916595189 | understatement | the opposite of hyperbole; kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is | 84 | |
| 8916598499 | villanelle | a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain; uses on ly two rhymes which are repeated as follows; aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa; line 1 is repeated entirely to form lines 6, 12, and 18, and line 3 is repeated entirely to form lines 9, 15, and 19; thus, eight of the nineteen lines are refrain | 85 | |
| 8916609291 | allegory | a narrative that works on multiple levels, aiming to teach or explain something (often clearly linking explanation to moral lesson) by using characters, events, and other aspects of the story as symbols, often for abstract concepts | 86 |
