Terms : Hide Images
| 5788802407 | alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginnings of words. | 0 | |
| 5788804176 | 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. | 1 | |
| 5788809094 | antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas, as in "Man proposes; God disposes." This is a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. | 2 | |
| 5788810191 | apostrophe | a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not always absent), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present. | 3 | |
| 5788811433 | assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. | 4 | |
| 5788812205 | ballad meter | a four-line stanza rhymed abcd with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four. | 5 | |
| 5788812775 | blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. | 6 | |
| 5788813246 | 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 of articulation, or it may be used consciously for effect, as Browning and Eliot often use it. | 7 | |
| 5788813838 | 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. | 8 | |
| 5788814791 | 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. This may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. | 9 | |
| 5808884005 | devices of sound | the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Among these are rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. The devices are used for many reasons, including to create a general effect of pleasant or of discordant sound, to imitate another sound, or to reflect a meaning. | 10 | |
| 5808886596 | diction | the use of words in a literary work. It may be described as formal (the level 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). | 11 | |
| 5808889736 | didactic poem | a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. | 12 | |
| 5808891057 | dramatic poem | a poem which employs a dramatic form or some element or elements of dramatic techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends. | 13 | |
| 5808892438 | elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations upon death or another solemn theme. | 14 | |
| 5808895299 | end stopped | a line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark are these | 15 | |
| 5808896343 | enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next. | 16 | |
| 5808897397 | extended metaphor | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem. | 17 | |
| 5808900037 | euphony | a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate. Its opposite is cacophony. | 18 | |
| 5808901168 | eye rhyme | rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the pronunciation. Examples include "watch" and "match," and "love" and "move." | 19 | |
| 5808903210 | feminine rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as "waken" and "forsaken" and "audition" and "rendition." | 20 | |
| 5808905007 | 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. This uses words to mean something other than their literal meaning. | 21 | |
| 5808907473 | free verse | poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical. | 22 | |
| 5808910206 | heroic couplet | two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit. | 23 | |
| 5808912603 | hyperbole | a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration. It may be used for either serious or comic effect. | 24 | |
| 5808916758 | imagery | the images of a literary work; the sensory details of a work; the figurative language of a work. This has several definitions, but the two that are paramount are the visual auditory, or tactile images evoked by the words of a literary work | 25 | |
| 5808919927 | irony | the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning. This is a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning. | 26 | |
| 5808923147 | internal rhyme | rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. | 27 | |
| 5808925337 | lyric poem | any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings. Love lyrics are common, but these have also been written on subjects as different as religion and reading. Sonnets and odes are lyric poems. | 28 | |
| 5808927870 | masculine rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme-words. | 29 | |
| 5808931525 | metaphor | a figurative use of language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a comparative term like "as," "like," or "than." | 30 | |
| 5808933497 | meter | the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry. This of a poem emphasizes the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem. | 31 | |
| 5808935666 | 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. In this way we commonly speak of the king as the "crown," an object closely associated with kingship. | 32 | |
| 5808941296 | mixed metaphor | the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following with which the first is incongruous. | 33 | |
| 5808943565 | narrative poem | a non-dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or complex, long or short. Epics and ballads are examples of these. | 34 | |
| 5808945024 | octave | an eight-line stanza. Most commonly, this refers to the first division of an Italian sonnet. | 35 | |
| 5808946462 | onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning. Examples are "buzz," "hiss," or "honk." | 36 | |
| 5808950743 | oxymoron | a form of paradox that combines a pair of contrary terms into a single expression. This combination usually serves the purpose of shocking the reader into awareness. Examples include "wise fool," "sad joy," and "eloquent silence." | 37 | |
| 5808953379 | 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. | 38 | |
| 5808954893 | parallelism | a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry. this is a characteristic of Asian poetry, being notably present in the Psalms. | 39 | |
| 5808958074 | paraphrase | a restatement of an ideas in such a way as to retain the meaning while changing the diction and form. This is often an amplification of the original for the purpose of clarity. | 40 | |
| 5808962556 | personification | a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics. | 41 | |
| 5808963385 | poetic foot | a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it. | 42 | |
| 5808982222 | pun | a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings. | 43 | |
| 5808985171 | quatrain | a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes. | 44 | |
| 5808991073 | refrain | a group of words forming a phrase or sentence and consisting of one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem, usually at the end of a stanza. | 45 | |
| 5808992041 | rhyme | close similarity or identity of sound between accented syllables occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines of verse. For these, the vowels in the accented syllables must be preceded by different consonants, such as "fan" and "ran." | 46 | |
| 5808994284 | rhyme royal | a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets. | 47 | |
| 5809001058 | rhythm | the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The presence of these lends both pleasure and heightened emotional response to the listener or reader. | 48 | |
| 5809004806 | 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. | 49 | |
| 5809008953 | satire | writing that seeks to arouse a reader's disapproval of an object by ridicule. This is usually comedy that exposes errors with an eye to correct vice and folly. | 50 | |
| 5809013882 | scansion | a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the type(s) of feet per line. Following are the most common types of meter: monometer one foot per line dimeter two feet per line trimeter three feet per line | 51 | |
| 5809386564 | sestet | a six-line stanza. Most commonly, this refers to the second division of an Italian sonnet. | 52 | |
| 5809391205 | simile | a directly expressed comparison; a figure of speech comparing two objects, usually with "like," "as," or "than." | 53 | |
| 5809406929 | sonnet | normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. | 54 | |
| 5809410388 | stanza | usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme. | 55 | |
| 5809424756 | strategy | the management of language for a specific effect. These of a poem is the planned placing of elements to achieve an effect. These of most love poems is deployed to convince the loved one to return to the speaker's love. By appealing to the loved one's sympathy, or by flattery, or by threat, the lover attempts to persuade the loved one to love in return. | 56 | |
| 5809452388 | structure | the arrangement of materials within a work; the relationship of the parts of a work to the whole; the logical divisions of a work. The most common units of these in a poem are the line and stanza. | 57 | |
| 5809455969 | style | the mode of expression in language; the characteristic manner of expression of an author. | 58 | |
| 5809458931 | symbol | something that is simultaneously itself and a sign of something else. For example, winter, darkness, and cold are real things, but in literature they are also likely to be used to represent death. | 59 | |
| 5809462428 | synecdoche | a form of metaphor which in mentioning a part signifies the whole. For example, we refer to "foot soldiers" for infantry and "field hands" for manual laborers who work in agriculture. | 60 | |
| 5809465363 | 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. | 61 | |
| 5809467271 | tercet | a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme. | 62 | |
| 5809470797 | terza rima | a three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc,etc. | 63 | |
| 5809472594 | theme | the main thought expressed by a work. In poetry, it is the abstract concept which is made concrete through its representation in person, action, and image in the work. | 64 | |
| 5809476264 | 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.) This is described by adjectives, and the possibilities are nearly endless. Often a single adjective will be enough, and it may change from stanza to stanza or even line to line. it is the result of allusion, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, symbol, syntax, and style. | 65 | |
| 5809480370 | understatement | the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is. | 66 | |
| 5809485132 | villanelle | a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain. This uses only two rhymes which are repeated as follows: aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa. | 67 |
