Terms : Hide Images
| 13877726616 | alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginnings of words | 0 | |
| 13877734483 | 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 | |
| 13877738672 | antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas | 2 | |
| 13877743144 | 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 | |
| 13877766218 | assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. | 4 | |
| 13877771143 | blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter | 5 | |
| 13877778606 | cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones | 6 | |
| 13877787955 | 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 | 7 | |
| 13877799996 | 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. | 8 | |
| 13877810479 | consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. | 9 | |
| 13877818739 | couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same | 10 | |
| 13877823333 | devices of sound | the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry, such as rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia | 11 | |
| 13877844749 | diction | the use of words in a literary work; can 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) | 12 | |
| 13877857324 | didactic poem | a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson | 13 | |
| 13877995054 | dramatic poem | a poem which employs a dramatic form or some element or elements of dramatic techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends | 14 | |
| 13877999821 | elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet"s meditations upon death or another solemn theme | 15 | |
| 13878026456 | end-stopped | a line with a pause at the end, such as lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark | 16 | |
| 13878044874 | enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next | 17 | |
| 13878067589 | extended metaphor | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem | 18 | |
| 13878075064 | euphony | a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate | 19 | |
| 13878078914 | 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." | 20 | |
| 13878090875 | feminine rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as "waken" and "forsaken" and "audition" and "rendition." | 21 | |
| 13878102254 | figurative language | writing that uses words to mean something other than their literal meaning and figures of speech (as opposed to literal language or that which is actual or specifically denoted) such as metaphor, irony, and simile. | 22 | |
| 13878119442 | free verse | poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical | 23 | |
| 13878129837 | hyperbole | a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration. It may be used for either serious or comic effect. | 24 | |
| 13878139302 | imagery | the visual auditory, or tactile images evoked by the words of a literary work or the images that figurative language evokes | 25 | |
| 13878150007 | irony | the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning | 26 | |
| 13878156765 | verbal irony | a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning | 27 | |
| 13878169150 | internal rhyme | rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end | 28 | |
| 13878173784 | lyric poem | any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings, such as sonnets and odes | 29 | |
| 13878179791 | masculine rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyming words | 30 | |
| 13878198862 | metaphor | a figurative use of language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a comparative term like "as," "like," or "than." | 31 | |
| 13878205585 | 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 | 32 | |
| 13878219319 | foot | a unit of meter | 33 | |
| 13878222318 | 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. | 34 | |
| 13878225587 | mixed metaphors | the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following with which the first is incongruous. Lloyd George is reported to have said, "I smell a rat. I see it floating in the air. I shall nip it in the bud." | 35 | |
| 13878235296 | narrative poem | a non-dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or complex, long or short, such as epics and ballads | 36 | |
| 13878240699 | octave | an eight-line stanza | 37 | |
| 13878245686 | onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning. Examples are "buzz," "hiss," or "honk." | 38 | |
| 13878251397 | 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." | 39 | |
| 13878254536 | 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 | 40 | |
| 13878263609 | parallelism | a similar, repeating grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry | 41 | |
| 13878274439 | 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. | 42 | |
| 13878280622 | personification | a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics | 43 | |
| 13878287415 | poetic foot | a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it | 44 | |
| 13878298372 | iambic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable | 45 | |
| 13878305738 | trochaic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable | 46 | |
| 13878311789 | anapestic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable | 47 | |
| 13878326765 | dactylic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of a stressed syllable followed by a two unstressed syllables | 48 | |
| 13878338752 | pyrrhic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of two unstressed syllables | 49 | |
| 13878345971 | spondaic foot | a metrical foot in poetry that consists of two stressed syllables | 50 | |
| 13878356481 | pun | a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings. "They went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell." | 51 | |
| 13878366805 | quatrain | a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes | 52 | |
| 13878371788 | 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 | 53 | |
| 13878375005 | rhyme | close similarity or identity of sound between accented syllables occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines of verse | 54 | |
| 13878379989 | rhythm | the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables; lends both pleasure and heightened emotional response to the listener or reader | 55 | |
| 13878386835 | 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. | 56 | |
| 13878391163 | 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. | 57 | |
| 13878397714 | scansion | a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the type(s) of feet per line | 58 | |
| 13878406358 | monometer | one foot per line | 59 | |
| 13878409370 | dimeter | two feet per line | 60 | |
| 13878409371 | trimeter | three feet per line | 61 | |
| 13878412943 | tetrameter | four feet per line | 62 | |
| 13878422132 | pentameter | five feet per line | 63 | |
| 13878425226 | hexameter | six feet per line | 64 | |
| 13878429512 | heptameter | seven feet per line | 65 | |
| 13878436504 | octameter | eight feet per line | 66 | |
| 13878436505 | iambic pentameter | a poetic meter consisting of five feet per line, each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable | 67 | |
| 13878471244 | sestet | a six line stanza; most commonly refers to the second division of an Italian sonnet | 68 | |
| 13878479777 | simile | a directly expressed comparison; a figure of speech comparing two objects, usually with "like," "as," or "than." | 69 | |
| 13878489940 | sonnet | normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. The conventional Italian, or Petrarchan version is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; the English, or Shakespearean, version is rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg. | 70 | |
| 13878544165 | stanza | a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme | 71 | |
| 13878548943 | 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 | 72 | |
| 13878551947 | style | the mode of expression in language; the characteristic manner of expression of an author, shaped by diction, syntax, figurative language, imagery, selection of detail, sound effects, and/or tone | 73 | |
| 13878563715 | symbol | something that is simultaneously itself and a sign of something else | 74 | |
| 13878571715 | 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. | 75 | |
| 13878578707 | 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. | 76 | |
| 13878583559 | 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 | 77 | |
| 13878588199 | tone | the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning; described by adjectives; the result of allusion, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, symbol, syntax, and style | 78 | |
| 13878602422 | understatement | the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is. For example, Macbeth, having been nearly hysterical after killing Duncan, tells Lenox, ""Twas a rough night." | 79 |
