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| 4237810959 | Alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words. "Gnus never know pneumonia" is an example of alliteration since, despite the spellings, all four words begin with the "n" sound. | 0 | |
| 4237813294 | 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. When T.S. Eliot writes, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," he is alluding to the lines "Let us roll our strength and all/ Our sweetness up into one ball" in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." | 1 | |
| 4237813295 | antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas, as in "Man proposes; God disposes." Antithesis is a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. The second line of the following couplet by Alexander Pope is an example of antithesis | 2 | |
| 4237814646 | 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. Following are two examples of apostrophe | 3 | |
| 4237814647 | assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. "A land laid waste with all its young men slain" repeats the same "a" sound in "laid," "waste," and "slain." | 4 | |
| 4237815766 | ballad meter | a four-line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four. | 5 | |
| 4237828313 | blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the meter of most of Shakespeare's plays, as well as that of Milton's Paradise Lost | 6 | |
| 4237828314 | 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. See, for example, the following line from Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra": | 7 | |
| 4237829835 | 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. For example, one would naturally pause after "human" in the following line from Alexander Pope: | 8 | |
| 4237829836 | 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. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. A famous example of a conceit occurs in John Donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which he compares his soul and his wife's to legs of a mathematical compass. | 9 | |
| 4237831202 | consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words usually referring to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. Consonance is found in the following pairs of words: "add" and "read," "bill and ball," and "born" and "burn." | 10 | |
| 4237831203 | couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same. | 11 | |
| 4237833043 | devices of sound | the techniques of deploying the sounds of words, especially in poetry. Among the devices of sound 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. | 12 | |
| 4237833044 | diction | the use of words in a literary work. Diction may be described as formal (the level of usage common in serious books and formal discourse), informal (the level of usage found in 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). | 13 | |
| 4237834353 | didactic poem | a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. The distinction between didactic poetry and non-didactic poetry is difficult to make and usually involves a subjective judgment of the author's purpose on the part of the critic or the reader. Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism is a good example of didactic poetry. | 14 | |
| 4237834354 | dramatic poem | a poem which employs a dramatic form or some element or elements of dramatic techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends. The dramatic monologue is an example. Alternative definition: there are three types of poetry---lyric, narrative, and dramatic. A dramatic poem usually has more than one character involved in some sort of conflict. | 15 | |
| 4237836362 | elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations upon death or another solemn theme. Examples include Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"; Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam; and Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." | 16 | |
| 4237836363 | 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 end-stopped line. | 17 | |
| 4237838322 | enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next. Milton's Paradise Lost is notable for its use of enjambment, as seen in the following lines: | 18 | |
| 4237838323 | extended metaphor | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem. In "The Bait," John Donne compares a beautiful woman to fish bait and men to fish who want to be caught by the woman. Since he carries these comparisons all the way through the poem, these are considered "extended metaphors." | 19 |
