AP Literature Poetry Devices Flashcards
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| 2683321099 | figure of speech | A device used to produce figurative language. Many compare dissimilar things. | 0 | |
| 2683321100 | trope | Artful diction; the use of language in a nonliteral way; also called a figure of speech | 1 | |
| 2683321101 | apostrophe | A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love. | 2 | |
| 2683321102 | hyperbole | A figure of speech that uses exaggeration to express strong emotion, make a point, or evoke humor | 3 | |
| 2683321103 | litotes | A deliberate understatement for effect; the opposite of hyperbole. For example, a good idea may be described as "not half bad," or a difficult task considered "no small feat." Litotes is found frequently in Old English poetry; "That was a good king," declares the narrator of the Beowulf epic after summarizing the Danish king's great virtues. | 4 | |
| 2683321104 | irony | A device that depends on the existence of at least two separate and contrasting levels of meaning embedded in one message. Verbal irony is sarcasm when the speaker says something other than what they really mean. In dramatic irony the audience is more aware than the characters in a work. Situational irony occurs when the opposite of what is expected happens. This type of irony often emphasizes that people are caught in forces beyond their comprehension and control. | 5 | |
| 2683321105 | symbol | Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or otherworldly. A rose, for example, has long been considered a ____ of love and affection. | 6 | |
| 2683321106 | metaphor | A comparison that establishes a figurative identity between objects being compared. Ex. Hope is the | 7 | |
| 2683321107 | allegory | An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegory's meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene are two major works in English. | 8 | |
| 2683321108 | oxymoron | A figure of speech consisting of two apparently contradictory terms Ex. jumbo shrimp | 9 | |
| 2683321109 | paradox | As a figure of speech, it is a seemingly self-contradictory phrase or concept that illuminates a truth. For instance, Wallace Stevens, in "The Snow Man," describes the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Man: Epistle II," describes Man as "Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all." Paradox is related to oxymoron, which creates a new phrase or concept out of a contradiction. | 10 | |
| 2683321110 | antithesis | Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings. William Blake pits love's competing impulses—selflessness and self-interest—against each other in his poem "The Clod and the Pebble." Love "builds a Heaven in Hell's despair," or it "builds a Hell in Heaven's despite." | 11 | |
| 2683321111 | personification | A figure of speech in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person. William Blake's "O Rose, thou art sick!" is one example; Donne's "Death, be not proud" is another. | 12 | |
| 2683321112 | anthropomorphism | A form of personification in which human qualities are attributed to anything inhuman, usually a god, animal, object, or concept. John Keats admires a star's loving watchfulness ("with eternal lids apart") in his sonnet "Bright Star, Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art." | 13 | |
| 2683321113 | pathetic fallacy | Faulty reasoning that inappropriately ascribes human feelings to nature or nonhuman objects. It is related to personification and anthropomorphism, but emphasizes the relationship between the poet's emotional state and what he or she sees in the object or objects. For instance, in William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the speaker sees a field of daffodils "tossing their heads in a sprightly dance," outdoing the nearby lake's sparkling waves with their "glee." The speaker, in times of solitude and introspection, is heartened by memories of the flowers' joy. | 14 | |
| 2683321114 | simile | A direct comparison made between two unlike things, using a word of comparison such as like, as, than, such as, or resembles. | 15 | |
| 2683321115 | zuegma | A figure of speech in which one verb or preposition joins two objects within the same phrase, often with different meanings. For example, "I left my heart—and my suitcase—in San Francisco." Zeugma occurs in William Shakespeare's "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun": "Golden Lads, and Girles all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust." Here, "coming to dust" refers to the chimney-sweeper's trade as well as the body's decay. | 16 | |
| 2683321116 | metonomy | A figure of speech in which a related term is substituted for the word itself. Often the substitution is based on a material, causal, or conceptual relation between things. For example, the British monarchy is often referred to as the Crown. In the phrase "lend me your ears," "ears" is substituted for "attention." | 17 | |
| 2683321117 | synechdoche | A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole. For example, "I've got wheels" for "I have a car," or a description of a worker as a "hired hand." | 18 | |
| 2683321118 | elision | The omission of unstressed syllables (e.g., "ere" for "ever," "tother" for "the other"), usually to fit a metrical scheme. "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs," goes the first line of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which "amorous" is elided to "am'rous" to establish the pentameter (five-foot) line. | 19 | |
| 2683321119 | alliteration | The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; "pizza" and "place" alliterate. Example: "We saw the sea sound sing, we heard the salt sheet tell," from Dylan Thomas's "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed." | 20 | |
| 2683321120 | consonance | A resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial rhyme; it can also refer to shared consonants, whether in sequence ("bed" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab"). | 21 | |
| 2683321121 | dissonance | A disruption of harmonic sounds or rhythms. Like cacophony, it refers to a harsh collection of sounds; it is usually intentional, however, and depends more on the organization of sound for a jarring effect, rather than on the unpleasantness of individual words. | 22 | |
| 2683321122 | assonance | The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme. See Amy Lowell's "In a Garden" ("With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur") or "The Taxi" ("And shout into the ridges of the wind"). | 23 | |
| 2683321123 | chiasmus | Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture ("But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first"; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). | 24 | |
| 2683321124 | anaphora | Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, it is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect. | 25 | |
| 2683321125 | allusion | A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot's influential long poem is dense with allusions. | 26 | |
| 2683321126 | anachronism | Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeare's placing of a clock in Julius Caesar is an anachronism, because clocks had not yet been invented in the period when the play is set. | 27 | |
| 2683321127 | ambiguity | A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. As poet and critic William Empson wrote in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), "The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry." A poet may consciously join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader's expectation of meaning, as e.e. cummings does in [anyone lived in a pretty how town]. | 28 | |
| 2683321128 | ellipsis | In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader's ability to understand the expression. For example, Shakespeare makes frequent use of the phrase "I will away" in his plays, with the missing verb understood to be "go." | 29 | |
| 2683321129 | circumlocution | A roundabout wording, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "twice five miles of fertile ground" (i.e., 10 miles) in "Kubla Khan." Also known as periphrasis. | 30 | |
| 2683321130 | aphorism | A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage. Ex: Benjamin Franklin's "How to get RICHES." | 31 | |
| 2683321131 | complaint | A poem of lament, often directed at an ill-fated love, as in Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella XXXI." It may also be a satiric attack on social injustice and immorality; in "The Lie," Sir Walter Raleigh bitterly rails against institutional hypocrisy and human vanity "Tell men of high condition, / That manage the estate, / Their purpose is ambition, / Their practice only hate." | 32 | |
| 2683321132 | conceit | From the Latin term for "concept," a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. In Shakespeare's "Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been," for example, "What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!" laments the lover, though his separation takes place in the fertile days of summer and fall. | 33 | |
| 2683321133 | epigraph | a quotation or aphorism at the beginning of a literary work suggestive of the theme.. For example, Grace Schulman's "American Solitude" opens with a quote from an essay by Marianne Moore. | 34 | |
| 2683321134 | motif | A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and may serve an overall theme. For example, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and John Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress both feature the ___ of a long journey. | 35 | |
| 2683321135 | neologism | a new word, expression, or usage; the creation or use of new words or senses. Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" is filled with them, including "slithy" and "gimble." | 36 | |
| 2683321136 | pun | Wordplay that uses homonyms (two different words that are spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time. "Ah, nothing more obscure than Browning / Save blacking," writes Ambrose Bierce in "With a Book," making a pun on the name of poet Robert Browning and the color brown. | 37 | |
| 2683321137 | synesthesia | A blending or intermingling of different senses in description. "Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine," writes Emily Dickinson. | 38 | |
| 2683321138 | poetic license | A poet's departure from the rules of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in order to maintain a metrical or rhyme scheme; can also mean the manipulation of facts to suit the needs of a poem. | 39 |
