AP Literature Vocabulary #16 Literary Terms Flashcards

8709155008	chiasmus ex: Coleridge: "Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike."	In poetry, a type of rhetorical balance in which the second part is syntactically balanced against the first, but with the parts reversed. In prose, this is called antimetabole	0
8709161915	caesura ex: Alexander Pope: "To err is human, to forgive divine." One would naturally pause after "human"	a natural pause or break; 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.	1
8709166647	enjambment ex: Milton's Paradise Lost: "... Or if Sion hill / Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowered / Fast by the oracle of God ..."	the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next	2
8709168248	kenning ex: King: "ring-giver"; Ocean: "whale-road"	a device employed in Anglo-Saxon poetry in which the name of a thing is replaced by one of its functions or qualities	3
8709171770	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.	4
8709175249	poetic foot ex: Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge illustrates all of these feet except the pyrrhic foot: "Trochee trips from long to short. / From long to long in solemn sort / Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable. / Iambics march from short to long; / With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.	a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it. The most common type are as follows: iambic u /; trochaic / u; anapestic u u /; dactylic / u u; pyrrhic u u; spondaic / /	5
8709185705	Scansion	a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and 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 tetrameter: four feet per line pentameter: five feet per line hexameter: six feet per line heptameter: seven feet per line octameter: eight feet per line iambic pentameter: a line consisting of five iambic feet anapestic tetrameter: a line consisting of four anapestic feet In order to determine the meter of a poem, the lines are scanned, or marked to indicate stressed and unstressed syllables which are then divided into feet.	6
8709198376	devices of sound	the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Among 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. rhythm: a rise and fall of the voice produced by the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in language. feminine rhyme: a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as waken and forsaken and audition and rendition. Feminine rhyme is sometimes called double rhyme. 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. 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. internal rhyme- rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. The following lines contain internal rhyme: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore / While I nodded, nearly napping. . suddenly there came a tapping . . . . 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 lines. True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance.	7
8709209103	types of poems	a composition in verse, especially one that is characterized by a highly developed artistic form and by the use of heightened language and rhythm to express an intensely imaginative interpretation of the subject. Elegy: a poem of mourning, usually about someone who has died. A Eulogy is great praise or commendation, a laudatory speech, often about someone who has died. Epic: a long narrative poem, written in heightened language , which recounts the deeds of a heroic character who embodies the values of a particular society. Free verse: poetry that does not conform to a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Lyric poem: a poem that does not tell a story but expresses the personal feelings or thoughts of the speaker. A ballad tells a story. any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings. Love lyrics are common, but lyric poems have also been written on subjects as different as religion and reading. Sonnets and odes are lyric poems 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 narrative poems. 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. 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.	8
8709223405	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 structure in a poem are the line and stanza. stanza- usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme refrain: a word, phrase, line, or group of lines that is repeated, for effect, several times in a poem. 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. couplet- a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same. octave- an eight-line stanza. Most commonly, octave refers to the first division of an Italian sonnet. quatrain- a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes; a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes. rhyme royal- a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets. sestet- a six-line stanza. Most commonly, sestet refers to the second division of an Italian sonnet. sonnet- normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. The conventional Italian, or Petrarchan sonnet is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet is rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg. tercet- a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme. terza rima- a three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc,etc. Dante's Divine Comedy is written in terza rima. villanelle- a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain. The villanelle uses only 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. Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is an example of a villanelle.	9