Poetic Devices Flashcards
What are the 8 things to look for in every poem?
Literal Meaning: What do the words mean? What’s the ‘plot’ of the poem?
Diction: What are the important words and phrases?
Persona: Who is speaking?
Tone: What is the persona’s attitude?
Opposition: What two (or more) things/ideas are conflicting?
Shift: Where are the major changes?
Poetic and sound devices: What are their intended effects?
Theme: What are the messages of this poem?
Allusion
using a reference to an outside fact, event, or another source.
Diction
a poet’s choice of words. Denotation refers to the dictionary definition of a word, and connotation refers to the ideas associated with the word.
Enjambment
the running over of a sentence from one line or stanza into the next without stopping at the end of the first.
Full-stop line
The opposite of enjambment, in which a pause comes at the end of a syntactic unit (sentence, clause, or phrase). This pause can be expressed in writing as a punctuation mark, such as a colon, semi-colon, period, or full stop.
Imagery
the use of words to represent things, actions, or ideas by sensory description (the five senses).
Irony
the contrast or gap between actual meaning and the expected meaning.
Juxtaposition
the placement of two things closely together to establish comparisons or contrasts.
Metaphor
a direct comparison of unlike objects by identification or substitution.
Opposition
similar to conflict in prose, the two things that are going against each other in a poem.
Shift
where the poet signals a change in idea, direction, or attitude in a poem.
Simile
a direct comparison of two unlike objects, using ‘like’ or ‘as.’
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a division of four or more lines having a fixed length, meter, or rhyming scheme. They are the “paragraphs” of poetry.
Symbolism
the use of one object to suggest another, hidden object or idea.
Syntax
the word order and line structure, as opposed to diction, the actual choice of words.
Theme
the idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. The message about the motifs.
Tone
the attitude of the poet toward the subject she is writing about. It is the style or manner of a piece of work, an inflection of the mood of the piece.
Alliteration
when a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur close together in a series.
Anaphora
a repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses.
Assonance
repetition of two or more vowel sounds within a line.
Consonance
a repetition of two or more consonant sounds within a line.
End rhyme
When a rhyme occurs at the end of a line.
Internal rhyme
When a rhyme occurs within a single line or a verse.
Onomatopoeia
a word/phrase whose sound suggests its meaning.
