Poetic Devices Flashcards
Repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.
Alliteration
The potential of possessing more than one meaning. Often poets want to deliberately create obscurity or uncertainty in their poetry. They often prefer that a poem’s meaning remains unsettled. They want to bristle with possibilities.
Ambiguity
A figure of speech/reference/representation of or to well known person, place, event, literary work or work of art.
Allusion
Direct address to something or someone that you wouldn’t ordinarily address.
Apostrophe
An elaborate metaphor, artificially strained or far fetched, in which the subject is compared to a simpler analogue. Usually chosen from nature or a familiar context. Especially associated with intense emotional or spiritual feelings. Sometimes they extend throughout the length of the entire poem.
Conceit
A term generally used to mean choice of words. Also used to mean the same group of words with the same social register as in low or high diction.
Diction
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line to the next. Differs from an end stopped line in which grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line.
Enjambment
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Ex hyperbole (exaggeration), litotes (understatement), simile/metaphor (comparison), and synecdoche/metonymy (a part of a thing stands for a whole)
Figurative Language
A figure of speech involving exaggeration
Hyperbole
A vivid picture, an appeal to any of the 5 senses, an instantaneous complex of emotions, often linked to a vivid picture or sense appeal. Any figure of speech.
Imagery
The practice, most often seen in old poetry, twisting words out of natural order.
Inversion
A contrast or discrepancy between one thing and another. Many types.
Irony
Saying something opposite to what you really mean.
Verbal irony
An event is expected to occur but the opposite happens. A discrepancy between what seems to be and what actually is.
Situational irony
Discrepancy between what readers know and what characters know.
Dramatic irony
An unspoken or implicit comparison between 2 things, implying identity. Like or as is not used in this comparison type
2 parts
tenor: the thing being compared
vehicle: The thing tenor is being compared to
Metaphor
The practice of replacing the name of a thing with something associated with it.
Metonymy
The use of words to imitate the sound they describe
Onomatopoeia
A statement that combines opposites. A kind of irony because it shows how opposites can unexpectedly create uneasy realities.
Oxymoron
The speaker or voice of a literary work who is doing the talking. Is the “I” of the narrative or implied speaker of a lyric poem
Persona
The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.
Personification
A figure of speech involving the comparison of unlike things using like, as, or as though.
Simile
A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form– either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one unit to another. Poetic paragraphs.
Stanza
Object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, stands for something beyond itself
Symbol
