Poetic Terms Flashcards
Acrostic
A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically.
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.
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.
Allusion
A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement.
Ambiguity
A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. A poet may consciously join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader’s expectation of meaning or the ambiguity may be less deliberate, steered more by the poet’s attempts to express something ineffable.
Anapest
A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words “underfoot” and “overcome” are anapestic.
Anaphora
Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.
In Joanna Klink’s poem “Some Feel Rain,” the phrase “some feel” is repeated, which creates a rhythm and a sense of an accumulating emotions and meanings.
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.”
Antithesis
Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings.
Apostrophe
An address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if he or she were present.
Assonance
The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme.
Ballad
A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event. Beginning in the Renaissance, poets have adapted the conventions of the folk ballad for their own original compositions such as “La Belle Dame”
Blank verse
Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered the closest to English speech patterns.
Cacophony
Harsh or discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination of consonants within a group of words. The opposite of euphony. Writers frequently use cacophony to express energy or mimic mood.
Caesura
A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause. A medial caesura splits the line in equal parts, as is common in Old English poetry. When the pause occurs toward the beginning or end of the line, it is termed, respectively, initial or terminal.
Chiasmus
Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA
Common measure
A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad.
Consonance
A resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial rhyme (see also Alliteration). Consonance can also refer to shared consonants, whether in sequence (“bed” and “bad”) or reversed (“bud” and “dab”).
Couplet
A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length. A couplet is “closed” when the lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence.
Dactyl
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words “poetry” and “basketball” are both dactylic.
Dissonance
A disruption of harmonic sounds or rhythms. Like cacophony, it refers to a harsh collection of sounds; dissonance is usually intentional, however, and depends more on the organization of sound for a jarring effect, rather than on the unpleasantness of individual words.
Dramatic monologue
A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader.
Ekphrasis
“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion.
Elision
The omission of unstressed syllables (e.g., “ere” for “ever,” “tother” for “the other”), usually to fit a metrical scheme.
Ellipsis
In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader’s ability to understand the expression.
End-stopped
A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break—such as a dash or closing parenthesis—or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period. A line is considered end-stopped, too, if it contains a complete phrase.
Enjambment
The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped.
Epic
A long narrative poem in which a heroic protagonist engages in an action of great mythic or historical significance. N
Epic simile
A detailed, often complex poetic comparison (see simile) that unfolds over the course of several lines. It is also known as a Homeric simile, because the Greek poet Homer is thought to have originated the device in the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Epigraph
A quotation from another literary work that is placed beneath the title at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem.
Figure of speech
An expressive, nonliteral use of language. Figures of speech include tropes (such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, and simile) and schemes (anything involving the ordering and organizing of words—anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for example).
Foot
The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter. A foot usually contains one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English poetry are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables).
Free verse
Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition.
Genre
A class or category of texts with similarities in form, style, or subject matter. The definition of a genre changes over time, and a text often interacts with multiple genres. A text’s relationship to a particular genre—whether it defies or supports a genre’s set of expectations—is often of interest when conducting literary analysis. Four major genres of literature include poetry, drama, nonfiction, and fiction. Poetry can be divided into further genres, such as epic, lyric, narrative, satirical, or prose poetry.
Heptameter
A meter made up of seven feet and usually 14 syllables total (see Fourteener). George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s the Iliad is written in heptameter.
Hexameter
A metrical line of six feet, most often dactylic, and found in Classical Latin or Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad. In English, an iambic hexameter line is also known as an alexandrine.
Hyperbole
A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. Hyperbole usually carries the force of strong emotion.
Iamb
A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The words “unite” and “provide” are both iambic. It is the most common meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech.
Imagery
Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images. Specifically, using vivid or figurative language to represent ideas, objects, or actions.
Irony
As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant. Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the contradiction.
Lament
Any poem expressing deep grief, usually at the death of a loved one or some other loss.
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.”
Metaphor
A comparison that is made directly (for example, John Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) or less directly (for example, Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds”), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as “like,” “as,” or “than.”
Meter
The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry is accentual-syllabic.
Metonymy
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.” “O, for a draught of vintage!” exclaims the speaker in John Keats’s “Ode to Nightingale,” with “vintage” understood to mean “wine.”
Negative capability
A theory first articulated by John Keats about the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science. Contemplating his own craft and the art of others, especially William Shakespeare, in one of his famous letters to relatives Keats supposed that a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated. See Keats’s “To Autumn.” The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Octave
An eight-line stanza or poem. See ottava rima and triolet. The first eight lines of an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet are also called an octave.
Ode
A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,”) or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn”).
Onomatopoeia
A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense (for example, “choo-choo,” “hiss,” or “buzz”).
Oxymoron
A figure of speech that brings together contradictory words for effect, such as “jumbo shrimp” and “deafening silence.”
Palindrome
A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward and forward. The words “civic” and “level” are palindromes, as is the phrase “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama.” The reversal can be word by word as well, as in “fall leaves when leaves fall.”
Pathetic fallacy
The assignment of human feelings to inanimate objects, as coined by the Victorian literary critic John Ruskin. For him, a poet’s tendency to project his or her emotions outward onto the workings of the natural world was a kind of false vision. Today the term is used more neutrally, and the phenomenon is usually accepted as an integral part of the poet’s craft. 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.
Pentameter
A line made up of five feet. It is the most common metrical line in English.
Personification
A figure of speech in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person.
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.
Pun
Wordplay that uses homonyms (two different words that are spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time.
Quatrain
A four-line stanza, rhyming
- ABAC or ABCB (known as unbounded or ballad quatrain).
- AABB (a double couplet).
- ABAB (known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic)
- ABBA (known as envelope or enclosed)
- AABA
Refrain
A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza.
Eye rhyme
rhymes only when spelled, not when pronounced. For example, “through” and “rough.”
End rhyme
the most common type, is the rhyming of the final syllables of a line.
Feminine rhyme
applies to the rhyming of one or more unstressed syllables, such as “dicing” and “enticing.”
Half rhyme
the rhyming of the ending consonant sounds in a word (such as “tell” with “toll,” or “sopped” with “leapt”).
Identical rhyme
employs the same word, identically in sound and in sense, twice in rhyming positions.
Internal rhyme
rhyme within a single line of verse When a word from the middle of a line is rhymed with a word at the end of the line.
Masculine rhyme
describes those rhymes ending in a stressed syllable, such as “hells” and “bells.” It is the most common type of rhyme in English poetry.
Monorhyme
the use of only one rhyme in a stanza.
Pararhyme
poet Edmund Blunden’s term for double consonance, where different vowels appear within identical consonant pairs.
Romanticism
A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic.
Sestet
A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet. A sestet refers only to the final portion of a sonnet, otherwise the six-line stanza is known as a sexain.
Shakespearean sonnet
The variation of the sonnet form that Shakespeare used—comprised of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg—is called the English or Shakespearean sonnet form, although others had used it before him. This different sonnet structure allows for more space to be devoted to the buildup of a subject or problem than the Italian/Petrarchan form, and is followed by just two lines to conclude or resolve the poem in a rhyming couplet.
Sonnet
A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally a “little song,” the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding lines.
Spondee
A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is “hog-wild.”
Stanza
A grouping of lines separated from others in a poem. In modern free verse, the stanza, like a prose paragraph, can be used to mark a shift in mood, time, or thought.
Stress
A syllable uttered in a higher pitch—or with greater emphasis—than others. The English language itself determines how English words are stressed, but sentence structure, semantics, and meter influence the placement and perception of stress.
Syllabic verse
Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses.
Syllable
A single unit of speech sound as written or spoken; specifically, a vowel preceded by zero to three consonants (“awl,” “bring,” “strand”), and followed by zero to four consonants (“too,” “brag,” “gloss,” “stings,” “sixths”).
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 symbol of love and affection.
Synecdoche
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”).
Synesthesia
In description, a blending or intermingling of different sense modalities. Synesthetic effects include textual amplification, complication, and richness.
Tercet
A poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhyme
Tetrameter
A line made up of four feet.
Tone
The poet’s attitude toward the poem’s speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader. Often described as a “mood” that pervades the experience of reading the poem, it is created by the poem’s vocabulary, metrical regularity or irregularity, syntax, use of figurative language, and rhyme.
Trimeter
A line of three metrical feet.
Trochee
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable. Examples of trochaic words include “garden” and “highway.”
Villanelle
A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain.
Volta
Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.
