Poetry Flashcards
Name the most important features of poetry
- relative brevity
- compression, condensation and reduction of the represented subject matter
- increased subjectivity
- musicality and proximity to songs
- structural and phonological complexity
- morphological and syntactic complexity
- deviation from everyday language and increased artificiality
- increased aesthetic self-referentiality
What determines the speech situation in a poem?
- Who is the textual speaker?
- To whom are their remarks addressed?
- Where and when are speaker and addressee situated?
-> analyse personal and possessive pronouns and their referential functions
meter
- organisational principle according to which a line of verse is divided into feet
- differentiated according to the number of stressed syllables -> monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5) and hexameter (6)
foot
smallest rhythmical unit consisting of one stressed and up to two unstressed syllables, e.g. iamb
tetrameter
a line with four stressed syllables, also known as ‘four-beat line’
enjambement
a “run-on” line that carries over into the next to complete its meaning.
caesura
an audible pause internal to a line, usually in the middle.
(An audible pause at the end of a line is called an end-stop.) The French alexandrine, Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, and Latin dactylic hexameter are all verse forms that call for a caesura.
alexandrine
a line consisting of am iambic hexameter with a caesura after the third stress, or the sixth syllable.
stanza
a “paragraph” of a poem: a group of lines separated by extra white space from other groups of lines.
a couplet consists of two lines, a tercet of three and a quatrain of four
rhyme
generally referring to a rhyme at the end of a line of verse (end-rhyme), with a consonance between all phonemes following the last stressed vowel, and with all rhyming syllables occurring within the same word.
free verse
poetry in which the rhythm does not repeat regularly.
end rhyme
rhyme between stressed final vowels in lines of verse
internal rhyme
special case; full rhyme between two or more words within the same line of verse
scansion
the identification and analysis of poetic rhythm and meter. To “scan” a line of poetry is to mark its stressed and unstressed syllables.
rhyming scheme
schematic representation of the sequence of end-rhymes:
- rhyming couplets: aa bb cc
- alternate rhyme: abab cdcd
- embracing rhyme: abba cddc
- chain rhyme: aba bcb cdc
- tail rhyme: aab ccb
anaphora
the repetition of a word or phrase, usually at the beginning of a line.
alliteration
the repetition of sounds in a sequence of words.
allegory
narrative with two levels of meaning, one stated and one unstated.
apostrophe
direct address to an absent or otherwise unresponsive entity (someone or something dead, imaginary, abstract, or inanimate).
assonance
the repetition of vowel-sounds.
chiasmus
from the Greek letter Chi ( Χ ), a “crossed” rhetorical parallel. That is, the parallel form a:b::a:b changes to a:b::b:a to become a chiasmus.
consonance
the repetition of consonant-sounds.
elegy
since the 17th century, usually denotes a reflective poem that laments the loss of something or someone.
metonymy
a figure of speech in which something is represented by another thing that is commonly and often physically associated with it, e.g. “White House” for “the President.”
