Poetry Flashcards
accentual meter
Lines of verse organized by number of stresses rather than by feet or number of syllables. Accentual meter is the basis of sprung rhythm.
accentual-stress meter
Lines of verse bases on the metrical foot. Most common in English Poetry.
Alcaics
A four-line stanza of considerable metrical complexity.
Alliteration
The repetition of sounds in nearby words, most often involving the initial consonants of the words (and sometimes the internal consonants in the stressed syllables).
Ambiguity
The ability to mean more than one thing.
Analogy
Resemblance in certain respects between things that are otherwise unlike; also, the use of such likeness to predict other similarities.
Anapest
Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one.
Anaphora
Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines.
Assonance
The repetition of vowel sounds in a line or series of lines. Often effects pace and seems to underscore the words included in the pattern.
Aubade
A lyric about the dawn
Ballad
A narrative poem. Characterized by repetition
Ballad stanza
A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as “common meter”
Blank Verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Caesura
A sign, used in scansion, that marks a natural pause in speaking a line of poetry
Concrete Poetry
An attempt to supplement (or replace) verbal meaning with visual devices from painting and sculpture. A true concrete poem cannot be spoken; it is viewed, not read.
Confessional Poem
A relatively new (or frequently defined) kind of poetry in which the speaker focuses of the poet’s own psychic biography.
Connotation
what is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly and directly describes.
Controlling metaphors
Metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem.
Conventions
Standard ways of saying things in verse, employed to achieve certain expected effects. Conventions may pertain to style, (e.g. the rhyme scheme of the sonnet) or content (e.g. the figure of the shepherd in pastoral)
Couplet
A pair of lines, almost always rhyming, that form a unit.
Dactyl
A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones
Denotation
The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase (as distinct from its implication)
Dramatic poetry
Poetry written in the voice of one or more characters assumed by the poet
Dramatic monologue
A poem written in the voice of a character, set in a specific situation, and spoken to someone.
Echo
a reference that recalls a word, phrase, or sound in another text.
E.g. “and indeed there will be time” in Eliots “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” recalls both Ecclesiastes.
Elegy
In classical times, any poem on any subject written in “elegiac” meter (dactylic couplets comprising a hexameter followed by a pentameter line), but since the Renaissance usually a formal lament for the death of a particular person.
End stop
A line break that coincides with the end of the sentence
English Sonnet
Three four-line stanzas and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg.
Enjambment
The use of a line that “runs on” to the next line, without pause, to complete its grammatical sense.
Envoy
A short concluding stanza found in certain poetic forms (e.g. the sestina) that often provides a concise summing-up of the poem.
Epic
A long poem, in a continuous narrative often divided into ‘books’ on a great or serious subject.
Epigram
Originally any poem carved in stone, but in modern usage a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the end.
Extended metaphors
detailed and complex metaphors that extended over a long section of the poem
feminine rhyme
Rhymes comprised of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
Figures of speech
Uses of a word or words that go beyond the literal meaning to show or imply a relationship, evoking further meaning. Such figures, sometimes called “tropes” (i.e. rhetoric “turns”), include anaphora, metaphor, metonymy and irony.
Foot
The basic unit, consisting of two or three syllables, into which a line is divided in scansion. Verse is labeled according to its dominant foot (E.g. Iambic) and the number of feet per line (e.g. pentameter). Lines of one,two,three,four,five and six feet are respectively called monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter.
Free verse
Poetry that does not follow the rules of regularized meter and strict form. However, these open forms continue to rely on patterns of rhythm and repetition to impose order
Heroic Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
Iamb
An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed.
Image
A mental representation of a particular thing able to be visualized.
Irony
A figure in which what is stated is opposite of what is meant or expected.
Metaphor
A figure of speech that relies on a likeness or analogy between two things to equate them and thus suggest a relationship between them.
Metonymy
A figure that relies on a close relationship other than similarity in substituting a word or phrase for the thing meant.
Motif
A recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects a poem with preexisting patterns and conventions.
Mythologies
Large systems of belief and tradition on which cultures draw to explain and understand themselves. These are often political or religious, and often become conventional over time.
Narrative
Poetry that tells a story and is primarily characterized by linear, chronological description.
Ode
An extended lyric, usually elevated in style and with an elaborate stanzaic structure.
Off-rhyme
rhyme that does not perfectly match in vowel or consonant sound.
Onomatopoeia
Use of a word or words the sound of which approximates the sound of the thing donated.
Oxymoron
A figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory words. E.g. “ cruel kindness”
Parody
A poem that imitates another poem closely, but changes details for comic or critical effect.
Pastoral
A poem that portrays the simple life of country folk, usually shepherds, as a timeless world of beauty, peace, and confinement.
Pattern poetry
A poem with lines in the shape of a subject,
Persona
A voice assumed by the author or poet.
Personification
Treating an abstraction as if it were a person, endowing it with humanlike qualities.
Pyrrhic
Two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables
Quantitative meter
Lines of verse divided into feet, which are scanned by syllable length rather than stress. Normally classical Greek and Latin verse.
Quatrain
A four-line stanza, whether rhymed or unrhymed. Common
Rhyme
The repetition of the same or similar sounds, usually at the end of lines.
Rhyme Royal
A seven-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhymed ababbcc.
Scansion
The analysis of a line of poetry (by scanning) to determine its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, which are usually divided into metrical feet.
Sestina
Six six-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza in a complex form that repeats words, not lines or rhymes. The final word in each line of the first stanza becomes the final word in other stanzas.
Setting
The time and place of the action in a poem
Simile
A direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another that usually draws the connection with the words ‘like’ or ‘as’
Situation
The context of the action in a poem; that is, what is happening when the poem begins.
Sonnet
A form, usually only a single stanza, that offers several related possibilities for its rhyme scheme; however, it is always fourteen lines long and usually written in iambic pentameter.
Speaker
The person, not necessarily the author, who is the voice of a poem.
Spondee
A stressed syllable followed by another syllable of approximately equal stress, as in “hot dog”
stanzas
Group of lines, usually in some predetermined pattern of meter and rhyme, that are set off from one another by a space.
Subject
The general or specific area of concern of a poem; also called its topic.
syllabic verse
A form in which the poet establishes a precise number of syllables to a line, without regard to their stress, and repeats them in subsequent stanzas.
Symbol
A word or image that stands for something else in a vivid but indeterminate way: it suggests more than what it actually says.
Symbolic poem
A poem in which the use of symbols is so pervasive and internally consistent that the larger referential world is distanced, if not forgotten.
Synesthesia
Figurative expression of the perception of one sense in terms of another. ‘cool colour’ cool normally meaning temp - but here is a complement
Syntax
The formal arrangement of words in a sentence.
Terza
A series of three-line stanzas with interlocking rhymes. Aba bcb cdc ded
Theme
The statement a poem makes about its subject. Although, generally speaking, the theme is what a poem is “about”, the meaning of a poem can never be reduced to one or more of the theme within the poem.
Tone
The attitude taken in or by a poem towards subject and theme.
Tradition
A customary practice or a widely accepted way of viewing or representing things; it usually includes many conventions.
Trochee
A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in “liar”
