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.
