romantics to victorians

Question 1

what is a speaker?

Answer 1

the voice of the poem, similar to a narrator in fiction.

Question 2

what are rhyming couplets?

Answer 2

couplets (a pair of successive lines of verse) that rhyme.

Question 3

what is sestet?

Answer 3

the last six lines of a sonnet.

Question 4

what is ‘lyrical ballad’?

Answer 4

a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798.

Question 5

what is repetition?

Answer 5

the use of the same word or phrase multiple times.

Question 6

what is assonance?

Answer 6

the repetition of the vowel sound across words within the lines of the poem creating internal rhymes.

Question 7

what is caesura?

Answer 7

a pause or stop in a metrical line.

Question 8

what is refrain?

Answer 8

a verse or phrase that is repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem.

Question 9

what is free verse?

Answer 9

any form of poetry that does not rely on consistent patterns of rhyme and meter.

Question 10

what is blank verse?

Answer 10

poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter.

Question 11

what is an octet?

Answer 11

an eight line stanza.

Question 12

what is quatrain?

Answer 12

a series of four-lines that make one verse of a poem, known as a stanza.

Question 13

what is semantic field?

Answer 13

a technique often used by writers to keep a certain image persistent in their readers’ mind.

Question 14

what is sibilance?

Answer 14

a type of literary device and figure of speech wherein a hissing sound is created in a group of words through the repetition of ‘s’ sounds.

Question 15

what is symbolism?

Answer 15

the use of words or images to symbolize specific concepts, people, objects, or events.

Question 16

define ‘determine’.

Answer 16

to firmly decide.

Question 17

define ‘ellipses’

Answer 17

a set of dots (…) indicating an ellipsis.

Question 18

what is juxtaposition?

Answer 18

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.

Question 19

what is modifier?

Answer 19

a word, especially an adjective or noun used attributively, that restricts or adds to the sense of a head noun (e.g. good and family in a good family house ).

Question 20

what is oxymoron?

Answer 20

a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ).

Question 21

what is an antonym?

Answer 21

a word opposite in meaning to another (e.g. bad and good ).

Question 22

what is a synonym?

Answer 22

a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language, for example shut is a synonym of close.

Question 23

what is pathetic fallacy?

Answer 23

the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.

Question 24

what are personal pronouns?

Answer 24

each of the pronouns in English ( I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us, and them ) comprising a set that shows contrasts of person, gender, number, and case.

Question 25

what is enjambment?

Answer 25

(in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Question 26

what is role?

Answer 26

a characters part in a poem or story.

Question 27

what is innotation?

Answer 27

a matter of variation in the pitch of the voice.