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Poetry Terminology
Poetry Midterm
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Allegory | A narrative in which characters and events stand for ideas and actions on another level (represent moral qualities). |
| Alliteration | The repetition at the beginning of words or syllables. |
| Image | Something that is brought into the light of consciousness through one of the senses. |
| Concrete | Anything presented to consciousness as a bodily sensation. |
| Abstract | Ideas that are stripped of physical detail. |
| Anapest | Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. |
| Assonance | The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry as in "I rose and told him of my woe." |
| Ballad | A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. |
| Blank Verse | A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
| Caesura | A strong pause within a line of verse. |
| Catharsis | The purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occur in the audience of tragic drama. |
| Closed Form | A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern, such as a sonnet. |
| Connotation | The personal and emotional associations called up by a word that go beyond its dictionary meaning. |
| Convention | A customary feature of a literary work such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy or an explicit moral in a fable. |
| Couplet | A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. |
| Dactyl | A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-berry. |
| Denotation | Dictionary meaning of the word. |
| Epic | A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. |
| Epigram | A brief witty poem, often satirical. |
| Flashback | An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of the action |
| Foot | A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by u ', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. |
| Foreshadowing | Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or story. |
| Free verse | Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. |
| Hyperbole | A figure of speech involving exaggeration. |
| Iamb | An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. |
| Imagery | The pattern of related comparative aspects of language in a literary work. |
| Irony | A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen. |
| Literal Language | A form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote. |
| Lyric Poem | A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. |
| Metaphor | A comparison between essentially unlike things without a word such as like or as. |
| Meter | The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. |
| Metonymy | A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. |
| Narrative poem | A poem that tells a story. |
| Octave | An eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet . |
| Open form | A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. [Buffalo Bill's] |
| Parable | A brief story that teaches a lesson often ethical or spiritual |
| Pathos | A quality of a play's action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for a character. |
| Quatrain | A four-line stanza in a poem. |
| Rhyme | The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. |
| Rhythm | The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. |
| Rising Meter | Poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable. |
| Satire | A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities and follies. |
| Similie | A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like,as, or as though. |
| Soliloquy | A speech in a play which is meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters on the stage. |
| Sonnet | A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. |
| Spondee | A metrical foot represented by two stressed syllables such as KNICK-KNACK. |
| Stanza | A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form–with similar or identical patterns of rhyme and meter. |
| Symbol | An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. |
| Tercet | A three-line stanza. |
| Tone | The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work. |
| Trochee | A metrical foot represented by an stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in GLAR-ing. |
| Elision | The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. |
| Diction | The selection of words in a literary work. |
| Figurative language | A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. |
| Pyrrhic | A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the") |
| Synecdoche | A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. |
| Understatement | A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means. |
Created by:
amber_mcmorris
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