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[AP] Poetic Devices
Poetic devices for AP Lit/Comp
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| alliteration | repetition of a consonant or a cluster of consonatal sounds |
| anapest | two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable, ex. "and we look'd and we saw him, the Cat in the Hat!" |
| anaphora | the use of a repeated sound, word, or phrase, at the beginning of a sequence of lines. |
| apostrophe | a direct address to a present or absent object or person. |
| assonance | the repetition of a vowel sound in a sequence of words. |
| Ballad | a traditional song ( often anonymous and often transmitted orally with many variations over a period of time) that tells a story. |
| Ballade | An old French form, consisting of three 8-line stanzas (rhyming ababbcbc) with a four-line envoy (bcbc) to close. |
| Blank verse | unrhymed imabic pentameter. Used for the first time in the Earl of Surrey's 1540 translation of the Aeneid, popularized by Shakespeare and Marlowe in drama and used by Milton. |
| Blazon | A listing of a lover's features, starting with the head or hair and working down the body. Derived from heraldry, originated in medieval times and became popular in Elizabethan times. |
| Caesura | A pause in a line of a verse, normally as a break in the middle of a line. |
| Catechresis | Misuse of a word or extending its meaning in an illogical metaphor, ex. "only choice," or "boiling temper," or "loud pink." |
| Chiasmus | A crossing or reversal of the order of terms in two parallel clause, ex. "One should live to eat, not eat to live" |
| Couplet | a pair of rhyming lines |
| Heroic couplet | Two rhymed lines in iambic pentameter, favored by Alexander Pope. |
| Dactyl | A meter in poetry in which one metric foot contains one stressed/long syllable followed by two short/unstressed syllable, ex. "poetry." |
| Dialectical Irony | Irony obtained by juxtaposing two differnt voices, alternating as a conversation, within a single poem. |
| Double dactyl | and 8-line poem in which each of the first three lines is a double dactyl, and the 4th and 8th lines rhyme and are abbreviated.The first line is a nonsense word, one line must be a proper name, and one line must be a six syllable word. |
| Ekphrasis | A verbal representation of a visual representation; any piece of literature that attempts to speak for or describe a work of art. |
| Elegy | originally a specific meter, now a label for any lament on the death of a specific individual. |
| Enjambment | A run-on line that goes into the following line. |
| Free verse | no specific meter; recent and associated in Englis with Walt Whitman |
| Iamb | metrical foot of one unstressed/short and one stressed/long syllable. |
| Imagism | Movement of poetry that flourished right before WWI/ Favored short, immediate bursts of imagery. Favored by Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, etc. |
| Irony | A term from which multiple meanings may be derived. |
| Limerick | Five anapestic lines with the scheme aabba; usually humorous. |
| Metaphor | A figure of similarity, implied as opposed to direct. |
| Meter | From the Greek word for foot or measure; means of measuring lines of conventional verse. |
| Metonymy | Refers to substitution; use of an item to refer to an item it is associated with. |
| Synecdoche | Form of metonymy; part of an object stands in for the whole. |
| Mock-Heroism | The implicit bringing down of heroic, epic , or serious persons by using inflated language and tone for low of trivial subjects. |
| Ottava Rima | a stanzaic form developed an used in Italian epics and romances, used by Byron and Yeats. ABABABCC, |
| Pantoun | A poem composed in quatrains, in which the first two lines of each quatrain constitute a single sentence, and the next two constitute a separate sentence on a different subject. |
| Periphrasis | The use of several words instead of a single phrase or name to describe someone or something in an oblique and "decorous" way. |
| Personification | referring to animals and/or non-living things as if human |
| Quantitative meter | The classical meter of Hellenic poetry, based on length/duration of syllable rather than stress. Difficult to maintain in English. |
| Quatrain | A four line stanza, typical in ballads, sonnets, and hymns. Can by rhymed or unrhymed. |
| Rhmye | the pattern of repeated sounds, normall at the end of lines in a verse. |
| Rondeau | Medieval French form also used in English. Most common is one of 12 8- syllable lines, with stanzas of 5, 3, and 5 lines. There are only two lines, with the first word or phrase repeating (Aabba aabR aabbaR, where R is the repeat or refrain) |
| Sestina | Each stanza repeats the same end-words (abcdef) but in different order - faebdc, and so on. |
| simile | a stated as opposed to implied comparison |
| Sonnet | standard 14-line poem, begun in Italy. Italian form has an octave followed by a sester (abbaabba with repeated rhymes in the next) and English has three quatrains and a concluding couplet (ababcdcdefefgg) |
| Spenserian stanza | 9 line stanza used by Spenser and Keats, ababbcbcc, and the last line is always an alexanrine (iambic hexameter) |
| Spondee | A mertic foot of two stressed/long syllables often used to vary lines an iambic or other meters |
| Synaesthesia | Form of catechresis; use of one sensory adjective to apply to another sense; "sultry sound" |
| Syntactic Inversion | Reversing normal word order to acheive poetic effect; Yoda-speak |
| Tercets/Terza Rima | A stanza of three lines; Terza rima interlocks, was used by Dante. |
| Tone | A speaker's attitude towards a subject, the predominant mood of an utterance. |
| Triolet | An eight line poem of only two rhymes, the first line repeating the fourth line and the first two lines repeating as the last two lines. (ABaAabAB) |
| Trochee | Metrical foot of one stressed.long and one unstressed/short syllable. |
| Trope | Generic word for all types of literary figuration - metaphor, metonymy, irony, allusions, etc. |
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