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AP Lit Poetry Terms
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginnings of words. Example: “Ned never knew pneumonia” repeats the “n” sound. |
| allusion | a reference to a work of literature or something outside the work, especially a well-known historical or literary event, person, or other work. |
| anadiplosis | repeating the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next clause. Example: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.” |
| anaphora | repetition at the beginning of clauses. Example: “Tell them to be good, tell them to follow their elders, and tell them to mind their manners.” |
| anastrophe | inverted order of words. |
| antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas; a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. |
| apostrophe | a figure of speech in which someone, some abstract quality, or a nonexistent person is directly addressed as though present. |
| assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. Example: “laid,” “waste,” and “slain” repeat the same “a” sound. |
| ballad meter | four-line stanzas usually rhyming abcb, with the first and third lines carrying four accented syllables and the second and fourth carrying three. |
| blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is used in most of Shakespeare’s plays. |
| cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones, which may be used consciously for effect. |
| caesura | a pause, usually near the middle of a line or verse, often indicated by punctuation and greater than the normal pause. |
| conceit | an ingenious or fanciful notion expressed through an elaborate analogy, pointing to a striking parallel between seemingly dissimilar things. |
| consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words, typically at the ends but also within or at the beginnings of words. |
| couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with the same end rhyme. |
| devices of sound | techniques for deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry, including rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. |
| diction | the use of words in a literary work; the word choice of an author or poet. |
| didactic poem | a poem primarily intended to teach a lesson; determining whether poetry is didactic can involve subjective judgment of the author’s purpose. |
| dramatic poem | a poem that employs a dramatic form or elements of dramatic technique to achieve poetic ends. A dramatic monologue is an example. |
| elegy | a sustained and formal poem presenting the poet’s meditations upon death or another solemn theme. |
| end-stopped | a line with a pause at the end, usually marked by a period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, or question mark. |
| enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next. |
| extended metaphor | an implied analogy or comparison carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem. |
| euphemism | the substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant. |
| euphony | a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate; the opposite of cacophony. |
| eye rhyme | rhyme that appears correct from spelling but is actually half-rhyme or slant rhyme in pronunciation. |
| feminine rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, such as “waken” and “forsaken.” Also called double rhyme. |
| figurative language | writing that uses figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and simile; words are used to mean something other than their literal meaning. |
| free verse | poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular, standard meter. |
| heroic couplet | two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc, with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit. |
| hyperbole | a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration used for serious or comic effect. |
| imagery | the images or sensory details of a literary work; descriptive language that evokes sensory details. |
| irony | the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning. Types include verbal, dramatic, and situational irony. |
| internal rhyme | rhyme that occurs within a line rather than at the ends of two different lines. |
| lyric poem | a short poem presenting a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings. Sonnets and odes are examples. |
| masculine rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of rhyme-words, such as “keep” and “sleep.” |
| metaphor | a figurative comparison expressed without using comparative terms such as “as,” “like,” or “than.” |
| meter | the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry. Each unit of meter is known as a foot. |
| metonymy | a figure of speech in which a term closely associated with an object or idea is substituted for the actual word itself. |
| mixed metaphors | the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following it, where the two are incongruous or not in harmony. |
| narrative poem | a non-dramatic poem that tells a story, whether simple or complex, long or short. Epics and ballads are examples. |
| octave | an eight-line stanza. Most commonly, it refers to the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet. |
| onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sounds suggest their meanings, such as “buzz,” “hiss,” or “honk.” |
| oxymoron | a form of paradox that combines a pair of contrary terms into a single expression or phrase, such as “wise fool” or “eloquent silence.” |
| paradox | a situation, action, or feeling that appears contradictory but, upon inspection, turns out to be true or make sense. |
| parallelism | a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry. |
| paraphrase | a restatement of an idea that retains the original meaning while changing the diction and form, often expanding the original for clarity. |
| personification | a figure of speech that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human qualities. |
| poetic foot | a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables. Common feet include iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic, pyrrhic, and spondaic. |
| polysyndeton (vs. asyndeton) | using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect, such as “Boats and tanks and planes…kings and queens and generals!” |
| pun | a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply different meanings; puns can be serious or humorous. |
| quatrain | a four-line stanza or group of lines with any combination of rhymes. |
| refrain | a group of words forming a phrase, sentence, or one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem, usually at the end of a stanza. |
| rhyme | close similarity or identity of sound between accented syllables. In true rhyme, the vowels in accented syllables are preceded by different consonants. |
| rhyme royal | a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets. |
| rhythm | the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. Rhythmic patterns can create pleasure and heightened emotional response. |
| sarcasm | a type of irony in which a person appears to praise something but is actually insulting it; its purpose is to injure or hurt. |
| satire | writing that seeks to arouse a reader’s disapproval through ridicule, usually exposing errors to correct vice and folly. |
| scansion | a system for determining the meter of a poem by marking stressed and unstressed syllables. |
| sestet | a six-line stanza. |
| simile | a directly expressed comparison, often using “like,” “as,” or “than.” |
| sonnet | usually a 14-line iambic pentameter poem. Common types include the Italian/Petrarchan and Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnets. |
| soliloquy | a dramatic speech in which a character speaks his or her thoughts aloud. |
| stanza | a group of lines forming the basic recurring unit in a poem, similar to a paragraph in prose. |
| syllepsis | a device in which a single word is used in two different senses. Example: “After he threw the ball, he threw a fit.” |
| symbol | an object or entity that acts as both itself and a sign of something else, usually a larger concept or idea. |
| synecdoche | a figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole. Examples include “foot soldier” and “field hands.” |
| synesthesia | the combination of one type of sensory language with another, such as “a loud color.” |
| syntax | the ordering of words into patterns or sentences. A shift from normal word order can emphasize a particular word. |
| tercet | a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme. |
| terza rima | a three-line stanza with the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, etc. Dante’s Divine Comedy is written in terza rima. |
| theme | the main thought expressed by a work of literature or poetry. |
| tone | the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; tone is described with adjectives and can shift throughout a poem. |
| understatement or litotes | the opposite of hyperbole; a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is. |
| villanelle | a 19-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain, with the rhyme scheme aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa and repeated refrains. |
Created by:
katdolan