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Poetry Unit Exam
Poetry Literary Terms from Kennedy-Gioia Textbook
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Alliteration | The repitition of two or more consonant sounds in successive words in a line of verse or prose. Initial = beginning of words (ex. Cool Cats). Internal = internally on stressed syllables (ex. in Kitchen Cups conCupiscent Curds). |
| Antithesis | Words, phrases, clauses or sentences set in deliberate contrast to one another. Antithesis balances opposing ideas, tones or structures, usually to heighten the effect of a statement. |
| Apostrophe | A direct address to someone or something; in poetry, often addresses something not ordinarily spoken to (ex. "O mountain!"). A speaker may address an inanimate object, a dead or absent person, an abstract thing, or a spirit. |
| Assonance | The repitition of two or more vowel sounds in successive words, which create a kind of rhyme. Initially = ex. All the Awful Auguries. Internally = ex. whIte lIlacs. May be used to focus attention on key words or concepts or make a phrase more memorable. |
| Carpe Diem | Latin for "seize the day". Originally said in Horace's famous "Odes I (11)," this phrase has been applied to characterize much lyric poetry concerned with human morality and the passing of time. |
| Closed Form | Generic term describing poetry written in a preexisting pattern of meter, rhyme, line or stanza. It produces a prescribed structure as in the triolet with a set rhyme scheme and line length. Ex. the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, ballade and rondeau. |
| Connotation | An association or additional meaning that a word, image or phrase may carry, apart from its literal denotation or dictionary definition. A word picks up connotations from all the uses to which it has been put in the past. |
| Denotation | The literal, dictionary definition of a word. |
| Didactic Poem | Kind of poetry intended to teach the reader a moral lesson or impart a body of knowledge. Poetry that aims for education over art. |
| Dramatic Monologue | A poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment. The speaker is usually addressing a silent listener as in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess". |
| Epic | A long narrative poem usually composed in an elevated style tracing the adventures of a legendary or mythic hero. Epics are usually written in a consistent form and meter throughout. Famous epics include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. |
| Feminine Rhyme | A rhyme of two or more syllables with a stress on a syllable other than the last, as in TURtile and FERtile. |
| Fixed Form | A traditional verse form requiring certain predetermined elements of structure. Ex. a stanza pattern, set meter, or predetermined line length. Ex. the sonnet must have no more or less than fourteen lines, rhymed according to certain conventional patterns. |
| Folk Ballad | Anonymous narrative songs, usually in ballad meter, that were originally transmitted orally. Although most well-known ballads have been transcribed and published, they were created for oral performance, often resulting in many versions of a single ballad. |
| Haiku | A Japanese verse form that has three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Traditional haiku is often serious and spiritual in tone, relying mostly on imagery, and usually set in one of the four seasons. |
| Hyperbole/Overstatement | Exaggeration used to emphasize a point |
| Irony | When a discrepancy of meaning is masked beneath the surface of the language; when a writer says one thing but means something quite the opposite. Verbal = contained in words. Situational = something about to happen when opposite is expected. |
| Literary Allusion | A reference to a person, place or thing in history or in another work of literature. |
| Masculine Rhyme | Either a rhyme of one syllable words (ex. fox and socks) or a rhyme on the stressed final syllables in polysyllabic words (ex. conTRIVE and surVIVE). |
| Metaphor | A statement that one this IS something else. By asserting that a thing is something else, a metaphor creates a close association between the two entities and usually underscores some important similarity between them. |
| Meter | A recurrent, regular, rhythmic pattern in verse. When stresses recur at fixed intervals, the result is meter. |
| Metonymy | Figure of speech in which the name of a thing is substituted for that of another closely associated with it. For instance, in saying "The WHite House decided," one could mean that the president decided. |
| Monometer | A verse meter consisting of one metrical foot, or one primary stress, per line. |
| Myth | Traditional narrative from a culture's oral traditions. Characters are usually gods or heroic figures. Characteristically explain the origins of things. In literature, may also refer to boldly imagined narratives that embody primal truths about life. |
| Narrative Poem | A poem that tells a story. Narrative is one of the four traditional modes of poetry, along with lyric, dramatic, and didactic. Ballads and epics are two common forms. |
| Neoclassical Poets | |
| Onomatopoeia | A literary device that attempts to represent a thing or action by the word that imitates the sounds associated with it (ex. crash, bang, boom). |
| Persona | Latin for "mask." A fictitious character created by an author to be the speaker of a poem, story or novel. A persona is always the narrator of the work and not nerely a character in it. |
| Personification | A figure of speech in which a thing, an animal or an absract term is endowed with human characteristics. Personification allows an author to dramatize the nonhuman world in tangibly human terms. |
| Poetic License | |
| Poetry | |
| Prosody | The study of metrical structures of poetry |
| Satric Poem | Poetry that blends criticism with humor to convery a message. Satire characteristically uses irony to make its points. Usually, its tone is one of detached amusement, withing contempt, and implied superiority. |
| Simile | A comparison of two things, indicated by some connetive, usually LIKE, AS, THAN, or a verb such as RESEMBLES. A simile usually compares two things that initially seem unlike but are shown to have a significant resemblance. |
| Stanza | From the Italian, meaning "stopping-place" or "room." A recurring pattern of two or more lines of verse, poetry's equivalent to the paragraph in prose. The stanza is the basic organizational principle of most formal poetry. |
| Stress/Accent | An emphasis or accent placed on a syllable in speech. Clear pronunciation of polysyllabic words almost always depends on correct placement of their stress. (ex. DE-sert vs de-SERT) Stress is the basic principle of most English-language meter. |
| Synecdoche | The use of a significant part of a thing to stand for the whole of it or vice versa. To say WHEELS for CAR or RHYME for POETRY are examples of synecdoche. |
| Troubadour | The minstrels of the late Middle Ages. Originaly, troubadours were lyric poets living in southern France and nothern Italy who sang to aristocratic audiences mostly of chivalry and love. |
| Understatement | An ironic figure of speech that deliberately describes something in a way that is less than the true case. |
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