Poetry Terms

Free Verse

• Poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme. This poetry imitates the natural rhythms of speech.

Blank Verse

• Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank means not rhymed.

• Verse used by William Shakespeare.

Iambic Pentameter

• Five iambs - The most important verse in poetry form in the English epic and dramatic poetry.

Sonnet

• A fourteen line poem, a lyric, and usually in iambic pentameter.

Ballad

• A fairly short narrative poem written in a songlike stanza form.

Lyric

• Poetry that does not tell a story but aims at expressing an author’s thoughts or emotions.

Imagery

• Word pictures that appeal to the five senses

Catalog Poem

• A catalog poem is built on a list of images.

• Sometimes it builds into a rolling rhythm.

Scene

• A setting which includes time and place

• Setting may be implied or stated directly

Haiku

• A Japanese poetry form

• 17 syllables, 5-7-5

• presents images from everyday life

• Contains seasonal word or symbol

• Presents a moment of discovery or enlightenment

Extended Imagery

• Images that continue through several lines of poetry.

Example of Extended Imagery

“Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears,

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match.”Robert Browning

From “Meeting at Night”

Cliche

• An overused word, worn-out expression or phrase

Allusion

• A reference to a statement, person, place, event, or thing that is known from literature, history, religion, myth, politics, sports, science, or pop culture.

Symbolism

• A person, place, thing, or event that stands for itself and something beyond itself.

Figures of Speech

Simile

• A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike, using such words or phrases as like, as, than, similar to, resembles, or seems.

Metaphor

• A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike.

Personification

• A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, an object, or a concept.

Hyperbole

• An exaggeration for effect

Rhyme

• Repetition of similar sounds or words, within a line or at the end of a line

Half-rhyme

• Also called near rhyme or slant rhyme

• Words are alike in some sound but do not exactly sound the same

• Example: now and know

Approximate RhymesNear RhymesSlant Rhymes

• Two words are alike in some sound but do not rhyme exactly

• Example:

now and know

Stanza

• Group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit

• Couplet 2

• Tercet 3

• Quatrain 4

• Cinquain 5

Stanza Continued

• Sestet 6

• Heptastich 7

• Octave 8

Rhyme Scheme

• Applying the letters of the alphabet to new sounds of words at the end of each line.

• I will go a

• To the show a

• We will eat b

• At our seatb

Meters

• Monometer = 1

• Dimeter =2

• Trimeter =3

• Tetrameter =4

• Pentameter =5

• Hexameter =6

Meter continued

• Heptameter = 7

• Octameter = 8

Sound Words

Alliteration

• Repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together

Consonance

• Repetition of consonant sounds within the words in a line of poetry

Assonance

• Repetition of similar vowel sounds that are followed by different consonant sounds

Example: base and fade

young and love

Repetition

• Words, phrases, or lines that repeat in the poem

Internal Rhyme

• Words that rhyme within one line of poetry.

Internal Rhyme

• Rhymes in the middle of a line

• “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.”

Edgar Allan Poe, from “The Raven”

Onomatopoeia

• Words that sound like their meaning

Rhythm

• Alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in language

Meter

• Poetic feet

• A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables

Kinds of Feet Meter or Rhythm

• Iamb da Dah

• Trochee Dah da

• Anapest da da Dah

• Dactyl Dah da da

• Spondee Dah Dah

• These sounds are syllables or words.

Scansion

• Reading in an exaggerated way to find the rhythm (meter).

Theme

• The underlying meaning or idea of the poem

Oxymoron

• A figure of speech that combines apparently contradictory ideas.

• Example: jumbo shrimp

Apostrophe

• A figure of speech in which a writer directly addresses an absent or dead person, an abstract quality, or something non-human as if it were present and capable of responding.

Implied Metaphor

• Comparison that suggests rather than directly states that one think is something else.

• Words suggest the nature of the comparison.

Narration

• Type of writing or speaking that tells about a series of related events. (The other types of writing are description, exposition, and persuasion.)

Style

• The choice of words, phrases, and sentences

• Placement on the page

• Dialect or regional speech

• Poetic forms, such as ode, ballad, sonnet, or lyric, to name a few

Diction

• Choice of words

Speaker

• The voice that is talking to us in a poem.

Pun

• Play on multiple meanings of a word or two words that sound alike but with different meanings. Shakespeare was a great punster.

Dialect

• Way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or a particular group of people.

Rhetorical Question

• A question asked but not intended by the speaker to be answered.

Understatement

• To represent as less than is the case

Epithet

• A short descriptive phrase pointing out an outstanding quality of a character.

Implied Ideas

• Information in a poem that implies meaning, but it does not say explicitly.

• Many poems ask the reader to “read between the lines.”

Irony

• Verbal - The difference between what one says and what one means

• Situational – The difference between what seems appropriate and what really happens, or when what we expect to happen is in fact quite contradictory to what really does take place.

Irony Continued

• Dramatic Irony – When the audience or the reader knows something important that a character in a play or story does not know.

Extended Metaphor

• A comparison developed over several lines or the entire poem.

Analogy

• An analogy is a comparison of two pairs of words. The words in each pair have the same relationship to each other.

Paraphrase

• A restatement of the content of a poem designed to make its prose meaning as clear as possible.

Tone

• The author’s attitude toward his/her material. Tone depends on word choice.

Conflict

• Struggle or clash between opposing characters or between opposing forces.

• External conflictsMan vs. Man social

Man vs. Nature physical

Man vs. Fate metaphysical

Conflict Continued

• Internal ConflictMan vs. Himself- psychological

Rhyme Scheme

• Assigning letters of the alphabet to rhyming lines in order to establish the kind of poem.

Rhymed Couplet

• Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.

End-stopped Line

• Punctuation at the end of the line.

Run-on Line

• No punctuation at the end of the line, which means that the reader continues the phrases without pausing or stopping.

Shakespearean Sonnet

• Three, four line stanzas, plus a couplet.Each stanza reflects a thought and the couplet give an answer or a conclusion.

• Abab, cdcd, efef, gg

Italian Sonnet

• Also called Petrarchan Sonnet

• One octave, one sestet

• The octave establishes a problem, the sestet gives a solution

• Abba, abba, cde, cde

Prose Poem

• A prose poem is a compact and rhythmic composition written in the form of a prose paragraph.

• Like any poem, a prose poem often presents its message by means of a vivid figure of speech.

Denotation

• Dictionary definition of a word

Connotation

• All the meanings, associations, or emotions that a word suggests

Dramatic Monologue

• A dramatic monologue is a poem in which a character speaks to one or more listeners. The reactions of the listener must be inferred by the reader.