Poetry Terms Poetry Unit

 Alliteration – the repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words  Allusion –Unacknowledged reference and quotations authors assume their readers will recognize.  Assonance – the repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose. EX: assonantal “I’s” in the following lines: “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,/ Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself.”

 Ballad – a narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in direct style.  Blank Verse – A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. (E.g. Shakespeare’s plays)  Connotation – The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning.  Consonance – the counterpart of assonance; the partial or total identity of consonants in words whose main vowels differ (ex. Shadow, meadow, pressed, passed)  Couplet – A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. (E.g. “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings /That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 Dactyl – a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-er-ing or BLUE-ber- ry.  Denotation – The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word’s denotative meaning against its connotative meaning.  Diction – level of formality that a speaker uses  Epic – a long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero.  Figurative Language – a form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words.

 Foot – A meterical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.  Free Verse – Poetry without regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is “free” in not being bound my earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme.  Hyperbole – a figure of speech involving exaggeration.  Iamb – An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.  Imagery – The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly images, in a literary work.  Internal rhyme – an exact rhyme within a line of poetry: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

 Irony – A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and literature.  Metaphor – A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as.  Meter – The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems.  Narrative Poem – a poem that tells a story  Narrator (Speaker) – The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author.

 Ode – A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject.  Onomatopoeia – The use of words to imitate sounds they describe. (E.g. buzz, crack)  Paradox – a rhetorical figure emodyng a seeming contradiction that is nonetheless true. (EX. “What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young.” OW)  Personification – Giving inanimate objects or abstract concepts animate or living qualities.  Point of View – The view from which a story is narrated.  Quatrain – a four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet.  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.  Refrain – repeated word or series of words in response or counterpoint to the main verse, as in a ballad.  Sestet – A six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem.  Simile – A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.  Sonnet – A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.  Stanza – A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form – either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another.  Tone – the implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work.  Trochee – An accented syllable followed by an unaccented on, as in FOOT-ball.