1. Poetry Terms

2. Alliteration * Repetition of the same initial sounds
Sally sold seashells at the seashore

3. Allusion *
Reference to a Person, Place, Thing from that is well known (like a historical event or person)
In the song, “Candle in the Wind” – Norma Jean refers to Marilyn Monroe

4. Apostrophe *
Words that are spoken to a person who is absent or imaginary, or to an object or abstract idea.

5. Assonance * Repetition of the same vowel sounds in a line
The cat in the hat sat on the mat

6. Ballad
narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style.

7. Blank Verse A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

8. Cacophony *
Harsh, unpleasant sounding words
Like the sounds of “ck”

9. Caesura * A pause or break in a line (commas, period, dash)
The boy, who drank
He always felt heavy

10. Closed Form
A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regular and consistent elements such as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern

11. Concrete Poem
Poem that takes the shape of the object it describes.

12. Connotation
Implied meaning of a word
The word mother – caring, kind

13. Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem.
Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

14. Denotation
Dictionary definition of a word

15. Dialect
A sound of language specific to an area

16. Diction
Word Choice in a piece of writing

17. Elegy
A lyric poem that laments the dead.

18. Elision *
The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."

19. End-stopped Line
There is some sort of punctuation at the end of the line
After the day’s journey, he was tired.

20. Epic A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero.
Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values.

21. Epigram
A brief witty poem, often satirical.

22. Euphony * Euphony is derives from Greek meaning "good sound".
Euphony is refers to pleasant spoken sound that is created by smooth consonants such as "ripple'.

23. Foot A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.
For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.
Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.

24. Form Poetry takes on many forms.
One common type of poetry is rhyming couplets
In free-form poetry, rhyme and meter are loose, allowing for complex rhythms and greater contextual freedom.
Poems can be long or short. As a result, the "types" of poetry will never be completely standardized.

25. Free Verse Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme.
The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad.

26. Haiku
A Japanese poem composed of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Haiku often reflect on some aspect of nature.

27. Hyperbole * Overexaggeration Her butt is as big as New York
I’m just gonna die because know I know he likes me

28. Iambic
An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY.
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.

29. Ideology
The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.

30. Idiom
A word or phrase of expression
Getting in a car, but on a plane

31. Imagery *
The ability to see or picture a scene or line from the poem through your senses

32. Irony
When one thing is said or done or expected to be done and the opposite occurs

33. Jargon unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing
language that is characterized by uncommon or pretentious vocabulary and convoluted syntax and is often vague in meaning
the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group

34. Limerick
Limericks are short sometimes bawdy, humorous poems of consisting of five Anapestic (3 syllables with stress on 3rd syllable: “up the hill”) lines.
Lines 1, 2, and 5 of a Limerick have seven to ten syllables and rhyme with one another.
Lines 3 and 4 have five to seven syllables and also rhyme with each other.

35. Edward Lear
There was an Old Man with a gong, Who bumped at it all day long; But they called out, 'O law! You're a horrid old bore!' So they smashed that Old Man with a gong.

36. Line
Single line of words in a poem

37. Metaphor * Comparison between 2 unlike things without using like or as
She is a rose

38. Meter
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems

39. Modernism
refers to the early part of the twentieth century — sometimes beginning with the First World War in 1914, and continuing through the 1930s or so — perhaps up to the Second World War.
Much experimentation with new forms

40. Narrative Ballad
A poem that tells a story

41. Ode
Odes are long poems which are serious in nature and written to a set structure.
John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode To A Nightingale" are probably the most famous examples of this type of poem

42. Onomatopoeia *
Written like it sounds
Buzz, Zang, Plop, Crackle

43. Open Form
A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure.
E.E. Cummings

44. Paradox *
a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.

45. Pastiche a work whose style imitates that of another writer or period.
Pastiche differs from parody in that it is usually intended as a kind of tribute rather than a satire.

46. Pastoral
a  poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, idealized way for example of shepherds or country life.

47. Persona
A persona, from the Latin for mask, is a character taken on by a poet to speak in a first-person poem.
Margaret Atwood uses the persona of a siren in her 'Siren Song', a poem that seduces its listeners with dissimulation.

48. Personification * Human quality to non-human things
The tree screamed when he cut it.

49. Poem
designed to convey experiences, ideas, or emotions in a vivid and imaginative way, characterized by the use of language chosen for its sound and suggestive power and by the use of literary techniques such as meter, metaphor, and rhyme.
Written in verse, not prose

50. Poet
A writer of poems

51. Poetry
Poetry is piece of literature written by a poet in meter or verse expressing various emotions which are expressed by the use of variety of techniques including metaphors, similes and onomatopoeia.

52. Prose Poem poem that does not use line breaks.
This still allows the poet to use alliteration, metaphor, ambiguity, personification, and many other poetic techniques, but it can still be strange to see a poem that goes all the way to the right-hand margin.

53. Realism
Realism is an aesthetic attitude stressing the truthful treatment of material, the normal and everyday, life as it truly is

54. Repetition
deliberate use of the same words or phrases multiple times to achieve a sense of expectation.
The reader comes to expect the word to be repeated.
Then the poet can continue to use the word or phrase with one effect or choose to not use that expected word for another effect.
In music: the refrain or chorus

55. Rhyme
The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with the second:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him; He was a gentleman from sole to crown Clean favored and imperially slim.

56. Rhythm
The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. In the following lines from "Same in Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are underlined:
I said to my baby, Baby take it slow.... Lulu said to Leonard I want a diamond ring

57. Run-on line Also known as enjambment
There is no punctuation at the end of a line, instead the thought continues on to the next line

58. Simile *
Comparison using Like or as
She is like a rose

59. Slang (part of diction)
highly informal speech that is outside conventional or standard usage and consists both of coined words and phrases and of new or extended meanings attached to established terms
slang develops from the attempt to find fresh and vigorous, colorful, pungent, or humorous expression, and generally either passes into disuse or comes to have a more formal status

60. Sonnet A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.
The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg.

61. 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.

62. Stress
Stress is the emphasis that falls on certain syllables and not others
the arrangement of stresses within a poem is the foundation of poetic rhythm.

63. Syntax
The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted:
"Whose woods these are I think I know."

64. Terza rima
poetry written in three-line stanzas (or “tercets”) linked by end-rhymes patterned aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe, etc. There is no specified number of stanzas in the form, but poems written in terza rima usually end with a single line or a couplet rhyming with the middle line of the last tercet.

65. Tone
The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work

66. Understatement *
A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration. The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this literary device: "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

67. Ut pictura poesis
As is painting so is poetry