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dramatic monologue
speaker addresses a silent auditor or auditors in a specific situation and setting that is revealed
entirely through the speaker’s words; this kind of poem’s primary aim is the revelation of the speaker’s personality,
views, and values.
auditors
an imaginary listener within a literary work, as opposed to the actual reader or audience outside the work
epithet
a characterizing word or phrase that precedes, follows, or substitutes for the name of a person or thing, such as
slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., or Zeus, the god of trophies
apostrophe
a figure of speech in which a speaker or narrator addresses an abstraction, an object, or a dead or absent person
enjambed lines
the technique of running over from one line to the next without stop, as in the following lines by William
Wordsworth: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.” The lines themselves would be described as enjambed
end-stopped lines
a line of verse that contains or concludes a complete clause and usually ends with a punctuation mark.
couplet
two consecutive lines of verse linked by rhyme and meter; the meter of a heroic couplet is iambic pentameter
heroic couplet
a couplet written in iambic pentameter
haiku
a poetic form, Japanese in origin, that in English consists of seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of
five, seven, and five syllables, respectively
limerick
a light or humorous poem or subgenre of poems consisting of mainly anapestic lines of which the first, second,
and fifth are of three feet; the third and fourth lines are of two feet; and the rhyme scheme is aabba.
blank verse
free verse
poetry characterized by varying line lengths, lack of traditional meter, and nonrhyming lines
denotation
a word’s direct and literal meaning, as opposed to its connotation.
connotation
what is suggested by a word, apart from what it literally means or how it is defined in the dictionary. See also
denotation
epitaph
an inscription on a tombstone or grave marker; not to be confused with epigram, epigraph, or epithet
figures of speech
any word or phrase that creates a “figure” in the mind of the reader by effecting an obvious change in
the usual meaning or order of words, by comparing or identifying one thing with another; also called a trope.
Metaphor, simile, metonymy, overstatement, oxymoron, and understatement are common figures of speech.
analogy
like a metaphor, a representation of one thing or idea by something else; in this case, often a simpler explanation gets at the gist of the more complicated example (e.g., “the brain is like a computer”).
consonance
the repetition of certain consonant sounds in close proximity, as in mishmash. Especially prominent in Middle
English poems, such as Beowulf.
assonance
the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings—for example, “The death of the
poet was kept from his poems” in W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”
anaphora
figure of speech involving the repetition of the same word of phrase in (and esp. at the beginning of) successive
lines, clauses, or sentences, as in “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epic belief, it was the epoch of incredulity[. . .]” (Charles Dickens, A Tale of
Two Cities).
palindrome
word, sentence, or poem that reads the same backward and forward. Good examples are civic (a word);
Madam, I’m Adam (a sentence); or Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth” (a poem)
concrete poetry
poetry in which the words on the page are arranged to look like an object; also called shaped verse. \
George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” for example, is arranged to look like two pairs of wings.
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