Poetry Terms

Onomatopoeia

When poems imitate what they are saying

Oxymoronic

A figure of speech that joins or yokes together two seemingly

contradictory or opposite things

Pantoum

Sixteen or more lines long, developed in english as unrhymed quatrains with repeating lines: the second and fourth lines of each stanza repeat as the first and third lines of the next stanza.

Pastoral

A convention that celebrated the virtues of rural life and largely idealized them.

Pentameter

Five-measure lines. This is one of the most prevalent line lengths in English verse.

Persona

Offers one way of discussing the speaker of the poem (as distinct from the living poet/author of the poem).

Personification

A rhetorical technique where animals, concepts, or inanimate objects are given

human attributes

Poetry

A genre (as opposed to novels, drama, technical reports, and so on); like prose, it can be unmetered.

Praise Song

In many African societies, tribal bards recite traditional epics of praise in

celebration at festivals and coronations and perform these epics in rhythmic prose and verse, often accompanied by percussionists

Prose Poem

A blocked-shape, usually paragraphed text that relies on the poetic techniques of imagery and condensed rhythmic, repetitive, often rhymed language and often makes it point via metaphor, analogy, or association