Poetic Forms and Literary Devices

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering key poetic forms and literary devices based on the lecture notes.

Sestina

A poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet; all stanzas have the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three line envoi.

Octave

Eight lines of rhyming poetry; most often seen as the first section of a Petrarchan sonnet.

Bombast

Wordy and inflated diction that is patently disproportionate to the matter that it signifies.

Allegory

A literary work in which characters and plot and setting make sense on a literal and figurative level.

Diction

The kinds of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also figurative language, that constitute any work of literature.

Pastoral

A deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the supposed peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting.

Proverb

Short, pithy statements of widely accepted truths about everyday life.

Apostrophe

A direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract or nonhuman entity, i.e., in an ode, the poet addresses an object or entity that could not 'hear' his/her message.

Chorus

A group of people, wearing masks, who sang or chanted verses while performing dancelike movements at religious festivals; in Greek tragedies they served mainly as commentators on the dramatic actions and events who expressed traditional moral, religious, and societal attitudes.

Tercet

A set or group of three lines of verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent tercet.