Week 1 & 2: Poetry Terms

Flashcards covering key terms and concepts of poetic form, including definitions and important distinctions.

Cadence

Consistent or dominant rising or falling stress pattern.

Consistency

Graceful and regulated repetition of flow.

Flow

Continual and consistent graceful shifting of component particles.

Freestyle

Improvisational free verse.

Free verse

Poetry that’s not in a ‘set’ meter.

Meter

The measure of a line of poetry.

Pattern

Design, a configuration of repeated elements.

Repetition & variation

Recurring appearance or manifestation, and deviation from that.

Rhyme

Correspondence of sound or idea (conceptual or ideational rhyme).

Rhythm

Recurrence and alternation of quantities or elements.

Stanzas

Symmetrical or parallel groupings of lines that give the impression of belonging together.

Strophes

Groupings of lines that are not arranged symmetrically or in equal quantity, but give the sense of belonging together.

Alliteration

Similar sounds at the beginning of words.

Assonance

Correspondence of vowel sounds in words.

Breath

The current of air that when exhaled from the body is the element on which a poem rides.

Caesurae

A pause or stop in the middle of the line, a cut.

Consonance

Correspondence of consonant sounds in words.

Contraries

Opposed ideas or concepts that exist in correspondence without joining.

Correspondence

The close relationship or connection between words, phrases, and ideas through sound and sense.

Dramatic occasion or situation

What’s happening or has happened as the speaker of the poem begins to speak.

Energy & Rule

Two intertwined principles that create the dynamic interplay that powers a poem (Dionysus & Apollo).

Enjambment

The movement of the sentence over the line ending or boundary. The line ends but the sentence keeps going…

Formal enactment

What a poem does to manifest meaning at the level of formal action.

Homophone

Words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings.

Internal rhyme

Acoustic rhyme between words within a line, not at line ends.

Juxtaposition

The placing of one thing beside another without explicitly connecting them.

Matter / materiality

The stuff-ness of stuff.

Parallelism

Two phrases or clauses that use the same or similar words in the same order.

Persona or mask

The character behind which stands the poet.

Scale

Proportions in relation to each other.

Silence

Absence of sound, the precondition of sound.

Spatialization

How verse creates space by visual and aural arrangement of language.

Speaker

The voice of the poem, who is speaking—sometimes the poet, sometimes a character.

Speech

‘Vocal’ communication that takes the form of language.

Syncopation

Regular displacement of the beat to a position that’s usually unaccented.

Syntax & line

The relationship between the sentence and the measure or line of poetry.

Tension

The sense of elements, ideas, sounds pulling against and away from each other.

Verse

Poetry in meter, or poetry that creates the impression of meter.