Second set of Poetry Terms English 9th grade

onomatopoeia

a word capturing or approximating the sound of what it describes; buzz is a good example.

personification

a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a

person by endowing it with humanlike qualities, as in “Death entered the room.”

villanelle

divided into six stanzas— five tercets (three-line stanzas) and one quatrain (four-line stanza). The first and third

lines of the first tercet rhyme with each other, and this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets and

in the last two lines of the concluding quatrain. The villanelle is also known for its repetition of select lines. An example is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

lyric poetry

originally, a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; now, any relatively short poem in which

the speaker expresses his or her thoughts and feelings in the first person rather than recounting a narrative or portraying a dramatic situation                    

dramatic poetry

a poem structured so as to present a scene or series of scenes, as in a work of drama.          

alliteration

the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words—for example, “While I nodded,

nearly napping” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” 

sonnet

a fixed verse form consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter.

English (Shakespearean) sonnet

An English or Shakespearean sonnet instead consists of three quatrains (four-line units)

and a couplet and often rhymes abab cdcd efef gg

Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet

consists of eight rhyme-linked lines (an octave) plus six rhyme-linked lines (a sestet), often with

either an abbaabba cdecde or abbacddc defdef rhyme scheme. This type of sonnet is also called the Petrarchan

sonnet in honor of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74).

sonnet sequence

A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets thematically unified to create a long work, although generally,

unlike the stanza, each sonnet so connected can also be read as a meaningful separate unit. 

elegy

(1) since the Renaissance, usually a formal lament on the death of a particular person, but focusing mainly on the

speaker’s efforts to come to terms with his or her grief; (2) more broadly, any lyric in sorrowful mood that takes

death as its primary subject. An example is W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” 

ballad

a verse narrative that is, or originally was, meant to be sung. Ballads were originally a folk creation, transmitted

orally from person to person and age to age and characterized by relatively simple diction, meter, and rhyme

scheme; by stock imagery; and by repetition; and often by a refrain

occasional poem

poem written to celebrate or commemorate a specific event such as a birth, marriage, death, coronation,

inauguration, or military battle. Examples include Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (written for his own marriage)

and W. B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916” (about the Easter Uprising in Ireland).

speaker

(1) the person who is the voice of a poem; (2) anyone who speaks dialogue in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama.

carpe diem poem

literally, “seize the day” in Latin, a common theme of literary works that emphasize the brevity of life

and the need to make the most of the present. Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” is a well-known example.

narrator

someone who recounts a narrative or tells a story. Though we usually instead use the term speaker when

referring to poetry as opposed to prose fiction, narrative poems include at least one speaker who functions as a narrator. 

epic poetry

a long narrative poem that celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, usually in founding a

nation or developing a culture, and uses elevated language and a grand, high style. Other epic conventions include a beginning in medias res, an invocation of the muse, a journey to the underworld, battle scenes, and a scene in which the hero arms himself for battle. Examples include Beowulf and Homer’s Iliad.

implied author

is the vision of the author’s personality and outlook implied by the work as a whole. Thus when we make a

claim about the author that relies solely on evidence from the work rather than from other sources, our subject is

the implied author

theme

(1) broadly and commonly, a topic explored in a literary work (e.g., “the value of all life”); (2) more narrowly and

properly, the insight about a topic communicated in a work (e.g., “All living things are equally precious”). Most literary works have multiple themes, though some people reserve the term theme for the central or main insight and refer to others as subthemes. Usually, a theme is implicitly communicated by the work as a whole rather than explicitly stated in it, though fables are an exception.

ode

lyric poem characterized by a serious topic and formal tone but without a prescribed formal pattern in which the

speaker talks about, and often to, an especially revered person or thing. Examples include Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”

romance

(1) originally, a long medieval narrative in verse or prose written in one of the Romance languages (French,

Spanish, Italian, etc.) and depicting the quests of knights and other chivalric heroes and the vicissitudes of courtly love; also known as chivalric romance; (2) later and more broadly, any literary work, especially a long work of prose fiction, characterized by a nonrealistic and idealizing use of the imagination; (3) commonly today, works of prose fiction aimed at a mass, primarily female, audience and focusing on

simile

a figure of speech involving a direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another, usually using the words like or as

to draw the connection, as in “My love is like a red, red rose.”

metaphor

a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared implicitly— that is, without the use of a signal such

as the word like or as—as in “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it.”

Irony

a situation or statement characterized by a significant difference between what is expected or understood and what

actually happens or is meant.

tone

the attitude a literary work takes toward its subject or that a character in the work conveys, especially as revealed

through diction.

mood

The mood of a piece of writing is its general atmosphere or emotional complexion—in short, the array of feelings

the work evokes in the reader. Every aspect of a piece of writing can influence its mood, from the setting and the imagery to the author's word choice and tone. For instance, a story that begins "It was a dark and stormy night" will probably have an overall dark, ominous, or suspenseful mood.

setting

the time and place of the action in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama. The spatial setting is the place or places in

which action unfolds; the temporal setting is the time.

point of view

the perspective from which people, events, and other details in a work of fiction are viewed