Poetry

Free Verse

No poetic meter, no regular rhyme scheme or rhythm

Close Reading

Formal analysis: techniques and components the poet used, and how form enhances meaning

Function Words

Show a structural relationship between with other words in a sentence

Content Words

Refer to objects of reality and their qualities

Nonsense words

No conventionally accepted meaning

Portmanteau Words

Blend the meaning and sounds of two other words

Enjambment

Striding over: when the syntax of a phrase carries over a line break. Read sentence as it carries over to the next line.

End-Stopped lines

Lines where the sense of the phrase fits with its line length. Pause at end of the line

Caesura

Strong phrasal pause occurring within the line (indicated with //)

Imagery

Imaginative recreation of a sensation through words that shows doesn’t tell (all five senses)

Exphrasis

Describes a scene or work of art (generally a painting or sculpture). Old used elaborate description, now used to interpret and confront.

Prosody

A poet’s or poem’s technical method or arrangement. The technical study of poetry.

Scansion

A process of dividing verse into coherent units (feet) and marking them.

Foot

Basic pattern of rhythm

Catalexis

Poet cuts off one or more unstressed syllables so that the line can end on a stress

Hypercatalectic

Extra unstressed syllable

Masculine Ending

Ends on a stress

Feminine Ending

Ends on an unstressed syllable

Meter

Syllabic pattern in poetry. The kind of foot plus the number of the type of foot

Poetic form

Meaning, cultural conventions, appeal

Rhythm

Sound effect, affect tone

Ballads

Poem, originally sung that used regular rhythms and rhymes to tell a story. Sung and passed down through oral culture.

Oral culture

Societies that relied on the human voice to transmit news, educate, warn, entertain, values, establish by using past stories. Rhythms and rhymes aid in memory.

Features of Ballad

• Fixed Features

• Emphasizes story not author (not lyric)

• Simple language

• Political and social radicalism

• Content varies

Ballad Meter

• Quatrains

• 1 & 3 are tetrameter

• 2 & 4 are trimeter

• Rising meter

• Mix of iambs and anapests

• Short lines

• All types of rhyme

• Repetitions

Common Meter/Measure/hymn Measure

Type of ballad stanza rhyming a-b-a-b

Monostich

One line stanza

Heroic Couplet

• Iambic pentameter

• Couplet

• End-stopped

• Rhyme scheme: a-a

Enjambed Couplets

Suggest tension between control and anarchy

Triplet

• Tercet

• Equal length

• Rhyme scheme: a-a-a

Terza rima

• Tetrameter or pentameter

• Tercet

• Regular length

• Rhyme scheme: a-b-a b-c-b c-d-c

Used by Dante

Ballad stanza

• Alternating tetrameter than trimeter

• Quatrain

• Rhyme scheme: Any rhyme scheme

Heroic/elegiac stanza

• Iambic pentameter

• Quatrain

• End-stopped

• Rhyme scheme: a-b-a-b

In Memoriam stanza

• Iambic tetrameter

• Rhyme scheme: a-b-b-a

Written about dead Arthur Henry Hallam

Rime Royal

• Iambic pentameter

• Septet

• Rhyme scheme: a-b-a-b-b-c-c

Jeffery Chaucer

Ottova rima

• Iambic pentameter

• Octet/Octave

• Rhyme scheme: a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c

Sonnet

14 line stanza of iambic pentameter about love, politics, thinking, seriousness

Volta

Turn or shift in thought or emotion

• Transition word or phrase

• Asks question, answers after volta

Italian/Petrarchan Sonnet

• Octave: a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a

• Volta

• Sestet: c-d-c-d-c-d or c-d-e-c-d-e

English/Shakespearean Sonnet

• Quatrain: a-b-a-b

• Quatrain: c-d-c-d

• Quatrain: e-f-e-f

• Volta

• Couplet: g-g

Blank Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter

Dramatic Monologues

Poem written as a speech/performance by a speaker who is not the poet - a character or persona Encourages reader to question speakers authority or intention

Lyric

Single speaker expresses internal thought or emotion

Form of Dramatic Monologues

• Any arrangement of stanza length or rhyme

• Direct speech of character spoken at a crucial moment

• Represents natural rhythms of speech in formal poetic frame

• Listener addressed in poem through gestures and cues

• Opening mid-speech to give the reader directness and make it feel like overhearing