Poetry Literary Terms Vocabulary Flashcards

A comprehensive collection of vocabulary flashcards based on literature lecture notes, covering device definitions, Japanese verse forms, and structural terminology used in poetry analysis.

Allusion

An expression designed to call something to mind without directly stating what it is; an indirect reference to a person, place, event, or idea from another text or cultural context.

Analogy

A comparison between things that have similar features, often used to help explain a principle or idea OR to create a new idea by showing a relationship.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which a speaker directly addresses someone (or something) that is not present or cannot respond in reality.

Connotation

The nuances of meaning in a word or image, as distinguished from denotation; associations and suggestions.

Consonance

A literary device that involves the repetition of consonant sounds within nearby words, usually at the beginning, middle, or end of the word.

Denotation

The literal meaning of a word without overtones.

Diction

The choice of words resulting in a certain level of language or tone.

Haiku

A Japanese verse form most often composed, in English versions, of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

Irony

A discrepancy between the immediate, apparent meaning of a word, phrase, or situation and its underlying meaning.

Kireji

A "cutting word" that indicates a shift in the haiku, which can include words, phrases, or punctuation.

Malapropism

The incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance.

Alliteration

The repeated use of a consonant, especially at the beginning of stressed words or syllables.

Anaphora

A device of repetition in which the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two or more successive lines, clauses, or sentences.

Assonance

Repetition of identical vowel sounds.

Hyperbole

Overstatement or exaggeration.

Imagery

An expression in words of a sense experience—visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory.

Metaphor

A statement that one thing is something else, which, in a literal sense, it is not.

Meter

A strong, regular, repeated pattern of sound; the measured flow of words and phrases in verse or prose as determined by the relation of long and short or stressed and unstressed syllables.

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which one thing is designated by the name of something associated with it, such as saying "the White House states…" or “the suit” for a business executive.

Narrative

A poem that tells a story.

Ode

A lyric poem, usually addressing a particular person or thing.

Persona poem

A poem in which the poet speaks through an assumed voice.

Refrain

Words, sounds, or phrases regularly repeated throughout a poem.

Rhyme

An identity between final vowel sounds without following consonants or between final vowel and consonant sounds in stressed syllables.

Rhythm

The pattern of beats in spoken or written language; it contributes to the musical quality of a poem.

Sonnet

A fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization.

Stanza

A separate group of lines in which the pattern is repeated throughout the poem, or any one section of a divided poem.

Structure

Systems of internal relationships between parts of a poem, including formal structure (format on the page) and thematic structure (meaning of the words).

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which one thing is designated by the name of one part of it, or a part designated by the name of a whole, such as "a sail" for a ship.

Synesthesia

The description of one kind of sensory impression in terms of another, for example, "the red blare of the trumpet".

Onomatopoeia

Words or groups of words in which the sounds imitate the sense, such as "the buzzing of bees".

Oxymoron

A yoking together of terms that are literally contradictory.

Personification

A form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstraction in human form.

Simile

A figure of speech which explicitly states a similarity between two normally unrelated things by means of the words "like", "as", and sometimes "than".

Symbol

Something perceptible that stands for an abstract idea to which it is related either conventionally, naturally, or privately.

Tone

The attitude of the poet or of the persona toward the subject of the poem and/or toward the reader.

Understatement

A device by which the full emotional significance of a situation is played down.

Pun

A joke based on the interplay of homophones or words that sound similar, where humor comes from the confusion of the two meanings.