Poetry Terms

Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds

Assonance

repetition of a vowel sound without repeating consonants sounds

Ballad

poem in verse form that tells a story

Blank Verse

unrhymed form of poetry

Caesura

pause or sudden break in a line of poetry

Canto

a major division of a long poem

Consonance

Repetition of a consonant sound within two or more words in close proximity.

couplet

pair of lines of verse of the same length that usually rhyme

End Rhyme

Rhyme that occurs at the end of two or more lines of poetry.

Enjambment

A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next.

Foot

smallest repeated pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poetic line

Iambic

an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable

Anapestic

A foot in poetry with two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.

Trochaic

a stressed syllable, followed by an unstressed syllable

Dactylic

a stressed syllable, followed by two unstressed syllables

Spondaic

two stressed syllables

Pyrrhic

two unstressed syllables

Free Verse

Poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme

Haiku

A Japanese form of poetry, consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables

Heroic Couplet

a couplet consisting of two rhymed lines of iambic pentamenter and a complete thought

Internal Rhyme

A word inside a line rhymes with another word on the same line

Lyric

A poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating a single, unified impression.

Meter

a patterned repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Refrain

A phrase, line, or group of lines that is repeated throughout a poem, usually after every stanza.

Repetition

Repeating of a word, a phrase, or an idea for emphasis

Rhyme

Repetition of sounds at the end of words

Rhythm

regular or random occurrence of sound in poetry

Sonnet

a poem consisting of 14 lines of Iambic pentameter

Italian Sonnet

A sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abbaabba and of a sestet using any arrangement of two or three additional rhymes, such as cdcdcd or cdecde

Shakespearean Sonnet

(English) three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and the last two lines are a rhyming couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Stanza

A fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem

Couplet

2 line stanza

Triplet

3 line stanza

Quatrain

4 line stanza

Quintet

5 line stanza

Sestet

6 line stanza

Septet

7 line stanza

Octave

8 line stanza

Verse

A single metric line of poetry, or poetry in general (as opposed to prose).

Monometer

one foot

Dimeter

two foot

Trimeter

three feet

Tetrameter

four feet

Pentameter

five feet

Hexameter

six feet

Heptameter

seven feet

Octometer

eight feet