Poetry Terms

Allegory

a narrative or visual representation with an underlying meaning, moral message, or political significance

Alliteration

the repetition of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginnings of words

Allusion

a reference to a person, event, or literary work outside the poem

Anaphora

a technique in which successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany

Anthropomorphism

the attribution of human traits, actions, or emotions to an animal, object, or nonhuman being

Antithesis

a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else

Apostrophe

a direct address of an inanimate object, abstract qualities, a god, or a person not living or present

Assonance

the repetition of similar vowel sounds

Ballad

a plot-driven song with one or more characters and often constructed in quatrain stanzas

Blank Verse

poetry that does not rhyme but follows a regular meter, most commonly iambic pentameter

Caesura

a pause for a beat in the rhythm of a verse, often indicated by a line break or by punctuation

Connotation

the implied or suggested meaning associated with a word or phrase

Consonance

the repetition of similar consonant sounds

Contrast

the state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association

Couplet

a two-line stanza, or two lines of verse, rhymed or unrhymed

Denotation

the dictionary meaning of a word

Diction

the language, including word choice and syntax, that is used in poetry. Word choice

End-Stopped Line

a metrical line containing a complete phrase or sentence, or a line of poetry ending with punctuation; the opposite of enjambment

Enjambment

the continuation of a sentence or clause across one poetic line break

Figurative Language

language that is symbolic or metaphorical and not meant to be taken literally

Form

the structure of a poem, including its line lengths, line breaks, meter, stanza lengths, and rhyme scheme

Free Verse

open-form poetry not dictated by an established form or meter and often influenced by the rhythms of speech

Hyperbole

exaggeration for emphasis

Imagery

language in a poem representing a sensory experience, including visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory

Irony

a rhetorical device involving contradictions of expectation or knowledge and divided into three primary types: verbal, situational, and dramatic

Juxtaposition

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect

Metaphor

a comparison between essentially unlike things, as the application of a name or description to something to which it is not literally applicable

Meter

the measured pattern of rhythmic accents in a line of verse

Motif

a dominant theme subject to idea which runs through a piece of literature. Often a "motif" can assume a symbolic importance

Onomatopoeia

the use of language that sounds like the thing or action it describes

Oxymoron

a figure of speech which joins together words of opposite meanings

Paradox

a situation or phrase that appears to be contradictory but that also contains some measure of truth

Personification

is the endowment of inanimate objects, animals, or abstract concepts with animate or human-living qualities

Quatrain

a four-line stanza, or unit of four lines of verse, rhymed or unrhymed

Repetition

the poetic technique of repeating the same word or phrase multiple times within a poem or work

Rhyme

the correspondence of sounds in words or lines of verse

Rhyme Scheme

the pattern of rhymes falling at the ends of a poem's lines

Rhythm

the movement of the poem as created through meter

Simile

a comparison between two essentially unlike things using words "such as," "like," and "as"

Sibilance

the repetition of hissing or hushing sounds, primarily 's', 'sh', and 'z' sounds, to create a specific effect in writing or speech

Slant Rhyme

a rhyme formed with words with similar but not wholly identical sounds; also called an off rhyme, half rhyme, and imperfect rhyme

Sonnet

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

Speaker

the voice of the poem, similar to a narrator in fiction

Stanza

a grouping of lines that forms the main unit in a poem

Symbol

an object or action that stands for something beyond itself

Synecdoche

a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa

Synesthesia

an attempt to fuse different senses by describing one in terms of another

Syntax

the arrangement of language and order of words used to convey the poem's content

Tone

a literary device that conveys the author's attitude toward the subject, speaker, or audience of a poem

Voice

an expression denoting the comprehensive style of a speaker adopted by the author in a poem

Volta

a rhetorical shift that marks the change of a thought or argument in a po