AP Lit Poetry Terms

Lyric poem

A short, personal, song-like poem that expresses a single speaker's intense emotions, feelings, or thoughts, often using vivid imagery and musical language, and historically sung to a lyre in Ancient Greece.

Sonnet

A poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.

Villanelle

A nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain.

Sestina

A poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.

Rondeau

A thirteen-line poem, divided into three stanzas of 5, 3, and 5 lines, with only two rhymes throughout and with the opening words of the first line used as a refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas.

Elegy

A poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

Ode

A lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter.

Pastoral poem

A poem that idealizes rural life, portraying peaceful, simple living in nature, contrasting with complex city life to explore themes of love, innocence, and humanity's relationship with the natural world.

Diction

The choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing.

Denotation

The literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.

Connotation

An idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.

Simile

A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Extended metaphor

A metaphor that is introduced and then developed over multiple sentences, paragraphs, or an entire work.

Personification

The endowment of inanimate objects, animals, or abstract concepts with animate or human-living qualities.

Hyperbole

Exaggeration for emphasis.

Understatement

A figure of speech where a poet deliberately describes something as much less important, serious, or significant than it actually is, often for ironic, humorous, or emphatic effect.

Onomatopoeia

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

Cacophony

The use of harsh, discordant, or unharmonious sounds, often from explosive consonants and hissing sounds, clustered together to create a jarring, unpleasant, or chaotic effect.

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds.

Consonance

The repetition of similar consonant sounds.

Alliteration

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

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence or clause across one poetic line break.

Caesura

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

Stanza

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

Irony

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

Tone

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

Speaker/point of view

The voice of the poem, similar to a narrator in fiction, the perspective or viewpoint of the speaker in a poem.

End rhyme

When the last syllables within a verse rhyme, and many poets and songwriters use it to create rhythm.

Internal rhyme

Occurs within a single line of verse, or between internal phrases across multiple lines.

Slant rhyme

A type of rhyme with words that have similar, but not identical sounds.

Euphony

The use of harmonious, melodious word combinations that sound pleasant and smooth to the ear. Poets achieve it with lyrical phrasing, rhyme, rhythm, and avoiding harsh consonant clusters, making the poem more enjoyable and enhancing its mood.