Poetic Terms and Literary Devices

Flashcards designed to help memorize poetic terms and literary devices for English literature.

Alliteration

The repetition at close intervals of the initial consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.

Aubade

A poem about dawn; a morning love song; or a poem about the parting of lovers at dawn.

Ballad

A fairly short narrative poem written in a song-like stanza form.

Blank Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Consonance

The repetition at close intervals of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.

End-stopped line

A line that ends with a natural speech pause, usually marked by punctuation.

English (or Shakespearean) sonnet

A sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg, structured into three quatrains and a concluding couplet.

Euphony

A smooth, pleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds.

Foot

The basic unit used in the scansion of metrical verse, usually containing one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables.

Free verse

Non-metrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line, developed organically.

Iamb

A metrical foot consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable.

Internal rhyme

A rhyme in which one or both of the rhyme words occur within a line.

Meter

The regular patterns of accent that underlie metrical verse.

Villanelle

A nineteen-line fixed form consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with specific rhyme patterns.

Puns

A word used to suggest two meanings.

Double Entendre

A type of pun whose one meaning is generally of a sexual nature.

Analogy

An implicit comparison that sets up a proportional relationship between two sets of ideas.

Fables

Short allegorical stories that point out a lesson.

Metonymy

Something closely related as representative of the whole.

Synecdoche

A part of something used to represent the whole.

Epithets

The use of a single-word adjective or adjective phrase linked to a person or thing to describe a specific quality.

Understatement

Playing down the magnitude of an idea; opposite of hyperbole.

Parallel structure

The repetition within a sentence of the same type of grammatical forms.

Antithesis

Specific use of parallelism expressing opposing or contrary meanings.

Idiom

A phrase with a figurative meaning, not inferred from the phrase itself.

Anastrophe

Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words.

Isocolon

Phrases of equal length.

Zeugma

A word used in more than one way in a sentence.

Apostrophe

Direct address to something not present, or to a personified object or idea.

Conceit

An extended metaphor.

Chiasmus

A reversal in the order of otherwise parallel phrases.

Anaphora

The repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses.

Litotes

An understatement used to create emphasis by negation.

Pathetic Fallacy

Nature mirrors a character's emotions through personification.

Euphemism

A type of understatement used to avoid offending the audience.

Paradox

The expression of apparent contradiction where opposing ideas are nevertheless true.

Oxymoron

Linking together two apparently contradictory words into a single phrase.