Poetry Terms

Accent

The emphasis, or Stress, given a syllable in pronunciation. We say “syllable” not “syllable,” “emphasis” not “emphasis.” Accents can also be used to emphasize a particular word in a sentence: Is she content with the contents of the yellow package?

Alliteration

the repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words, usually at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable: “descending dew drops”; “luscious lemons.” Alliteration is based on the sounds of letters, rather than the spelling of words; for example “keen” and “car” aliterate, but “car” and “cite” do not. Used sparingly, alliteration can intensify ideas by emphasizing key words, but when used too self-consciously, it can be distracting, even ridiculous rather than effective. 

Apostrophe

An address, either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear the speaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend. It often provides a speaker the opportunity to think aloud.

Assonance

the repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words that do not end the same, for example, “asleep under a tree,” or “each evening.” Similar endings result in rhyme, as in “asleep in the deep.” Assonance is a strong means of emphasizing important words in a line

Ballad

traditionally, a ballad is a song, transmitted orally from generation to generation, that tells a story and that eventually is written down. As such, ballads usually cannot be traced to a particular author or group of authors. Typically, they are dramatic, condense, and impersonal narrative such as “Bonny Barbara Allan”

Literary Ballad

a narrative poem that is written in deliberate imitation of the language, form, spirit of the traditional ballad, such as Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

Ballad stanza

a four-line stanza, known as a Quatrain, consisting of alternating eight- and six-syllable lines. Usually only the second and fourth lines. Coleridge adopted the ballad stanza in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Blank verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the English verse form closest to the natural rhythms of English speech and therefore is the most common pattern found in traditional English narrative and dramatic poetry from Shakespeare to the early twentieth century. Shakespeare’s plays use blank verse extensively. 

Caesura

a pause within a line of poetry that contributes to the rhythm of the line. It can occur anywhere within a line and need not be indicated by punctuation. In scanning a line, they are indicated by a double vertical line (II) 

Carpe diem

The Latin phrase meaning “seize the day”. This is a very common literary theme, especially in lyric poetry, which emphasizes that life is short, time is fleeting, and that one should make the most present pleasures. Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” employs this theme

Consonance

a common type of near rhyme that consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home, same, worth, breath

Couplet

Two consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter.

Heroic couplet

A couplet written in rhymed iambic pentameter.

Didactic poetry

poetry designed to teach an ethical, moral, or religious lesson. Michael Wigglesworth’s Puritan poem Day of Doom is an example of didactic poetry

Dramatic monologue

A type of lyric poem in which a character (the speaker) addresses a distinct but silent audience imagined to be present in the poem in such a way as to reveal a dramatic situation and, often unintentionally, some aspect of his or her temperament or personality

Elegy

A mournful, contemplative lyric poem written to commemorate someone who is dead, often ending in a consolation. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, written on the death of Arthur Hallam, is this. It may also refer to a serious meditative poem produced to express the speaker’s melancholy thoughts.

End-stopped line

A poetic line that has a pause at the end. They reflect normal speech patterns and are often marked by punctuation. The first line of Keats’s “Endymion” is an example of this device; the natural pause coincides with the end of the line, and is marked by a period: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

Enjambment (run-on line)

 In poetry, when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning. This is also called a run-on line. The transition between the first two lines of Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up” demonstrates the device:

  My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

Epic

a long narrative poem, told in a formal, elevated style, that focuses on a serious subject and chronicles heroic deeds and events important to a culture or nation. Milton’s Paradise Lost, which attempts to “justify the ways of God to man” 

Epigram

a brief, pointed and witty poem that usually makes a satiric or humorous point. Epigrams are most often written in couplets, but take no prescribed form

Fixed form

A poem that may be categorized by the patterns of its lines, meter, rhythm, or stanzas. A sonnet is a fixed form of poetry because by definition it must have fourteen lines. Other fixed forms include Limerick, Sestina, and Villanelle. However, poems written in a fixed form may not always fit into categories precisely, because writers sometimes vary traditional forms to create innovative effects. 

Foot

the metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured. It is usually consists of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables

Iambic foot

 consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, most common metrical foot in English poetry

Trochaic foot

consists of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable 

Anapestic foot

two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed one

Dactylic foot

one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones 

Spondee

A foot consisting of two stressed syllables.

Found poem

An unintentional poem discovered in a non poetic context, such as a conversation, news story, or advertisement. They serve as reminders that everyday language often contains what can be considered poetry, or that poetry is definable as any text read as a poem. 

Free verse

Also called open form poetry, this term refers to poems characterized by their nonconformity to established patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza. They use elements such as speech patterns, grammar, emphasis, and breath pauses to decide line breaks, and usually do not rhyme.

Haiku

a style of lyric poetry borrowed from the Japanese that typically presents an intense emotion or vivid image of nature, which traditionally, designed to lead to a spiritual insight. It is a fixed poetic form, consisting of seventeen syllables organized into three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Today, however, many poets vary the syllabic count of their piece.

Iambic pentameter

a metrical pattern in poetry which consists of five iambic feet per line (An iamb or iambic foot, consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) 

Limerick

a light, humorous style of fixed form poetry. Its usual form consists of five lines with the rhyme scheme aabba; lines 1,2, and 5 contain three feet, while lines 3 and 4 usually contain two feet. Limericks range in subject matter from the silly to the obscene and since Edward Lear popularized them in the nineteenth century, children and adults have enjoyed these comic poems.

Line

A sequence of words printed as a separate entity on the page. In poetry, they are usually measured by the number of feet they contain.

Lyric

a type of brief poem that expresses the personal emotions and thoughts of a single speaker. It is important to realize, however, that although the lyrics are uttered in the first person, the speaker is not necessarily the poet

Meter

when a rhythmic pattern of stress recurs in a poem, it is called meter. Metrical patterns are determined by the type and number of feet in  a line of verse; combining the name of a line length with the name of a foot concisely describes the meter of the line

Falling meter

refers to metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed sounds, such as the trochaic foot and dactylic foot

Rising meter

refers to a metrical feet which move from unstressed to stressed sounds, such us the iambic foot and the anapestic foot

Narrative poem

A poem that tells a story. It may be short or long, and the story it relates may be simple or complex. 

Octave

A poetic stanza of eight lines, usually forming one part of a sonnet

Ode

a relatively lengthy lyric poem that often expresses lofty emotions in a dignified style. They are characterized by a serious topic, such as truth, art, freedom, justice, or the meaning of life; their tone tends to be formal. THere is no prescribed pattern that defines an ode; some odes repeat the same pattern in each stanza, while others introduce a new pattern in each stanza.

Open form

sometimes called free verse, open form poetry does not conform to established patterns of meter, rhyme, stanza. Such poetry derives its rhythmic qualities from the repetition of word, phrases, or grammatical structure, the arrangement of words on the printed page, or by some other means. The poet E.E. Cummings wrote openly from poetry; his poems do not have measurable meters, but they do have rhythm.

Organic form

Refers to works whose formal characteristics are not rigidly predetermined but follow the movement of thought or emotion being expressed. Such works are said to grow like living organisms, following their own individual patterns rather than external fixed rules that govern, for example, the form of a sonnet.

Paraphrase

a prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem, in your own language 

Picture poem

a type of open form poetry in which the poet arranges the lines of the poem so as to create a particular shape on the page. The shape of the poem embodies its subject; the poem becomes a picture of what the poem is describing. Michael McFee “In Medias Res” is an example of a picture

Poetic diction

Refers to the way poets sometimes employ an elevated diction that deviates significantly from the common speech and writing of their time, choosing words for their supposedly inherent poetic qualities. Since the 18th century, however, poets have been incorporating all kinds of diction in their work and so there is no longer an automatic distinction between the language of a poet and the language of everyday speech.

Prose poem

a kind of open form poetry that is printed as prose and represents the most clear opposite of fixed form poetry. Prose poems are densely compact and often make use of striking imagery and figures of speech. See also fixed form, open form

Prosody

The overall mechanical structure of a poem. See also meter. 

Quatrain

a four-line stanza. They are the most common stanzaic form in the English language; they can have various meters and rhyme schemes.

Rhyme

The repetition of identical or similar concluding syllable in different words, most often at the ends of lines. It is predominantly a function of sound rather than spelling; thus, words that end with the same vowel, sounds rhyme, for instance, day, prey, bouquet, weigh and words with the same consonant ending rhyme, for instance vain, feign, rein, lane. Words do not have to be spelled the same way or look alike to rhyme. In fact, words may look alike but not rhyme at all. This is called eye rhyme, as with bough and cough, or brow and blow. 

End rhyme is the most common form of rhyme in poetry; the rhyme comes at the end of the lines:

It runs though the reeds

And away it proceeds, 

Through meadow and glade, 

In sun and in shade. 

Internal rhyme

places at least one of the rhymed words within the line, as in “Dividing and gliding and sliding” or “In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud.”

Masculine rhyme

describes the rhyming of single-syllable words of more than one syllable, when the same sound occurs in a final stressed syllable, as in defend and contend, betray and away. 

Feminine rhyme

consists of a rhymed stressed syllable followed by one or more identical unstressed syllables, as in butter, clutter; gratitude, attitude; quivering, and shivering

Near rhyme

(also called off rhyme, slant rhyme, and approximate rhyme), the sounds are almost but not exactly alike. A common form of near rhyme is consonance, which consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home, same, worth, breath.

Rhythm

a term used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds in poetry. Depending on how sounds are arranged, the rhythm of a poem may be fast or slow, choppy or smooth. Poets use rhythm to create pleasurable sound patterns and to reinforce meanings. Rhythm in prose arises from pattern repetitions of sounds and pauses that create looser rhythmic effects

Scansion

The process of measuring stresses in a line of verse to determine its metrical pattern of the line

Sestet

A stanza consisting of exactly six lines.

Sestina

a type of fixed form poetry consisting of thirty-six lines of any length divided into six sestets and a three-line concluding stanza called a sestet. These six words must also appear in the envoy, where they often resonate important themes. AN example of this highly demanding form of poetry is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”

Envoy

six sestets and a three-line concluding stanza: A type of fixed form poetry consisting of thirty-six lines of any length divided into six sestets and a three-line concluding stanza. The six words at the end of the first sestet’s lines must also appear at the ends of the other five sestets, in varying order. These six words must also appear in the envoy, where they often resonate important themes. An example of this highly demanding form of poetry is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina.”

Sonnet

A fixed form of lyric poetry consisting of fourteen lines, usually written in iambic pentameter.

Italian sonnet

also known as the Petrarchan sonnet, is divided into an octave, which typically rhymes abbaabba, and a sestet, which may have varying rhyme schemes. Common rhyme patterns in the sestet are cdecde, cdcdcd, and cdccdc. Very often the octave presents a situation, attitude, or problem that the sestet comments upon or resolves, as in John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

English sonnet

also known as the Shakepearean sonnet, is organized into three quatrains and a couplet, which typically rhyme abab cdcd efef gg. This rhyme scheme is more suited to English poetry because English has fewer rhyming words than Italian. English sonnets, because of their four-part organization, also have more flexibility with respect to where thematic breaks can occur.

Speaker

The voice used by an author to tell a story or speak a poem. The speaker is often a created identity, and should not automatically be equated with the author’s self.

Stanza

In poetry, it refers to a grouping of lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme.

Stress

The emphasis or accent given to a syllable in pronunciation.

Tercet

A three-line stanza.

Terza rima

An interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on. Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” are written in terza rima.

Triplet

A tercet in which all three lines rhyme.

Verse

A generic term used to describe poetic lines composed in a measured rhythmical pattern, that are often, but not necessarily rhymed.

Villanelle

A type of fixed form poetry consisting of nineteen lines of any length divided into 6 stanzas: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The first and third lines of the initial tercet rhyme; these rhymes are repeated in each subsequent tercet (aba) and in the final two lines of the quatrain (abaa). Line 1 appears in its entirety as lines 6, 12, and 18, while line 3 reappears as lines 9, 15, and 19. Dylan Thomas’s “do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle.