AP Lit Quiz

Ballad: A narrative folk song. 


The ballad is traced back to the Middle Ages. Ballads were usually created by common people and passed orally due to the illiteracy of the time.


 Subjects for ballads include killings, feuds, important historical events, and rebellion.

Dramatic Monologue: A poem in which the speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader.

Dramatic Situation: The underlying plot line that is created to place the characters in conflict with themselves or others. It is a literary tool that is used to force the audience to become emotionally invested in the poem.

Elegy: A type of literature defined as a song or poem, written in elegiac couplets, that expresses sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died.

Epic: A long poem in a lofty style about the exploits of heroic figures. These often come from an oral tradition of shared authorship or from a single, high-profile poet imitating the style.

Lyric: A song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a particular person, thus separating it from narrative poems. These poems are generally short, averaging roughly twelve to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines. These poems express vivid imagination as well as emotion and all flow fairly concisely.

Narrative Poem: A poem that tells a story. A narrative poem can come in many forms and styles, both complex and simple, short or long, as long as it tells a story. A few examples of a narrative poem are epics, ballads, and metrical romances.

Ode: Usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern. The ode often praises people, the arts of music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract concepts.

Sonnet: A fixed form of fourteen lines, normally iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme conforming to or approximating one of three main types: Petrarchan (Italian), Spenserian, or the Shakespearean (English).


  1. Petrarchan (or Italian) Sonnet:

1. Made up of Octave and sestet

  1. Octave: 2 Italian quatrains: abba abba

  2. Sestet:

  1. rhyme pattern varies, some variant on c, d, and e

  2. cde cde = Italian Sestet

cd cd cd = Sicilian Sestet

Villanelle: A nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Rhyme Scheme: