Poetry Terms Flashcards

Key Concepts in Poetry Terms

• Wit

  • An intellectually amusing language that surprises and delights.

  • Characterized by quick, clever, and sometimes biting humor, often serving satirical effects.

• Accent

  • The emphasis or stress placed on particular syllables within words.

• Elegy

  • A mournful poem that reflects on loss or mortality, often lamenting the dead.

• Elision

  • The omission of a syllable or sound in a word, typically to maintain meter or rhythm.

  • Often marked by an apostrophe (e.g., 'tis instead of it is).

• Assonance

  • The repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words, especially when stressed (e.g., "Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dark fox gone to ground").

• Ballad

  • A narrative poem that tells a story, typically structured in quatrains with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter.

• Bard

  • A poet traditionally associated with storytelling and reciting epics.

• Blank Verse

  • Unrhymed verse written in iambic pentameter; often used in English dramatic, epic, and reflective verse.

• Cacophony

  • A harsh and jarring mixture of sounds, often created through the use of hard consonants (e.g., "the clash of metal").

• End Stopped

  • A metrical line that ends at a grammatical boundary or with punctuation, like a colon, semicolon, or period.

• Enjambment

  • The continuation of a sentence or clause from one line of poetry to the next without a pause (e.g., "I was walking down the road, / The sun was shining bright.").

• Envoy (envoi)

  • A short concluding stanza in certain poetic forms that summarizes the message or addresses a person.

• Epic

  • A long narrative poem that recounts heroic deeds and legendary events of great figures, often with grand themes.

• Epithet

  • A descriptive phrase expressing a characteristic of the person or thing mentioned (e.g., "Alexander the Great").

• Caesura

  • A pause or break in a line of poetry, often to create a dramatic effect or change in rhythm.

• Consonance

  • The repetition of consonant sounds, particularly at the end of words or within them (e.g., "pitter patter").

• Euphony

  • A pleasing and harmonious sound created through the use of smooth consonants and flowing vowel sounds.

• Falling Meter

  • A metrical pattern where a stressed syllable is followed by unstressed syllables.

• Dialect

  • The regional or social variety of a language that includes variations in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

• Form

  • The structure or shape of the poem, detailing how it's organized on the page.