Poetry Terms
AP English Poetry Terms
1. antithesis: a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas, as in “Man proposes; God disposes.” Antithesis is a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. The second line of the following couplet by Alexander Pope is an example of antithesis:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine.
2. assonance: the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. “A land laid waste with all its young men slain” repeats the same “a” sound in “laid”, “waste”, and “slain”.
3. Ballad: a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas.
Ballad meter: a four-line stanza rhymed abcd with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four.
O mother, mother make my bed.
O make it soft and narrow.
Since my love died for me today,
I die for him tomorrow.
4. Bias - occurs when an author prejudices the audience in favor of one side of an issue by not covering the topic fairly.
5. Bildungsroman: a coming of age text; a novel that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of its main character from his or her youth to adulthood.
6. caesura: a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line, and often greater than the normal pause. For example, one would naturally pause after “human” in the following line from Alexander Pope:
To err is human, to forgive divine.
7. consonance: the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. Consonance is found in the following pairs of words: “add” and “read,” “bill and ball,” and “born” and “burn.”
8. Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
9. colloquialism : the use of ordinary or familiar words or phrases in a poem or story.
10. diction: the use of words in a literary work.
11. elegy: a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet’s meditations upon death or another solemn theme. Examples include Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam”; and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
12. end-stopped: a line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark are end-stopped lines.
True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
13. enjambment: the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next. Milton’s Paradise Lost is notable for its use of enjambment, as seen in the following lines:
. . . .Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, . . . .
14. Epigram: a brief, witty, or terse saying or aphorism.
"The only way to have a friend is to be one" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
15. Juxtaposition: Juxtaposition is a literary device that places contrasting elements side by side to highlight their differences. It can involve ideas, characters, themes, or images.
16. meter: the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry. The meter of a poem emphasizes the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem. Each unit of meter is known as a foot.
17. Monologue: A monologue is a long speech given by a single person, often in a dramatic work like a play, movie, or television show. Monologues can also be found in non-dramatic works like poetry.
18. Mood: the atmosphere that pervades a literary work with the intention of evoking a certain emotion or feeling from the audience.
19. paradox: a situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out to be true or at least to make sense. The following lines from one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets include paradoxes:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
(The poet is talking about God here. I can only be free if faith ravishes and imprisons me).
20. Persona: a voice or character representing the speaker in a literary work.
21. Point of View: the perspective from which a story is told, essentially who is narrating the events and what level of access they have to the characters' thoughts and feelings, determining how the reader experiences the narrative; it can be first-person, second-person, or third-person (with further variations like limited or omniscient) depending on the narrator's position within the story.
22.satire: writing that seeks to arouse a reader’s disapproval of an object by ridicule. Satire is usually comedy that exposes errors with an eye to correct vice and folly. Satire is often found in the poetry of Alexander Pope.
23. Scansion: the metrical analysis of a verse. A system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the type(s) of feet per line. Following are the most common types of meter:
monometer one foot per line /dimeter two feet per line /trimeter three feet per line/ tetrameter four feet per line/ pentameter five feet per line/ hexameter six feet per line /heptameter seven feet per line /octameter eight feet per line.
Using these terms, then, a line consisting of five iambic feet is called “iambic pentameter,” while a line consisting of four anapestic feet is called “anapestic tetrameter.” In order to determine the meter of a poem, the lines are “scanned,” or marked to indicate stressed and unstressed syllables which are then divided into feet.
24. Sibilance: a literary device that uses the repetition of hissing or shushing sounds to create a high-frequency sound. It's a type of consonance that's often used by poets. Sadly, Sam sold seven venomous serpents to Sally and Cyrus in San Francisco."
25. Syntax: the ordering of words into patterns or sentences. If a poet shifts words from the usual word order, you know you are dealing with an older style of poetry or a poet who wants to shift emphasis onto a particular word.
26. Understatement: the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is. For example, Macbeth, having been nearly hysterical after killing Duncan, tells Lenox, “Twas a rough night.”