Poetry
Alliteration: the repetition of initial consonant sounds, primarily used in poetry
“And how the silence surged softly backward”
Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables
Ballad: a song or poem that tells a story (often tragic)
Blank verse: poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines (does not rhyme)
Cacophony: a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds in a line or passage in a literary work
Cadence: the natural, rhythmic rise and fall of a language as it is normally spoken
Caesura: a pause or break in a line of verse
Catalog: a list of things, people, or events
Conceit: a brief metaphor – striking a parallel between dissimilar things
Concrete poem: a poem in which the words are arranged on a page to suggest a visual representation of the subject
Connective tissue: those elements that help create coherence in a written piece.
Consonance: the repetition in 2 or more words of final consonants in stressed syllables “add – read”
Couplet: a pair of rhyming lines, usually of the same length and meter, which generally expresses a general idea
Dirge: a wailing song, sung at a funeral or in commemoration of death, a short lyric lamination
Dissonance: harsh and inharmonious sounds, a marked breaking of the music of poetry, which may be intentional.
Dramatic monologue: a poem spoken by one person addressing one or more listeners
Elegy: a sustained and formal poem setting forth meditations on death or another solemn theme
End-stopped lines: lines in which both the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion at the end
Enjambment: the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a line on to the next verse or couplet.
Epic: a long narrative poem about the deeds of gods or heroes
Euphony: pleasing sounds; the pleasant, mellifluous presentation of sounds in a literary work
Foot: the unit of rhythm in verse
Free verse: poetry not written in a regular meter
Image: a word or phrase that appeals to one or more of the five senses
Limerick: light verse consisting of five lines or regular rhythm in which the first, second, and fifth lines (each consisting of three feet) rhyme, and the third and fourth lines (each consisting of two feet) rhyme (aabba)
Lyric: a highly musical verse that expresses the observations and feelings of a single speaker
Measure: frequently a synonym for meter
Meter: the rhythmical pattern of a poem which is determined by the number and types of stresses in each line
Feet: groups of stressed and unstressed lines; 8 types of feet
Iamb: one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
Trochee: one stressed followed by an unstressed
Anapest: two unstressed followed by one stressed
Dactyl: one stressed followed by two unstressed
Spondee: two strong stresses
Pyrrhic: foot with 2 unstressed syllables
Amphibrach: unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed, followed by another unstressed
Amphimacer: stressed, unstressed, stressed
Monometer: one-foot lines
Dimeter: two-foot lines
Trimeter: three-foot lines
Tetrameter: four-foot lines
Pentameter: five-foot lines
Hexameter: six-foot lines
Heptameter: seven-foot lines
Octameter: eight-foot lines
Octave: an eight-line stanza
Ode: a single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse, directed to a single purpose, and dealing with one theme
Quatrain: a stanza or poem made up of four lines
Refrain: a repeated line or group of lines in a poem or song
Repetition: the use, more than once, of any element of language
Rhyme: the repetition of sounds at the ends of words
End rhyme: occurs when the rhyming words come at the ends of lines
Internal rhyme: occurs when the rhyming words appear within the same line or corresponding lines
Approximate rhyme (half rhyme, slant rhyme): are words that have some correspondence in
sound but not an exact one
Rhythm: the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in language
Scansion: a system for describing conventional rhythms by dividing lines into feet, indicating the locations of binomial accents, and counting syllables
Sestet: the second, six-line division of an Italian sonnet
Sonnet: a 14-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter
English (Shakespearean) sonnet: consists of 3 quatrains and a couplet, usually rhyming abab cdcd efef gg
Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet: consists of an octave and a sestet, usually rhyming abbaabba cdecde
Speaker: the voice of a poem
Stanza: a group of lines in a poem, considered as a unit
Stress: the emphasis given a spoken syllable
Villanelle: a nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets (three-line stanzas) with the rhyme scheme aba and with a final quatrain (four-line stanza) of abaa
Volta: the turn in thought—from question to answer, problem to solution—that occurs at the beginning of the sestet in an Italian sonnet