Alliteration - Occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Allusion - Brief reference to a real or fictional person, event, place, or work of art.

Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds in a chunk of text.

Ballad - A story/narrative in poetic form.

Consonance - A repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels, in a chunk of text.

Diction - The author’s specific word choice.

Enjambment - This occurs when one line ends without a pause or any punctuation and continues onto the next line.

Free Verse - Poetry that does not rhyme or have a measurable meter.

Metaphor - A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things without using connecting words, such as “like” or “as”.

Meter - The measured arrangement of sounds/beats in a poem, including the poet’s placement of emphasis and the number of syllables per line.

Onomatopoeia - A word that sounds like what it is [buzz, click, bang, sizzle]

Rhythm - 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.

Simile - A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things using connecting words, such as “like” or “as”.

Stanza - An unidentified group of lines in poetry. This is often marked by spacing between sections of the poem.

Symbol - An object or action that means something more than its literal meaning.

Theme - The central meaning or dominant message the poet is trying to deliver to the reader.

Tone - The attitude the poem’s narrator (this may or may not be the actual poet) takes towards a subject or character : serious, humorous, sarcastic, ironic, concerned, tongue-in-cheek, solemn, objective, etc.

Verse - A single line of poetry.