Poetry Terms

  1. Poetry

    • One of three major genres of imaginative literature. Origins in music and oral performance.

  2. Poet

    • A writer of poetry learns and creatively practices the art of versification.

  3. Speaker

    • The person who is the voice of a poem.

  4. Line

    • Discrete organization of words. length and shape can communicate meaning.

  5. Prose

    • The regular form of spoken and written language measured in sentences

  6. Grammar (something about sentences and or punctuation)

    • The system and structure of languages consist of syntax and morphology.

  7. Line Break

    • Where a poet stops a line and begins another.

  8. (“Empty”) Space

    • Space the author uses as a “universe“. It creates echo, canyons, and open range.

  9. Rhyme

    • A type of echoing which utilizes a correspondence of sound in the final accented vowels and all that follows A two or more words.

  10. Sound

    • A type of poetry that emphasizes sounds that make up the words rather than the words themselves

  11. Diction

    • Informal or colloquial, it resembles everyday speech. determines tone

  12. Stanzas

    • A section of a poem, marked by extra line spacing before and after.

  13. Tone

    • The poet’s attitude in style or expression toward the subject.

  14. Imagery

    • It is broadly defined as any sensory detail or evocation in a work. describes an object. can be auditory, tactile, visual, or olfactory

  15. Figures of Speech

    • Any word or phrase that creates a figure in the mind of the reader by effecting obvious change in the usual meaning or order of words by comparing or identifying one thing with another

  16. Metaphor

    • Comparison of two things using without signal words (like or as)

  17. Simile

    • Comparison of two things using signal words (like or as)

  18. Synesthesia

    • The perception or description of one kind of sense impression on words normally used to describe a different sense.

  19. Symbolism

    • 19th late-century movement reacting against realism.

  20. Rhythm

    • The modulation of weak and strong elements in the flow of speech.

  21. Syntax

    • Word order is the way words are put together from phrases, clauses, and sentences

  22. Meter

    • The more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

  23. Structure

    • The way the poem is presented to the reader.

  24. Theme

    • The central idea.

  25. Form

    • The structure of a poem.