Poetry Terminology

Structural

• Asyndeton - omission of conjunctions like 'and' or', e.g. 'I expect my dog to chew my pillows, my cat to claw my furniture'

• Polysyndeton - conjunctions used several times in close succession, e.g.  "We ate roast beef and squash and biscuits and potatoes and corn and cheese and cherry pie."

• Chiasmus - where the grammar of one phrase is inverted in the following phrase, such that two key concepts from the original phrase reappear in the second phrase in inverted order, e.g. 'She has all my love; my heart belongs to her'

• Climax -  where successive words, phrases, clauses, or sentences are arranged in ascending order of importance, e.g. 'Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!'

• Volta - emotive shift in the poem

• End-Stopped Line- line of poetry in which a sentence or phrase comes to a conclusion at the end of the line

• Line Break - termination of one line of poetry, and the beginning of a new line.

• Enjambment- continuation of a sentence or clause across a line break

• Aposiopesis - enjambment for emotional effect, suddenly breaking off in speak

• Parallelism - where two or more elements of a sentence (or series of sentences) have the same grammatical structure, e.g. "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime'

• Parataxis - where words, phrases, clauses, or sentences are set next to each other so that each element is equally important., e.g. "I came, I saw, I conquered'

• Refrain - line or group of lines that regularly repeat, usually at the end of a stanza.

• Epistrophe - the repetition of a word/phrase at the end of a successive lines/clauses

• Fragmented syntax - sentence structure is broken/erratic

• Disjointed syntax - sentence is all over the place, e.g. ' Running. Out of breath. Can't stop'

• Stanza - group of lines form a smaller unit within a poem. A single stanza is usually set apart from other lines or stanza within a poem by a double line break or a change in indentation.

• Caesura - pause within a line of poetry marked by punctuation (period, comma, ellipsis, dash)

Repetition and rhyme

• Repetition - where a word or phrase is repeated two or more times. Repetition occurs in so many different forms that it is usually not thought of as a single figure of speech.

• Epizeuxis- where a word or phrase is repeated in immediate succession, with no intervening words, e.g. "Words, words, words'

• Epistrophe- where one or more words repeat at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences, e.g. "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'

• Diacope - where a word or phrase is repeated with a small number of intervening words, e.g. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'

• Anaphora - words repeat at the beginning of successive sentences, e.g. 'Life is short, life is fragile, life is precious'

• Antanaclasis - where a word is repeated in a sentence, meaning a different thing each time, e.g. 'We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately'

• Anadiplosis - where word/s at the end of one clause is repeated at the beginning of the next cause, e.g. 'Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.

• Antimetabole - where a phrase is repeated by the order of words is reversed, e.g. 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'

• Rhyme - repetition of similar sounds in two or more words

• Slant Rhyme - where two words located at the end of a line of poetry themselves end in similar—but not identical—consonant sounds, e.g. "pact" and slicked" or "unpack" and "detach"

• End Rhyme- rhymes that occur in the final words of lines of poetry

Poem Type

• Allegory - work that conveys a hidden meaning through the use of symbolic characters and events, e.g. 'The Tortoise and The Hare'

• Acrostic - where a particular set of letters spells out a word or phrase with special significance to the text

• Allusion - unexplained reference to something outside the text, e.g. Other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, philosophical ideas

• Anachronism - something placed in the wrong time period, e.g. Going to a cinema in Medieval England

• Antithesis - juxtaposing two contrasting ideas within parallel grammatical structures, e.g. 'That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind'

• Aphorismus - questioning the way a word is used, e.g. 'How can you say to me I am a king?'

• Analogy - comparison that aims to explain and idea by likening it to something else, e.g. 'She's as blind as a bat'

• Aphorism - saying that concisely expresses a moral principle, e.g. 'You can't always get what you want'

• Catharsis - process of releasing strong or pent-up emotions through art, coined by Aristotle

• Cliché - overused phrase lacking in substance and originality, e.g. 'plenty of fish in the sea'

• Diction -  writer's unique style of expression, especially choice and arrangement of words

• Elegy - poem of serious reflection, especially one mourning the loss of someone who died

• Motif - element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature.

• Satire - use of humour, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone

• Tone - general character or attitude of a piece of writing , which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on.

• Tone of voice - how the speaker sounds in terms of emotion/pace

• Confessional poetry - sense of sharing a secret, e.g. To My Nine-Year Old Self

• Ekphrasis - basing a poem on art/music/literature for a narrative,, often extended metaphors, e.g. Ode on a Grecian Urn

Word Choice

• Aporia - speaking expressing uncertainty or doubt to prove a point, e.g. 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways'

• Apostrophe - speaker directly addresses something that is not present/can't respond

• Colloquialism - use of informal words or phrases.

• Connotation -  array of emotions and ideas suggested by a word in addition to its dictionary definition

• Hyperbole -  where a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis

• Idiom -  phrase that conveys a figurative meaning that is difficult or impossible to understand based solely on a literal interpretation of the words

• Imagery - descriptive language that engages the human senses

• Irony -  how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are

• Juxtaposition - when an author places two things side by side as a way of highlighting their differences

• Metonymy - where an object or concept is referred to not by its own name, but instead by the name of something closely associated with it, e.g. 'Wall Street prefers lower taxes'

• Oxymoron - where two contradictory terms or ideas are intentionally paired in order to make a point—particularly to reveal a deeper or hidden truth, e.g. "proud humility'

• Paradox - figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel of truth or reason

• Polyptoton - the repetition of words derived from the same root, e.g. "Who shall watch the watchmen?" is an example of polyptoton because it includes both "watch" and "watchmen.

• Synecdoche - where a part of something is used to refer to its whole. E.g. "The captain commands one hundred sails" is a synecdoche that uses "sails" to refer to ships—ships being the thing of which a sail is a part.

• Lexical field - pattern of topics, e.g. father, mother, uncle, and aunt

• Semantic field - patterns in meaning or mood, e.g. Wave, tree, joy, calmness

• Semantic shifts - shifts in semantic field/mood shift

• Polysemy - word with many possible meanings, e.g. Bright, bank

• Pronouns

  • Personal pronouns - I, you, she, it, we, they

  • Possessive pronouns - mine, yours, hers, his, theirs

  • Collective pronouns - we, ours, them, us

• Adverbs - adjective describing a verb - quickly/slowly

• Verbs

  • Modal verbs - instructive/suggesting, shall, will, should, would, can, could, may, might

  • Static verbs - abstract/state of being/powerful, know, feel, believe, sitting

  • Dynamic verbs - powerful, killing, raging

  • Stative verbs - complex feelings/actions, detest, need (could link with polysemy/ambiguity)

  • Abstract nouns - complex feelings, love, hate (could link with polysemy/ambiguity)

• Adjectives

  • Superlatives - exaggerated, hyperbolic, best, amazing, wonderful, fantastic, disgusting

  • Comparative adjectives - taller, brighter, smarter

  • Positive/negative adjectives - ambitious/ugly

Figurative devices

• Extended Metaphor - metaphor that unfolds across multiple lines or even paragraphs of a text, making use of multiple interrelated metaphors within an overarching one

• Zeugma - metaphorical and literary meaning simultaneously, 'my teeth and ambitions are bared'

• Metaphor - figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other, e.g. "Love is a battlefield."

• Conceit -  fanciful metaphor, especially a highly elaborate or extended metaphor in which an unlikely, far-fetched, or strained comparison is made between two things, e.g. John Donne's poem, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which two lovers are compared to opposite points of a compass needle using a long and elaborate metaphor

• Simile - a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things, often use the connecting words like/as

• Personification - anything made human (Objects/animals)

• Anthropomorphism - making animals human

• Zoomorphism - make humans seem like animals

• Pathetic fallacy - the attribution of human feelings to nature, e.g. 'the sun was smiling down on him'

• Symbolism- where a writer uses one thing—usually a physical object or phenomenon—to represent something more abstract

• Pun - plays with words that have multiple meanings, or that plays with words that sound similar but mean different things

• Rhetorical Question - where a question is asked for a reason other than to get an answer, most commonly, it's asked to make a persuasive point, e.g. "How many times do I have to tell you not to eat my dessert?"

• Verbal Irony - when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean.

• Litotes - form of understatement in which a sentiment is expressed ironically by negating its contrary, e.g. saying "It's not the best weather today" during a hurricane

• Imagism - sharp and precise detail of imagery, clarity

• Parataxis - unclear/irrelevant seeming ideas, e.g. 'He wanted a sandwich - the shark attack was horrifying'

• Synaesthesia - use of merging the senses in an abstract manner

Sound

• Alliteration - where the same sound repeats in a group of words

• Assonance - where the same vowel sound repeats within a group of words, e.g. 'Who gave Newt and Scooter the blue tuna? It was too soon!'

• Consonance - where the same consonant sound repeats within a group of words, e.g. 'Traffic figures, on July Fourth, to be tough'

• Onomatopoeia - where words evoke the actual sound of the thing they refer to or describe, e.g. The “boom” of a firework exploding

• Euphony - combining of words that sound pleasant together, lots of consonants with soft/muffled sounds (L, M, N)

• Cacophony - combining of words that sound harsh with percussive sounds (T, P, K)

• Plosives - consonant sound that's made by stopping then releasing air flow (T, P, K)

• Fricatives - fricative consonant (F, TH)

• Sibilance - where a hissing sound is created within a group of words through the repetition of "s" sounds

• Dissonance - how the poet sounds to the reader, is it harsh to us? Is there harshness?, disconnect between poet/reader