AP Lit Poetry

Anapest: Three-syllable foot, stress on third (unstressed, unstressed, stressed)

Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds

Aubade: Poem about dawn; morning love song; poem about the parting of lovers at dawn

Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter

Caesura: Strong pause within a line of verse

Conceit: Fanciful, clever extended metaphor

Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds

Dactyl: stressed, unstressed, unstressed

Dimeter: two feet

Elegy: sorrowful poem or speech

Enjambment: run-on line of poetry that carries over from one line into the next

Epithet: descriptive name or phrase used to characterize someone

feminine rhyme: lines rhymed by their final two syllables

Foot: A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Iamb: unstressed, stressed

Litotes: understatement

Masculine Rhyme: A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable

meter: regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry

Metonymy: substituting the name of one object for another object closely associated with it

Octave: 8 line stanza

Scansion: Analysis of verse into metrical patterns

Sestet: six line stanza

Speaker: the voice of the poem

Spondee: stressed, stressed

Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole

Tercet: three line stanza

Tone: Attitude a writer takes toward the audience, a subject, or a character

Trochee: stressed, unstressed

Villanelle: 19 line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain

Volta: the shift or point of dramatic change in a poem

Zeugma: a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses

Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds

Allusion: A reference to another work of literature, person, or event

Antithesis: Direct opposite

Didactic Poetry: Poetry designed to tea:ch an ethical, moral, or religious lesson.

English sonnet: a sonnet consisting three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg

Extended Metaphor: A metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work.

implied metaphor: Implies or suggests the comparison between the two thing without stating it directly

Italian sonnet: a sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba, followed by a sestet with the rhyme pattern cdecde or cdcdcd

Terza Rima: A three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc.

Ode: A lyric poem usually marked by serious, respectful, and exalted feelings toward the subject.

Onomatopoeia: A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory terms in a brief phrase.

Paradox: a contradiction or dilemma

Parallelism: similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses

Personification: A figure of speech in which an object or animal is given human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes

phonetic intensive: a word whose sound, by an obscure process, to some degree suggests its meaning