Poetry Terms
Poem A composition written for performance by the human voice.
Categories of poetry:
Epic - long, narrative poem. (Like The Odyssey or Beowulf.)
Dramatic - poetry in the form of monologue or dialogue, in other words, plays. (We already read plenty of those.)
Lyric - fairly short, with a single “speaker.” Most of the poems in the Norton Anthology are this type, and that is also what we’ll be focusing on.
Rhythm and meter
Rhythm: Rhythm is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
scansion The analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables by scanning to determine metrical feet
caesura - A pause in the speaking rhythm
unstressed uses u symbol
stressed uses / symbol
meter is the system for how we measure the recurring rhythm
Meter is measured in feet
Accentual meter - also called “strong stress” meter. Lines organized by stressed syllables and uses alliteration instead of rhyme. Old English poems like Beowulf were written in this meter.
Accentual Syllabic meter - This is the dominant meter, see below for how it works.*
Syllabic meter - measures the number of syllables rather than the stress. Haiku works this way.
Quantitative meter - measures feet according to the duration of utterance rather than stress. More common in Greek and Latin poetry.
Accentual meter types
Iambic - unstressed stressed
Trochaic - stressed unstressed
Anapestic - unstressed unstressed stressed
Dactylic - stressed unstressed unstressed
Spondaic - stressed stressed
Pyrrhic - unstressed unstressed
Monometer - one foot
Dimeter - two feet
Trimeter - three feet
Tetrameter - four feet
Pentameter - five feet
Hexameter - six feet
Heptameter - seven feet
Octameter - eight feet
Nonameter - nine feet
Decameter - ten feet
Poetry forms:
Blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameter
Couplets - pairs of rhymed lines
Tercet - three line stanzas
Quatrain - four line stanzas
Rhyme Royal - seven line stanza rhyming ababbcc
Ottava Rima - eight line stanzas rhyming abababcc
Spenserian Stanza - nine lines…
Villanelle - 5 tercets (aba) followed by a quatrain (abaa) with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeating throughout the poem as the last lines of the later stanzas, making a constant refrain.
Sonnet - 14 lines, iambic pentameter, one of three basic rhyme schemes. See below:
Three basic kinds of sonnet based on how the rhyme scheme is arranged.
Italian or Petrarchan sonnet - abba abba cde cde
English or Shakespearean sonnet - abab cdcd efef gg
Spenserian Sonnet - abab bcbc cdcd ee
Sestina - Most complicated form. 6 stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by an “envoy” of three lines. The end words of the first stanza repeat in a fixed pattern as the end words of the remaining stanzas, and two per line in the ending tercet.
Limerick - five lines (aabba), lines 1, 2, and 5 are longer. Usually nonsense, often naughty. I know far more dirty limericks than clean ones.
Open forms - Free Verse. No use of traditional rhyme and meter. That doesn’t mean there are NO rules, but it does mean that the poet is playing by a different set of rules.
Prose poem - may look like prose, but contains poetry elements.
Shaped poems - poems laid out to look like the shape of the thing the poem is about.
Sound Devices:
Rhyme - The concurrence, in two or more lines, of the last stressed vowel and of all speech sounds following that vowel.
End rhyme - rhymes are at the ends of lines.
Internal rhyme - rhymes occur within the same line of poetry.
Rhyme scheme - the pattern of (end) rhyme in the poem.
Assonance - repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds.
Consonance - repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds.
Alliteration - repetition of the initial consonant sounds.
Onomatopoeia - words that resemble the sounds they denote. Bam!
Masculine rhyme - rhymes are a single stressed syllable.
Feminine rhyme - rhymes are a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
Perfect rhyme - correspondence of rhyming sounds is exact.
Eye rhyme - words which are spelled alike, but whose pronunciations are different. prove/love, daughter/laughter
Imperfect rhyme:
Off rhyme - a.k.a. “Half rhyme,” “near rhyme,” or “slant rhyme” - changes either the vowel sound or the following consonants expected of a perfect rhyme. gone/alone, room/storm, firm/room, be/fly
Vowel rhyme - goes beyond off rhyme to the point where only the vowel sounds are in common. green/leaves, starry/barley, climb/eyes/sight
Pararhyme - the stressed vowel sounds differ, but are flanked by identical or similar consonants. trod/trade