Terms you should know
(The definitions here are drawn from three sources: An Introduction to Poetry, by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia; A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams; The Harper Handbook to Literature, by Northrop Frye et. al.)
Abstract diction: words expressing ideas or concepts
Accentual meter: a metrical system in which the number of stresses per line, rather than their placement or frequency, is the organizing unit
Allegory: a (usually) narrative description in which persons, places, and things appear in a sustained system of equivalents
Alliteration: repetition of a consonant sound in a series of words
Allusion: an indirect reference to any person, place, or thing, actual or fictional
Apostrophe: an address to someone or something not usually spoken to
Assonance: repetition of a vowel sound in a series of words
Ballad: a narrative song or poem
Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
Caesura: a pause within a line
Climax: a point of high emotional intensity, the crisis or turning point in a drama or story. With a tightly constructed plot, there is often one major climax, but in works with an episodic structure there may be a series of climaxes of varying intensities.
Conceit: an elaborate comparison
Concrete diction: words that emphasize things immediately perceivable by the senses
Connotation: a word's associations or suggestions
Couplet: a pair of rhymed lines containing a complete thought
Denotation: a word's dictionary meaning
Diction: word choice
Dramatic monologue: a poem written as a speech made by a character
Elegy: a poem of mourning or remembrance
End-stopped line: line ending with a full pause
Enjambed, or run-on lines: lines ending without punctuation that are read with only a small pause or with no pause at all (enjambment is the practice of using enjambed lines)
Epic: a long narrative poem about a mythical or historic event (examples: The Iliad, The Odyssey)
Epigram: a short poem ending in a witty or ingenious thought
Eulogy: poem of praise
Exact rhyme: occurs when sounds following rhyming vowels are exactly the same: red and bread, shell and fell
Feminine rhyme: a rhyme of two or more syllables with a stress on a syllable other than the last one: history and mystery
Foot: the basic metrical unit
Genre: a French term denoting a specific type of literature or literary form. There are varying ways of distinguishing among genre, but since Plato and Aristotle there has emerged a lasting division into three generic classes: lyric, epic (or narrative), and drama. In contemporary terms this often translates into distinctions among poetry, narrative prose fiction and nonfiction, and drama.
Hyperbole: overstatement
Imagery: a word or sequence of words referring to a sensory experience, whether visual, tactile, or auditory
Irony: a manner of speaking that implies a discrepancy
Lyric poetry: a short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker
Masculine rhyme: a rhyme of one-syllable words, or multi-syllabic words with a stressed final syllable
Metaphor: a statement that one thing is something else
Meter: a system of regularly occurring stresses in a poetic line
Metonymy: substituting the name of a thing for that of another closely associated with it (i.e., the White House said today)
Onomatopoeia: attempt to represent a thing or action by a word that imitates the sound associated with it (for example, zip, buzz, hiss)
Paradox: a statement that seems contradictory but that actually makes some kind of sense
Paraphrase: restating in one's own words the subject and ideas of another; also, restating in prose the subject and ideas of a poem
Personification: a figure of speech in which a thing, an animal, an abstract term, is made human
Prosody: the study of metrical structures in poetry
Pun: a play on words
Quatrain: a stanza of four lines
Rhythm: recurrence of stresses and pauses in a poem
Rhyme: when two or more words or phrases contain an identical or similar vowel-sound, and the consonant-sounds that follow are identical or similar
Rhyme scheme: the order in which rhyming words occur, indicated by letters (i.e., abba, aba, abcabc)
Scansion: system of indicating stresses and pauses in poetry using symbols to indicate stressed syllables, unstressed syllables, and pauses (caesuras)
Sestina: "song of sixes," a medieval verse form of six six-line stanzas, in which the poet repeats six end-words in a prescribed order, reintroducing the six repeated words (in any order) in a closing three line envoy.
Simile: a comparison of two things indicated by a connective such as like, as, than, or a verb such as resembles
Slant rhyme: occurs when the final consonant sounds are the same, but the vowels are different: green and gone, that and hit
Sonnet: there are two kinds of sonnets, both poems of 14 lines : the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, and the Italian (or Petrarchan), consisting of an octave (two quatrains) and sestet (two tercets)
Stanza: a group of lines whose pattern is repeated throughout the poem
Stress: an accent or emphasis on a syllable
Syllabic verse: a rhymed or rhymeless verse form, usually stanzaic, in which the poet keeps to a pattern of a certain number of syllables to a line
Symbol: a visible object or action that suggests some further meaning in addition to itself
Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole (i.e., She gave us a hand.)
Tercet: a group of three lines
Terza rima: tercets linked by an interlocking rhyme scheme: aba, bcb, cdc, etc.
Tone: the attitude toward the person or thing addressed
Transferred epithet: a device of emphasis in which a characteristic (as opposed to a name or label [metonymy] or a part [synecdoche]) of one thing is attributed to another closely associated to it
Understatement: implying more than is said
Verse: any composition in lines of more or less regular rhythm, often (but not always) ending in rhymes
Villanelle: a medieval verse form in which the first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeatedly alternately throughout the poem as the final line in the ensuing tercets. The two lines appear together, as a couplet, at the conclusion of the poem.
Also:
You should be able to indicate, with scansion marks, the following feet:
- iamb
- anapest
- trochee
- dactyl
- spondee
And you should know the commonly used names for line lengths (meter):
- monometer: one foot
- dimeter: two feet
- trimeter: three feet
- tetrameter: four feet
- pentameter: five feet
- hexameter: six feet
- heptameter: seven feet
- octameter: eight feet
