Poetry Terms

Alliteration- the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Allusion- an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference.

Assonance- in poetry, the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in nonrhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible (e.g., penitence, reticence ).

Ballad- a ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally "dancing songs".

Blank Verse- a poem with no rhyme but does have iambic pentameter. This means it consists of lines of five feet, each foot being iambic, meaning two syllables long, one stressed followed by an unstressed.

Caesura- a break between words within a metrical foot (a pause near the middle of a line.)

Couplet- a pair of lines of metre in poetry. Couplets usually comprise two lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse.

Diction- the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry.

End Rhyme- a rhyme that occurs in the last syllables of verses.

Enjambment- the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Epic- a long, narrative poem that is usually about heroic deeds and events that are significant to the culture of the poet

Foot-  a basic repeated sequence of meter composed of two or more accented or unaccented syllables. In the case of an iambic foot, the sequence is "unaccented, accented".

Free Verse- poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.

Imagery- visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work or poem.

Lyric- a type of emotional songlike poetry, distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry.

Metaphor- the comparison of one thing to another without the use of like or as: “A man is but a weak reed”; “The road was a ribbon of moonlight.”

Meter- the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse.

Ode- a lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner and written in varied or irregular meter.

Onomatopoeia- the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named.

Repetition- the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to secure emphasis.

Rhyme Scheme- the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song.

Rhythm- stressed and unstressed syllables used in poetry.

Simile- a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose."

Sonnet- a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per line.

Stanza- a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse.

Stress- the emphasis that falls on certain syllables and not others; the arrangement of stresses within a poem is the foundation of poetic rhythm.

Theme(s)- the statement the poem/poet makes about its subject mainly communicated by diction and tone.

Tone- the mood a poem creates in a reader.

Verse- a single metrical line in a poetic composition. Verse has also come to represent any division or grouping of words in a poetic composition, with groupings traditionally having been referred to as stanzas.

Volta- the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.