Mrs. Hedayat’s Glossary of Poetic Terms
Alliteration:
using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syllables in a phrase or
verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence.
Alliteration need not re-use all initial consonants: words like “train” and “terrific”
alliterate.
Allusion:
a reference to a historical, mythical, or literary person, place, event, movement, etc.
Assonance (Latin, ‘to answer with the same sound’)
the rhyming of a word with another in one or more of their accented vowels, but not in
their consonants: sometimes called vowel rhyme.
Atmosphere:
the mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work.
Ballad:
a popular song, often recited aloud, narrating a story, and passed down orally. Over 300
traditional English ballads, in up to 25 versions of each, were edited as the so-called
”Child ballads” (named after the editor, F.J. Child) 1882-98. Examples of the form
include “Sir Patrick Spens.” “Twa Sisters of Binnorie.” “The Three Ravens.” the Lyrical
Ballads by William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by
John Keats. See also Broadside ballads.
Blank verse:
un-rhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse, a ten-syllable line and the usual
rhythm of English dramatic and epic poetry from its introduction by Henry Howard, earl
of Surrey, in his translation of Books II and IV of Virgil’s Certain Books of Virgil Æneis.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet II.2.339: “The Lady shall say her mind freely: or the blanke Verse
shall halt for’t.” Poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Browning’s
dramatic
monologues, and Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning” use blank verse.
Blues:
oral black American folk or popular melancholic songs of the early twentieth century.
Cadence:
the ametrical rhythm of natural speech
Caesura (Latin: ‘cut’)
a stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by a punctuation or by a grammatical
boundary, such as a phrase or clause. When a caesura splits the line in equal parts , it is
termed medial. When the pause occurs towards the beginning or end of the line, it is
termed, respectively, initial and terminal.
Carpe diem:
seize the day, live while you can, savor the moment
Conceit (Italian):
a complicated intellectual metaphor. Petrarchan conceits drew on conventional sensory
imagery popularized by the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74). Metaphysical conceits were
characterized by esoteric, abstract associations and surprising effects.
Connotation:
Suggested meaning of a word.
Consonance:
The repetition of similar consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words, as in lost and
past.
Couplet:
a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length
Denotation:
“dictionary definition” of a word
Dirge:
a brief funeral hymn or song. An example is Henry King’s Exequy.
Elegy:
a Greek or Latin form in alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter lines:
and a melancholy poem lamenting its subject’s death but ending in consolation.
Enjambement:
the running over of a sentence or phrase from one verse to the next, without terminal
punctuation. Such verses can be called run-on lines.
Epic:
an extended narrative poem with a heroic or superhuman protagonist engaged in an
action of great significance in a vast setting (often including the underworld and engaging
the gods).
Epitaph:
a burial inscription, often in verse.
Figure of Speech:
one of many kinds of word-play, focusing either on sound and word-order (schemes) or
on semantics (tropes). Usually describes one thing in terms of another.
Foot:
the basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one
stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in english are
iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic.
Free verse:
rhythmical but non-rhyming lines. These may have a deliberate rhythm or cadence but
seem to disappoint the reader’s expectation for a formal metre, such as iambic
pentameter.
Haiku or hokku:
Japanese poem of three unrhyming lines in 5, 7, and 5 syllables.
Hyperbole:
exaggeration beyond reasonable credence. An example: tons of money, waiting for ages,
a flood of tears.
Iamb, iambus:
a metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. This is
the rhythm of ordinary English speech. For example, “define” and “deter.”
Irony:
stating something by saying another quite different thing, sometimes its opposite.
Limerick:
a fixed verse form rhyming aabba, where a-lines have five feet and b-lines three feet, and
where the first and last lines end with the same word.
Lyric:
short poem in which the poet, the poet’s persona, or a speaker expresses personal
feelings, and often addressed to the reader
Metaphor:
a comparison that is made literally, either by a verb (for example, John Keats' "Beauty is
truth, truth beauty" from his "Ode on a Grecian Urn") or, less obviously, by a
combination of adjective and noun, noun and verb, etc. (for example, Shakespeare's
sonnet on the "the marriage of true minds"), but in any case without pointing out a
similarity by using words such as "as," "like," or "than."
Metre:
Arrangement of a line of poetry by the number of syllables & the rhythm of accented (or
stressed) syllables
Ode:
a poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms.
Onomatopeia (Greek `name-making'):
Figure of speech in which words are used to imitate sounds. Examples: buzz, hiss, zing,
clippety clop, pop, splat, thump, tick-tock.
Oxymoron:
an expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as John
Milton's description of Hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost.
Pastoral:
Poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, idealized way.
Pentameter:
five feet; sometimes termed pentapody, a five-part foot, one measure made up of five
feet. Iambic pentameter or cinquepace is the rhythm of so-called English ‘heroic’ verse of
ten syllables.
Personification:
Figure of speech in which nonhuman things or abstract ideas are given human attributes:
the sky is crying, dead leaves danced in the wind, blind justice.
Poetic license:
the freedom to depart from correctness and grammaticality sometimes extended to poets
by generous readers who believed that the poets knew better but needed such effects to be
true to their subject.
Poetry:
a form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject.
Pun:
an expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled identically) to deliver
two or more meanings at the same time.
Quatrain:
a four-line stanza, rhyming
Refrain:
on or more lines repeated before or after the stanzas of a poem.
Rhetorical question:
the poet asks a question without expecting to learn anything from the response, or to pose
any difficulty for the reader, the answer being something that the poet already implies
and the reader infers.
Scansion:
the scanning of verse, that is, dividing it into metrical feet and identifying its rhythm by
encoding stressed syllables (stresses, ictus) and unstressed syllables (slacks).
Simile:
Figure of speech in which two things are compared using the word “like or “as.” An
example from Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?”
Sonnet (Italian, “little song”):
int the Renaissance, a brief song or lyric of indeterminate rhyme scheme, but also a 14line poem patterned on forms popularized by Petrarch, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, and
Shakespeare.
Stanza (Italian, `a stopping place'):
a group of verses separated from other such groups in a poem and often sharing a
common rhyme scheme.
Stress:
Emphasis given to particular syllables. Stressed syllables usually stand out because they
have long, rather than short vowels, or because they have a different pitch and are louder.
Villanelle:
an Italian verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas (tereets) and a final quatrain,
possessing only two rhymes repeating the first and third lines of the first stanza
alternately in the following stanzas, and combining those two refrain lines into the final
couplet in the quatrain.