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| The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. |
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| Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. |
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| A character or force against which another character struggles. |
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| The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." |
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| A narrative poem written in four line stanzas. |
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| A line of poetry in unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
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| A strong pause within a line of verse, often shown by a dash or a space. |
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| The means by which writers present and reveal character. |
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| The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. |
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| A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. |
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| A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. |
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| The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. |
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| A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play. |
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| A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. |
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| A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. |
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| The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. |
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| The resolution of the plot of a literary work. |
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| The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names. |
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| The selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. |
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| A lyric poem that laments the dead. |
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| The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. |
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| A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. |
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| A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. |
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| A brief witty poem, often satirical. |
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| The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided. |
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| Poetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. |
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| A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole. |
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| A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. |
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| Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. |
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| A figure of speech involving exaggeration. |
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| An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. |
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| A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. |
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| The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. |
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| A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. |
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| A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. |
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| A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. |
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| The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. |
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| A poem that tells a story. |
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| The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. |
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| An eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet. |
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| A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually an ode is a serious poem on an exalted subject. |
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| The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. |
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| A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. |
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| The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. |
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| The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. |
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| A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the"). |
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| A four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrarchan sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet. |
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| The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. |
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| The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. |
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| Poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable. |
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| A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies. |
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| A six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem; the last six lines of an Italian sonnet. |
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| The time and place of a literary work that establish its context. |
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| A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. |
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| A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd. |
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| A metricalfoot represented by two stressed syllables, such as KNICK-KNACK. |
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| A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another. |
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| What a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. |
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| An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. |
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| A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. |
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| The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. |
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| The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. |
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| The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work. |
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| An accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball. |
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| A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration. |
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