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| A song or poem that tells a lively or tragic story in simple language using rhyming four-line stanzas and a set meter. |
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| A poem of lamentation memorializing the dead or contemplating some nuance of life's melancholy. Early Greek elegies employed a fixed form of dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter couplets. |
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| An author's or character's distinctive choice of words and style of expression. |
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| An artistic critique, sometimes heated, on some aspect of human immorality or absurdity. |
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| A direct comparison of two dissimilar things using the words like or as. |
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| A figure of speech that uses a piece or part of a thing to represent the thing in its entirety. For example, in the Biblical saying that man does not live by bread alone, bread stands for the larger concept of food or physical substances. |
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| The associations a word carries beyond its literal meaning. Connotations are forced by the context of the word's popular usage; for example, green, aside from being a color, connotes money. The opposite of denotation. |
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| A situation portrayed in a poem when what occurs is the opposite or very different from what's expected to occur. |
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| A type of figurative speech that uses verbal exaggeration to make a point. Hyperbole is somtimes called overstatement. |
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| The analysis of a poem's rhythm and metrical structures. |
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| The smallest unit of measure in poitic meter. A foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or two unstressed syllables. Meter is formed when the same foot repeats more than once. For example, in iambic pentameter, iambic refers to the type of foot (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), while pentameter tells us that there are five (pent) iambic feet in each line. |
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| A meter using feet with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. |
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| A poetic foot characterized by two unstressed syllables. |
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| A poetic meter compried of one poetic foot. |
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| A poetic meter that contains four feet in each line. |
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| A poetic meter that consists of seven feet in each line. |
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| Two lines of poetry forming one unit of meaning. Couplets are often rhymed, stung together without a break, and share the same meter. |
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| A line of poetry that, when read, does not come to a natural conclusion where the line breaks. |
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| A repetition of vowel sounds or patterns in neighboring words. |
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| A tercet of three rhymed lines. |
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| A poetic form containing seventeen syllables in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables each. Haiku traditionally contain a natural-world reference or central image. |
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| Unrhymed iambic pentameter, often used in Shakespeare's plays or for epic subject matter, as in Milton's Paradise Lost. |
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| An elevated, formal lyric poem often written in ceremony to someone or to an abstract subject. In Greek tragedy, a song and dance performed by the Chorus between episodia. |
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| The author's attitude toward his or her characters or subject matter. |
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| A variety of poem in which life in the coutryside, mainly among shepherds, is glorified and idealized. |
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| A close comparison of two dissimilar things that creates a fusion of identity between the things that are compared. A metaphor joins two dissimilar things without using words such as like or as. While a simile suggests that X is like Y a metaphor states that X is Y |
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| A figure of speech in which a writer ascrives human traits or behavior to something inhuman. |
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| The literal meaning of a word. The opposite of connotation |
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| Any object, image, character, or action that suggests meaning beyond the everyday literal level. |
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| A purposeful underestimation of something, used to emphasize its actual magnitude. |
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| Seemingly contradictory statements that, when closely examined, have a deeper, someimes complicated, meaning. |
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| The process of determining the metrical pattern of a line of poetry by making its stresses and feet. |
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| A poetic foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a strssed syllable. |
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| A meter in which the foot contains a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. |
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| Poetry in which the poet does not adhere to a preset metrical or rhyme scheme. Free verse has become increasingly prevalent since the nineteenth century, when it was first used. |
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| A poetic meter comprised of two poetic feet. |
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| A poetic meter that consists of five feet in each line. |
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| A poetic meter that consists of eight feet in each line. |
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| A pause, usually in the middle of a line, that marks a kind of rhythmic division. |
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| The echoing repetition of sounds in the end syllables of words, often (though not always) at the end of a line of poetry. |
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| The use of words that imitate the sounds they refer to, such as buzz or pop. |
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| A short poem with a central pictorial image written in an uninflected (direct and personal) voice. |
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| A poem in which a character addresses another character or the reader. Dramatic monologues are offshoots of the epic form. |
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| A four-line stanza. Quatrains are the most popular stanzaic form in English Poetry because they are easily varied in meter, line length, and rhyme scheme. |
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| A technique of using language to describe one thing in terms of another, often comparing two unlike objects, such as the sun and the face of the beloved, to condense and heighten the effect of language, particularly the effect of imagery or symolism in a poem. |
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| A figure of speech that uses an identifying emblem or closely associated object to represent another object. For example, the phrase the power of the purse makes little sense literally (ther is no purse that has power), but in the metonymical sense, purse stands for money. |
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| A figure of speech in which a writer directly addresses an unseen person, force, or personified idea. The term apostrophe derives from the Greek term meaning turning away and often marks a digression. |
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| A sensory impression created by language. Not all images are visual pictures; an image can appeal to any of the five senses, emotions, or the intellect. |
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| A statement in which the stated meaning is very different (sometimes opposite) from the implied meaning. |
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| A tercet fixed form featuring the interlocking rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc. |
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| The sequence of stressed and unstressed sounds in a poem. |
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| A meaure of verse, based on regular patterns of sound. |
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| A poetic foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The opposite of an iamb, and so sometimes called an "inverted foot," often beginning a line of iambic pentameter. |
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| A poetic foot characterized by two stressed syllables. |
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| A poem of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in a recognizable pattern of rhyme. Sonnets contain a volta, or turn, in which the last lines resolve of change direction from the controlling idea of the preceding lines. |
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| A poetic meter that conatins three feet in each line. |
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| A poetic meter that consists of six feet in each line. If the six feet are iambic, the line is known as an alexandrine, which was the preferred line of French epic poetry. |
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| A line or stanza that is repeated at regular intervals in a poem or song. |
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| A line that ends with a full stop or period. |
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| The repetition of the initial consonant sounds of a sequence of words. |
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| A unit of two or more lines, set off by a space, often sharing the same rhythm and meter. |
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