| A | B |
|---|
| alliteration | Repetition of initial consonant sounds |
| allusion | brief reference to a person, place, thing, event or idea in history or literature |
| apostrophe | an address, either to someone who is absent or to something nonhuman |
| assonance | repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words |
| caesura | a pause within a line of poetry |
| consonance | repeated consonant sounds |
| lyric | poetry that expresses feelings |
| narrative | poetry that tells a story |
| dramatic | poetry where speaker addresses a silent audience imagined to be present in the poem |
| end rhyme | rhyme at the end of the line |
| internal rhyme | rhyme within the line |
| end-stopped line | one poetic line contains a complete thought, often indicated by end marks |
| run-on line | a line ends without a pause, continuing into the next for its meaning |
| euphony | language that is smooth and musically pleasant to the ear |
| cacophony | language that is discordant or harsh to the ear |
| masculine rhyme | rhyme of one syllable |
| feminine rhyme | rhyme of two or more syllables |
| free verse | poems characterized by their nonconformity to patterns of meter, rhyme and stanza |
| meter | recurring rhythmic pattern in a poem |
| onomatopoeia | word resembles the sound it denotes |
| hyperbole | overstatement |
| lytotes | understatement |
| oxymoron | two words in juxtaposition for effect |
| simile | comparison using like or as |
| paradox | statement that initially seems contradictory, but turns out to make sense |
| personification | giving human characteristics to that which is not human |
| rhymescheme | pattern of rhyme in a poem |
| iambic foot | U / |
| trochaic foot | / U |
| anapestic foot | U U / |
| dactylic foot | / U U |
| spondaic foot | / / |
| pyrrhic foot | U U |
| irony | statement contradicts reality |
| metaphor | comparison between two unlike things |
| synecdoche | part signifies whole |
| metonymy | something associated with object is substituted for it |
| musical devices | alliteration, onomatopoeia, consonance, assonance, cacophony, euphony |
| figures of speech | simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron . . . |
| stanza | grouping of lines set off by a space that often has a set pattern of meter or rhyme |
