| A | B |
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| Alliteration | the repetition of the initial letter or sound in two or more words in a line of verse. |
| Ambiguity | Quality of having two or more possible meanings; often used intentionally in poetry |
| Apostrophe | The addressing of someone or something that cannot respond |
| Assonance | the similarity or repetition of an internal vowel sound in two or more words |
| Attitude | the feeling conveyed by the speaker toward his subject within the poem |
| Caesura | a pause within a line of poetry |
| Consonance | the repetition of consonant sounds within a line of verse. |
| Couplet | two-line stanza |
| connotation | associations a word calls to mind; what a word suggests beyond its basic definition |
| Denotation | The dictionary definition of a word |
| Diction | A writer’s word choice: elevated vs. colloquial, etc. |
| Dissonance | Harsh sounds, as opposed to harmony |
| Figurative language | an expression in which the words are used in a non-literal sense to present a figure, picture, or image |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration; overstatement |
| Imagery | anything that affects or appeals to the reader’s senses: sight (visual), sound (auditory), touch (tactile), taste (gustatory), or smell (olfactory). |
| Internal rhyme | Rhyme occurring within a single line |
| Lyric | typically short poem expressing the thoughts or feelings of a single speaker |
| Metaphor | an implied comparison between two usually unrelated things indicating a likeness or analogy between attributes found in both things. |
| Meter | The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables established in a line of poetry. |
| Foot | A unit of meter. |
| Iamb | A two-syllable foot with the stress on the second syllable; the most common foot in English. |
| Spondee | two stressed syllables (pounding rhythm) |
| trochee | A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. |
| Anapest | three syllables with the stress on the last syllable. |
| Dactyl | three syllables with the stress on the first syllable |
| Pyrrhic | two unstressed syllables (uncommon) |
| Mood | The feeling that pervades a poem, just as a person’s mood may be thoughtful, exuberant, bitter, etc. (contrast with tone) |
| Narrative | a poem that tells a story |
| Onomatopoeia | the use of a word to represent or imitate natural sounds (buzz, crunch, tingle, gurgle, sizzle, hiss) |
| Paraphrase | To put a poem into one’s own words |
| Personification | the giving of human characteristics to inanimate objects, ideas, or animals. |
| Quatrain | four-line stanza |
| Repetition | the reiterating of a word or phrase within a poem. |
| Rhyme | the similarity or likeness of sound existing between two words |
| Run-on line | Enjambment; a line of poetry whose meaning and grammatical structure do not stop at the end of the line but run over into the next |
| Simile | a direct or explicit comparison between two usually unrelated things indicating a likeness or similarity between some attribute found in both things; uses like or as to introduce the comparison. |
| Sonnet | typically 14-line poem; from the Italian for “little song” |
| Speaker | The “voice” or narrator of a poem |
| Stanza | The “paragraph” of a poem |
| Stress | Emphasis on one syllable or word over another in poetry |
| Symbol | a word or image that signifies something other than what it literally represents. |
