| A | B |
|---|
| alliteration | The repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close to one another |
| allusion | A reference to a statement, person, place, event, or thing that is known from literature, history, religion, mythology, politics, sports, science, or popular culture. |
| ballad | a song or songlike poem that tells a story. |
| blank verse | Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
| assonance | The repetition of similar vowel sounds followed by different consonant sounds in words that are close together. |
| couplet | Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. |
| diction | a writer's or speaker's choice of words. |
| elegy | A poem that mourns the death of a person or laments something lost. |
| epitaph | An inscription on a tombstone or commemorative poem written about a person who has died. |
| free verse | Poetry that has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. |
| iambic pentameter | A line of poetry made up of five iambs. |
| imagery | Language that appeals to the senses. |
| metaphor | A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike things without using a connective word such as like, as, than, or resembles. |
| meter | A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. |
| ode | A complex, generally long lyric poem on a serious subject. |
| onomatopoeia | The use of a word whose sound imitates or suggests its meaning. |
| parallelism | The repetition of words, phrases, or sentences that have the same grammatical structure or that restate a similar idea. |
| personification | A kind of metaphor in which a nonhuman or nonliving thing or quality is talked about as if it were human or had life. |
| quatrain | A four-line stanza or poem or a group of four lines unified by a rhyme scheme. |
| refrain | A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines. |
| rhyme | The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following in words that are close together in a poem. |
| simile | A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike things by using a connective word such as like or as. |
| sonnet | A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in iambic pentameter, that has one of several rhyme schemes. |
| speaker | The imaginary voice, or persona, assumed by the author of a poem. |
| stanza | A group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit. |
| symbol | A person, place, thing, or event that stands for both itself and for something beyond itself. |
| villanelle | A nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets (three-line stanzas), each with the rhyme scheme aba, and a final quatrain with the rhyme scheme abaa. |
