| A | B |
|---|
| Sonnet | a 14- line poem, often in iambic pentameter with rhymes in a fixed scheme. |
| Haiku | a short, originally-Japanese poetry form that captures a single moment, and traditionally invokes a season. |
| Elegy | a poem written to express grief at a death. |
| Epic | a long narrative poem about heroic deeds and big scale conflict. |
| Ballad | a poem that tells a story, and has a meter (so that it could be sung). |
| Meter | the rhythm of language, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. |
| Couplet | - two lines of poetry in a row that obviously go together, because they rhyme or they express a single thought. |
| Line Break | when you hit return and go down to the next line in a poem. |
| Stanza | a section of a poem, like a paragraph in an essay. |
| Connotation | the social, emotional associations that a culture has about a word. |
| Denotation | the dictionary definition of a word. |
| Alliteration | - a poetic or literary devise achieved by using several words that begin with the same consonants, as in "Whither wilt thou wander, wayfarer?" |
| Ambiguity | when something can be understood in more than one way, and it’s not clear which meaning is “right;” when something can be interpreted equally well in two different ways. |
| Cliche | something that used to be interesting, but has been over-used and is now stale and boring. |
| Literal | word for word; taking words in their usual or basic sense. |
| Figurative | not literal; used in figures of speech. |
| Metaphor | a comparison that doesn’t use “like” or “as.” |
| Simile | a comparison that uses “like” or “as”. |
| Personification | giving human qualities to something that isn’t alive. |
| Symbol | something concrete that stands for or represents something abstract. |
| Theme | the message conveyed by a text that applies to multiple other texts (and life in general). A theme cannot be a single word; it’s a statement. |
| Tone | the feeling or mood of a piece of writing. |
| Voice | the style in a piece of writing, conveying the author’s personality. |
| Allegory | – a work of art that has a second, hidden layer of meaning. |
| Allusion | when a work of art makes an indirect reference to something that the author assumes the audience will recognize/know. |
