| A | B |
|---|
| dramatic monologue | a character reveals his innermost thoughts / feelings |
| narrative poetry | a poem that tells a story |
| lyric poetry | poetry that expresses an emotion |
| paradox | a statement that is contradictory / absurd but also true |
| elegy | a poem that expresses sorrow over the death of someone loved |
| personification | giving something nonhuman human characteristics |
| ode | verse directed to a single purpose that deals with one theme |
| epic | a long narrative that relates to the deeds of a larger-than-life hero |
| symbol | something that stands for something other than itself |
| synecdoche | a part signifies a whole or a whole signifies a part (referring to a car as "my wheels") |
| allusion | a references in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history |
| sonnet | a fourtee-line poem written in iambic pentameter |
| apostrophe | someone absent or dead or nonhuman is addressed as if it were alive |
| metaphor | making a comparison between two unlike things without using like or as |
| simile | making a comparison between two unlike things using like or as |
| dramatic poem | a poem with an emotional conflict and may have dialogue, a monologue, diction, etc. |
| ballad | a song that tells a story with rhyme, a refrain, and a tragic ending |
| hyperbole | an exaggeration |
| onomatiopoeia | the use of a word whose sound imitates its meaning |
| metonymy | substitutes one term for another (the White House for Washington D.C.) |
| oxymoron | a self-contradictory arrangement of words |
| dramatic irony | when the audience knows what the characters do not |
| alliteration | the repetition of the same consonant sound |
| inversion | placing a sentence's elements outside of the normal possibility |
| cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds |
| rhyme scheme | the pattern of rhymed lines in a poem |
| iambic pentameter | five unstressed and five stressed syllables in a line of poetry |
| meter | the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| quatrain | a stanza of four lines |
| foot | a unit of measure consisting of a stressed syllable and an unstressed syllable |
| assonance | the repetition of vowel sounds |
| concrete poetry | poetry that uses the appearance of the verse lines on the page to suggest or imitate the poem's subject |
| irony of situation | a contrast between what happens and what is exppected to happen |
| blank verse | unrhymed imabic pentameter |
| couplet | two consecutive lines of poetry that form a unit |
| free verse | poetry without meter or rhyme |
| allegory | a poem that tells a story that teaches a moral lesson |
| parody | the humorous imitation of a work of literature, art, or music |
| imagery | the representation through language of sense experience |
| tone | the attitude a writer takes towards his subject |
| refrain | the repetition of a phrase or line in poetry |
| satire | literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform |
| paraphrase | a restatement of the content of a poem designed to make its prose meaning as clear as possible |
| approximate rhyme | rhyme that is close but not exact |
| scansion | an analysis of verse in terms of meter |
