| A | B |
|---|
| Figurative Language | writing or speech that is not meant to be taken literally. Common figures of speech include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, and simile. |
| Voice | the persona - mask - the voice that speaks the poem. It is not the poet who writes the poem. |
| Alliteration | the repetition of the initial (first) consonants of a series of words. "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" Authors use this to create musical effects in lanaguage. |
| Assonance | the repetition of volwel sounds with in a line of poetry. (Rain, rain, go away!) |
| Diction | careful selection of certain words and grammatical constructions |
| Tone | the author's attitude toward his/her material |
| Simile | a figure of speech that uses like or as to make a direct comparison between two unlike ideas. Good as gold. Clever as a fox. |
| Metaphor | a figure of speech that compares two unlike objects not using like or as. Sandburg compares fog to a cat. |
| Dialect | the imitation of regional speech in pring, using altered, phonetic spelling. Langston Hughes writes, "I'se been a-climbin' ". |
| End rhyme | the rhyming (matching of similar sounds) at the ends of lines of verse. |
| Imagery | the use of vivid, concrete, sensory details to create a picture in the reader's mind. |
| Internal rhyme | rhyming of words within, rahter than at the end of lines. Poe writes, "Once upon a midnight weary, while I pondered weak and weary". |
| Meter | any regular pattern of rhythm. |
| Onomatopoeia | the use of words that imitates sounds. To re-create the sound of water, Merriam uses words like sputter, purts and splash. |
| Poetry | the communication of thought and feeling through the careful arrangement of wrds for their sound, rhythm, and connotation as well as their sense. |
| Personification | a figure of speech that attributes human feeling or characteristics to inanimate objects. Sandburg describes fog as "looking over harbor and city". |
| Refrain | the repetition of one or more lines in each stanza of a poem. Alfred Noyes' famous refraim "The highwayman came riding-- Riding--riding--"several times. |
| Rhyme | poets use rhyme to lend a songlike quality to their verses and to emphasize certain words and ideas. End rhyme, internal rhyme and rhyme scheme are examples of this. |
| Rhyme scheme | any pattern of rhymes in a stanza which is a conventional pattern or which is repeated in another stanza. Lower case letters are assigned to the end rhyme of each line of poetry to discribe the pattern. The rhyme scheme of a stanza of poetry to could be ababcb. |
| Rhythm | a series of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged s that the readewr expects a similar series to follow. For example "I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I Am". |
| Sonnet | a lyric poem which has fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter- one rhyme scheme is abab cecd efef gg. |
| Stanza | the smallest division of a poem having a pattern of rhyming lines which is repeated in another stanza. |
| Symbol | something relativel concrete such as an object, action, character or scene, which stands for something relatively abstract. A heart often symbolizes love. |
| Verse | A single line of poetry. |
| Apostrophe | speaking to a person or thing that is not there or is not listening. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? |
| Understatement | a form of irony in which something is intentionally represented as less than it is in fact. |
| Hyperbole | extreme exaggeration for an effect on the audience. When Shel Silverstein writes, "The garbage reached across the state". |
| Metonymy | a term meaning an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself. For example: "There will be an announcement from the White House." |
| Malaproprism | inappropriateness of speech resulting from the use of one word for another which has a similarity to it. Archie Bunker said, "Whenever Edith sees a mouse, she always gets historical." |
| Lyric poetry | commonly presents a speaker expressing an emotion |
| Elegy | a traditional poetic form treating the death of a person in a formal philsophic way |
| Free verse | poetry written with a rhythm and other poetic devices, but without meter or a regular rhyme scheme. Its rhythm sounds more like the natural rhythms of normal conversation. Every line of a free verse poem may have a different pattern of beats. |
| Ode | a long, lyric peom, formal in style and complex in form often written for a special occasion. |
| Narrative poem | one that elss a story. "The Higwayman" by Alfred Noyes is a narrative poem. |
