AP Lit Poetry Terms
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Created by:
am_ageniusthinker on November 23, 2009
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49 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 allusion | reference to someone/something known from "pop" culture |
| apostrophe | a device in which the speaker makes a direct address to an inanimate, non-existent, or absent person or thing |
| asyndeton | the omission of conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words and phrases |
| ballad | a song or poem that tells a story (often a tragic one) |
| blank verse | poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| catalog | list of things, people, or events |
| carpe diem | Latin for "seize the day"; common motif in lyric verse, with an emphasis on making the most of current pleasures because "life is short"; especially popular in early 17th c. |
| chiasmus | the reversal of the order of corresponding words or phrases; inverted parallelism |
| conceit | elaborate simile or metaphor comparing two things that are startlingly different |
| concrete poem | a poem that suggests the visual representation of the subject |
| elegy | poem of mourning, usually about someone who has died |
| enjambment | the continuation of the sense beyond the end of a line of verse |
| epistrophe | also called epiphora, the repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases or verses |
| free verse | poetry that does not have regular meter or rhyme scheme |
| hyperbole | an incredible exaggeration used for effect |
| imagery | use of language to evoke a picture in mind |
| inversion | reversal of normal word order in a sentence or phrase |
| irony | the difference between what occurs/is said and what is expected to occur/be said |
| lyric poem | poem that doesn't tell a story but expresses personal feelings of the poet |
| metaphor | direct comparison of two unlike things with "clue" words |
| ode | lyric poem on a serious subject and written in dignified language |
| oxymoron | a combination of words that appear to be contradictory |
| paradox | a concept that appears to be contradictory yet true |
| pastoral | a literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in an idealized way |
| personification | figure of speech in which object or animal is given human characteristics |
| polysyndeton | repetition of a number of conjunctives in close succession; stylistic scheme used to slow the rhythm or prose and can add an air of solemnity to a passage |
| pun | the deliberate misuse of a word or thought resulting in comic relief; wordplay |
| simile | comparison of two unlike things using like, as, than, or resembles |
| sonnet | 14-line poem usually in iambic pentameter |
| theme | insight about human life that is revealed in a literary work |
| zeugma | when a single word, usually a verb or adjective is used in the same grammatical and semantic relationship with two or more other words |
| symbol | person, place, thing, or event that has meaning in itself and that also stands for something more than itself |
| alliteration | repetition of consonant sounds in words close together |
| assonance | the repetition of vowel sounds in a line or lines of poetry |
| cadence | natural, rhythmic rise and fall of language as it is spoken normally |
| consonance | the repetition of similar/identical consonants in words closely following each other |
| couplet | two consecutive rhyming lines of poetry |
| foot | metrical unit of poetry |
| meter | a pattern of stresses and unstressed syllables in poetry |
| onomatopoeia | use of sounds to echo their sense |
| refrain | word, phrase, line, group, of lines repeated for effect several times in a poem |
| rhyme | repetition of vowel sounds in accented syllables and all succeeding syllables |
| rhythm | the rise and fall of voice produced by alternation of stresses and unstressed syllable |
| scansion | the analysis of a poem to determine its meter |
| sibilance | a type of alliteration that repeats "hissing" sounds |
| slant rhyme | rhyme that is not exact but close |
| synaeresis | an audible contraction joining two vowels to create a single syllable |
| syncope | the more common contraction that omits a consonant |
| tercet | a triplet of rhyming lines |
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