| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Allteration | the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter. |
| Quatrain | A stanza or poem of four lines. |
| Couplet | a pair of successive lines of verse, esp. a pair that rhyme and are of the same length. |
| Simile | a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in "she is like a rose." |
| Personification | the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, esp. as a rhetorical figure. |
| Hyperbole | obvious and intentional exaggeration. |
| Rhyme scheme | the pattern of rhymes used in poems, usually symbolized by letters to represent correspondences. |
| Onomatopoeia | the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent. |
| Imagery | the formation of mental images, figures, or likenesses of things, or of such images collectively: the dim imagery of a dream. |
| Extended metaphor | a metaphor that is extended through a stanza or entire poem, often by multiple comparisons of unlike objects or ideas. |
| Lyric poem | a short poem of songlike quality. |
| Narrative poem | a poem that tells a story and has a plot. |
| Five act structure | a situation where the play has five acts. |
| Crisis | a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point. |
| Tragedy | a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction. |
| Tragic hero | a literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy. |
| Tragic flaw | the character defect that causes the downfall of the protagonist of a tragedy. |
| Oxymoron | a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in "cruel kindness" or "to make haste slowly." |
| Pun | the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning. |
| Soliloquy | an utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself or herself or is disregardful of or oblivious to any hearers present (often used as a device in drama to disclose a character's innermost thoughts): Hamlet's soliloquy begins with "To be or not to be." |
| Dramatic Irony | The dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity. |
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