English 10 Poetry Terms
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29 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 metaphor | one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two |
| simile | an explicit comparison between two different things using the words "like" or "as" |
| personification | a figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human |
| oxymoron | figure of speech that combines two contradictory terms in a compressed paradox, as in the word bittersweet or the phrase living death |
| paradox | a statement or expression so surprisingly self-contradictory as to provoke use into seeking another sense or context in which it would be true (death, thou shalt die) |
| juxtaposition | placing two contrasting ideas side by side |
| pun | an expression that achieves emphasis or humor by contriving an ambiguity; two distinct meanings being suggested either by the same word or by two similar-sounding words |
| theme | a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work's treatment of its subject-matter; a topic recurring in a number of literary works |
| tone | a very vague critical term usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work; refers to the author's attitude to the reader |
| irony | a subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance |
| metonymy | a figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it |
| synecdoche | the name of a part is substituted for the whole (using hired hand for worker) |
| apostrophe | a rhetorical figure in which the speaker addresses a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object |
| parallel structure (or parallelism) | the arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them; anaphora is a form of this |
| anaphora | a rhetorical figure of repetition in which the same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of) successive lines, clauses, or sentences |
| rhetorical shift (volta) | a change in tone, attitude, speaker, subject, etc. in a poem; look for key words like but, however, even though, although, yet, etc.; used for sonnets |
| polysyndeton | a rhetorical term for the repeated use of conjunctions to link together a succession of words, clauses, or sentences |
| asyndeton | a form of verbal compression which consists of the omission of connecting words (usually conjunctions) between clauses; opposite of polysyndeton |
| chiasmus | a figure of speech by which the order the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second (ex. pleasure's a sin, and sometimes, sin's a pleasure) |
| inversion | the reversal of the normally expected order of words, such as placing the adjective after the noun |
| end-stopped | brought to a pause at which the end of a verse coincides with the completion of a sentence, clause, or other independent unit of syntax; the opposite of enjambment; gives verse lines an appearance of self-contained sense |
| enjambment | the running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause (aka run-on line) |
| onomatopoeia | the use of words that seem to imitate the sounds they refer to (whack, fizz, crackle); any combination of words in which the sound gives the impression of an echoing of the sense |
| alliteration | the repetition of the same sounds in any sequence of neighboring words |
| assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds of neighboring words |
| consonance | the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds are different |
| half-rhyme (imperfect rhyme, slant rhyme) | the final consonants of stress syllables agree but the vowel sounds do not match (cape/deep or cape/keep) |
| end-rhyme | rhyme occurring at the ends of verse lines, as opposed to internal rhyme and head rhyme |
| internal rhyme | a poetic device by which two or more words rhyme within the same line of a verse |
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