| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Alliteration | Similar sounds at the beginning of two or more close words |
| Allusion | A brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature |
| Anapest | A metrical foot consisting of 2 unstressed and 1 stressed syllable |
| Apostrophe | A figure of speech addressing one who is dead or an inanimate object |
| Assonance | Repetion of a vowel sound in unrhymed words that are close enough to be discernible |
| Connotation | The emotions and associations a word provokes in a reader, above the literal and dictionary definition |
| Consonance | Repetition of consonants in close words |
| Couplet | Two lines of verse that form a unit in a poem; usually joined by meter or rhyme |
| Denotation | The dictionary definition of a word |
| Dialect | Language specific to a region or group of people |
| Diction | Word Choice |
| Elegy | A poem that mourns one dead |
| End-stopped line | Line that reflects normal speech patterns and are often marked by punctuation; each line is a grammatical unit or complete idea |
| Enjambment | When one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning |
| Extended Metaphor | A metaphor that continues beyond a moment occuring frequently or holistically through a poem; also called a conceit |
| Eye Rhyme | A rhyme that appears correct from the spelling, but is not from the pronunciation |
| Hyperbole | An exaggeration |
| Iamb | A metrical foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable |
| Imagery | Language that appeals to the five senses |
| Litote | A figure of speech where instead of making a direct statement, the speaker denies the statment's opposite; a form of understatement |
| Metaphor | A direct comparison |
| Meter | A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem |
| Onomatopoeia | Words imitative of the things they represent |
| Parallelism | Repetitive or successive syntax |
| Personification | The attribution of human characteristics to something nonhuman; essentially a metaphor |
| Quatrain | Four lines of poetry considered a unit |
| Simile | An indirect comparison between two unrelated things or ideas using "like" or "as" |
| Slant Rhyme | Similar sounds at the end of words; almost rhyme |
| Sonnet | A fourteen line poem usually in iambic pentameter and with a formal rhyme scheme |
| Syntax | Word order |
| Rhyme Scheme | The pattern of rhymes at the end of lines in a poem |
| Tercet | Three lines of poetry considered a unit |
| Trochee | A metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable |
| True Rhyme | Similar terminal sounds between syllables, usually occupying positions in two or more lines of verse |
| Villanelle | A nineteen line poem with one repeating rhyme-series of tercets, concluding with a quatrain |
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