- Alliteration: The repetition of the same or very similar consonant sounds in words that are close together.
- Ballad: A songlike poem that tells a story; often one dealing with adventure or romance
- Cinquain: 5 lines
- Concrete Poetry: Is one with a shape that suggests its subject; Example; A poem written about flowers in the shape of a flower.
- Couplet: 2 lines
- Figurative Language: Writing or speech that is not meant to be taken literally.
- Free Verse: Poetry without a regular meter or a rhyme scheme
- Haiku: A 3-line Japanese verse form; the first and third lines have 5 syllables and the second line has 7
- Heptastitch: 7 lines
- Hyberbole: A bold, deliberate overstatement, exaggeration, not indented to be taken literally
- Imagery: Language that appeals to the senses.
- Internal Rhyming: Words within a line or poetry rhyme
- Lyric Poetry: A highly musical poem that expresses the observations and feelings of a single speaker
- Metaphor: An imaginative comparison between two unlike things in which one thing is said to be another thing.
- Mood: The overall emotion created by a work of literature; image, dialogue, and plot can create it
- Narrative Poetry: A story told in poem; they often have all the elements of a short story
- Octave: 8 lines
- Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds echo their sense.
- Oxymoron: Words that contradict each other.
- Personification: A figure of speech in which a nonhuman or nonliving thing or quality is talked about as if it were human or alive.
- Poetry: A kind of rhythmic, compressed language that uses figures of speech & imagery designed to appeal emotion.
- Quatrain: 4 lines
- Rhyme: The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following them in words close together in a poem.
- Rhyme Scheme: The pattern of end rhymes in a poem; a regular pattern of rhyming words in a poem
- Sestet: 6 lines
- Simile: A comparison between two unlike things, using a word such as like, as, than, or resembles
- Speaker: The voice talking a poem.
- Stanza: In a poem, a group of consecutive lines that forms a single unit
- Tercet: 3 lines
- Theme: The truth about life revealed in a work of literature
- Tone: The attitude that a writer takes toward the audience, a subject, or character; "tone of voice"