Poetry Test Terms

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Allegory

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A narrative or description having a second meaning beneath the surface of one

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Alliteration

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The repetition at close intervals of the initial consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words. Important words and accented syllables beginning with vowels may also be said to alliterate with each other in as much as they all have the same lack of an initial consonant sound

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Allusion

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A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history

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Apostrophe

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A figure of speech in which someone absent or something nonhuman is addressed as if it were alive and present and could reply

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Assonance

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The repetition at close intervals of the vowel sounds of accented syllables or important words.

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Blank Verse

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Unrimed iambic pentameter

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Connotation

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What a word suggests beyond its basic definition; a word’s overtones of meaning

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Denotation

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The basic definition or dictionary meaning of a word

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Dramatic Irony

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An incongruity or discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true (or between what a character perceives and what the author intends the reader to perceive)

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Imagery

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The representation through language of sense experience

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Irony

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A situation, or a use of language, involving some kind of incongruity of discrepancy

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Irony of Situation (Situational Irony)

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A situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would see appropriate

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Paraphrase

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A restatement of the content of a poem designed to make its prose meaning as clear as possible

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Metaphor

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A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike.
It may take one of 4 forms:
1) both named
2) named and implied
3) implied and named
4) both implied

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Metonymy

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A figure of speech in which some significant aspect of detail of an experience is used to represent the whole experience

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Overstatement (hyperbole)

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A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth

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Paradox

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A statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements

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Personification

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A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, an object, or a concept.

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Sarcasm

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Bitter or cutting speech; speech intended by its speaker to give pain to the person addressed

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Satire

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A kind of literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice

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Simile

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A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike. The comparison is made explicit by the use of some such word or phrase as like, as, than, similar to, resembles, or seems.

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Symbol

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Something that means more than what it is; an object, person, situation, or action that in addition to its literal meaning suggests other meanings as well, a figure of speech which may be read both literally and figuratively

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Synecdoche

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The use of parts for the whole. A figure of speech

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Theme

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The central idea of a literary work

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Total Meaning

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The total experience communicated by a poem. It indicates all those dimensions of experience by which a poem communicates—sensuous, emotional, imaginative, and intellectual—and it can be communicated in no other words than those of the poem itself

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Verbal Irony

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A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant

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Accented or Stressed Syllables

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A syllable given more prominence in pronunciation than its neighbors is said to be accented

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Tone

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The writer or speaker’s attitude toward the subject, the audience, or herself or himself; the emotional coloring, or emotional meaning of a work

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Approximate Rime

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A term used for words in a riming pattern that have some kind of sound correspondence but are not perfect rimes

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Consonance

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The repetition at close intervals of the final constant sounds of accented syllables or important words

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Prose Meaning

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That part of a poem’s total meaning that can be separated out and expressed through paraphrase

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Understatement

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A figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means, or of saying what tone means with less force than the occasion warrants

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Rime

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The repetition of the accented vowel sound and all succeeding sounds important or importantly positioned words.
For example: Old-cold, vane-reign, court-report

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Masculine Rime

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A rime in which the repeated accented vowel sound is in the final syllable of the words involved

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Feminine Rime

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A rime in which the repeated accented vowel is in either the second or third last syllable of the words involved

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Internal Rime

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A rime in which one or both of the rime-words occur within the line

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End Rime

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Rimes that occur at the end of the line

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Refrain

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A repeated word, phrase, line or group of lines, normally at some fixed positioned in a poem written in stanzaic form

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Ballad

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A fairly short narrative poem written in a story-like stanza form

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Rhythm

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Any wavelike recurrence of motion of sound

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Rhetorical Stresses

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A natural pause, unmarked by punctuation, introduced into the reading of a line by its phrasing or syntax

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End-stopped Line

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A line that ends with a natural speech pause, usually marked by punctuation

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Run-on Line

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A line that ends with a natural speech pause, usually marked by punctuation

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Caesuras

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A pause introduced into the reading of a line by a mark of punctuation. They do not affect scansion

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Free Verse

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Non-metrical verse. Poetry written in free verse is arranged in lines maybe more or less rhythmical, but has no fixed metrical pattern of expectation

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Prose Poem

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Usually a short composition having the intentions of poetry but written in prose rather than verse

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Meter

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Regularized rhythm; an arrangement of language in which the accents occur apparently equal intervals in time

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Foot

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The basic unit used in the scansion or measurement of verse. A foot usually contains one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables but the monosyllabic foot, the spondaic foot, and the dipodic foot are all modifications of this principle

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Metrical Variations

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A pause that supplies the place of an expected accented syllable. Affects scansion

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Substitutions

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In metrical verse, the replacement of the expected metrical foot by a different tone

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Extra-Metrical Syllables

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In metrical verse, extra unaccented syllables added at the beginnings or endings of lines; these may either be a feature of the metrical form of a poem or occur as exceptions to the form

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Anacrusis

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One or more syllables at the beginning of a line of poetry that are regarded as preliminary to not a part of the metrical world

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Scansion

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The process of measuring verse, of marking accented and unaccented syllables, dividing the line into feet, identifying the metrical pattern, and noting significant variations from that pattern

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Grammatical and Rhetorical Pauses

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A natural pause, unmarked by punctuation, introduced into the reading of a line by its phrasing or syntax. Doesn’t affect scansion

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Cacophony

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Hard, unpleasant, and choppy-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds

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Syllabic Verse

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Verse measured by the number of syllables rather than the number of feet per line

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Onomatopoeia

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The use of words that supposedly mimic their meaning in their sound

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Phonetic Intensives

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A word whose sound, by an obscure process, to some degree suggests its meaning. As differentiated from onomatopoetic words, the meanings of phonetic intensives do not refer to sounds

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Euphony

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A smooth, pleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds

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Structure

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The internal organization of a poem’s content

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Form

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The eternal pattern or shape of a poem, describable without reference to its contents as continuous, stanzaic and fixed form, and free and syllabic verse

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Continuous Form

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That form of a poem in which the lines follow each other without formal grouping, the only breaks being dictated by units of meaning

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Stanzaic Form

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The form taken by a poem when its written in a series of units having the same number of lines and usually other characteristics in common, such as metical pattern or rime scheme

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Stanzas

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A group of lines whose metrical pattern (and usually its rime scheme as well) is repeated throughout a poem

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Fixed Form

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A form of a poem in which the length and pattern are prescribed by previous usage or tradition, such as sonnet, limericks, villanelle, haiku and so on

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Didactic

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Poetry having as a primary purpose to teach or preach

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Limerick

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A fixed form consisting of five lines of anapestic meter, the first two trimeter, the next two dimeter, the last line trimeter, riming aabba; used exclusively for humorous or nonsense verse

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Sonnet

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A fixed form of fourteen lines, normally iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme conforming to or approximately one of two main types—Italian and English

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Haiku

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A 3-line poem, Japanese in origin, narrowly conceived of as a fixed form in which the lines contain respectively 5,7,5—syllables. Generally concerned with some aspect of nature and present a single image or two juxtaposed images without comment, relying on suggestion rather than on explicit statement to communicate their meaning

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Octave

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An eight-line stanza. The first eight lines of a sonnet, especially one structured in the manner of an Italian sonnet

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Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet

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A sonnet consisting of an octave riming abbaabba and of a sestet using any arrangement of two or three additional rimes, such as cdcdcd or cdecde

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Sestet

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A six-line stanza. The last six lines of a sonnet structured on the Italian model

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English or Shakespearean Sonnet

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A sonnet remaining ababcdcdefefgg. Its content or structure ideally parallels the rime scheme, falling into three coordinate quatrains and a concluding couplet; often structured into octave sestet

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Sentimentality

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Unmerited or contrived tender feelings that quality in a story that elicits or seeks to elicit tears through an oversimplification or falsification of reality

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Rhetorical

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Poetry using artificially eloquent language, that is, language too high-flown for its occasion and unfaithful to the full complexity of human experience