Ap Literature, Poetry Terms - Introduction

Front 1

allusion

Back 1

a brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature

Front 2

apostrophe

Back 2

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

Front 3

caesura

Back 3

a pause in a line often indicated by punctuation

Front 4

diction

Back 4

a writer's choice of words

Front 5

enjambment

Back 5

a run-over line

Front 6

hyperbole

Back 6

the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect

Front 7

imagery

Back 7

the representation through language of sense experience

Front 8

line

Back 8

the characters that appear as a single row of type regardless of grammatical structure

Front 9

metaphor

Back 9

implied comparison between two things of unlike nature

Front 10

metonymy

Back 10

substitution of some attributive or suggestive word for what is actually meant

Front 11

personification

Back 11

investing abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities

Front 12

simile

Back 12

explicit comparison between two things of unlike nature

Front 13

speaker

Back 13

the person who is expressing a point of view in a poem, either the author or a persona created by the author

Front 14

stanza

Back 14

a grouped set of lines in a poem, usually physically set off from other such clusters by an extra line of space

Front 15

symbol

Back 15

a setting, object, or event in a story that carries more than literal meaning and therefore represents something significant to understanding the meaning of a work of literature

Front 16

synecdoche

Back 16

figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole

Front 17

syntax

Back 17

the words in their arrangement, and the dynamic energy the arrangement creates

Front 18

theme

Back 18

underlying issues or ideas of a work expressed as a statement that the text seems to be making about its subject matter

Front 19

tone

Back 19

a speaker's attitude as exposed through stylistic choices

Front 20

understatement

Back 20

the presentation or framing of something as less important, urgent, awful, good, powerful, and so on, than it actually is, often for satiric or comic effect