Alliteration: the repetition of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginnings of words.
Allusion: a reference to a person, event, or literary work outside the poem.
Anapest: a metrical foot containing three syllables, the first two of which are unstressed and the last of which is stressed.
Anaphora: a technique in which successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany.
Annotation: the close analysis of a poem or text through written notes and comments.
Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human traits, actions, or emotions to an animal, object, or other nonhuman figure.
Assonance: the repetition of similar vowel sounds.
Aubade: a dawn song that greets the morning while lamenting the end of the night, often concerning the parting of lovers.
Caesura: a pause for a beat in the rhythm of a verse, often indicated by a line break or by punctuation.
Chance Operations: methods of generating poetry independent of the author’s will to create unusual syntax and images.
Connotation: the implied or suggested meaning associated with a word or phrase.
Consonance: the repetition of similar consonant sounds.
Couplet: two successive lines of poetry, often rhymed.
Dactyl: a metrical foot containing three syllables, the first stressed and the following two unstressed.
Denotation: the dictionary meaning of a word.
Ekphrasis: the use of vivid language to describe or respond to a work of visual art.
Elision: the omission, usually via apostrophe, of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
End-Stop: the use of terminal punctuation such as a period, colon, or semicolon at the end of a poetic line; the opposite of enjambment.
Enjambment: the continuation of a phrase or sentence from one line to another without an end-stop.
Epigraph: a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme.
Falling Meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed syllables; the opposite of rising meter.
Figurative Meaning: the associative or connotative meaning of a word, phrase, or poem.
Filídh: a historic rank of Irish poet who practiced an elaborate oral tradition and were known for their mysticism.
Form: the structure of a poem, including its line lengths, line breaks, meter, stanza lengths, and rhyme scheme.
Fourth Wall: the fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall," the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot.
Futurism: an avant-garde movement in early twentieth-century arts and literature that emphasized technology, speed, and movement.
Hyperbole: exaggeration for emphasis.
Iamb: a metrical foot containing two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the latter of which is stressed.
Iambic Pentameter: a traditional form of rising meter consisting of lines containing five iambic feet, or ten syllables.
Idiom: 1.) a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., rain cats and dogs, see the light ). 2.) a form of expression natural to a language, person, or group of people. 3.) the dialect of a people or part of a country.
Imagery: language in a poem representing a sensory experience, including visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory.
Irony: a rhetorical device involving contradictions of expectation or knowledge and divided into three primary types: verbal, situational, and dramatic.
Line: a fundamental unit in verse, carrying meaning both horizontally across the page and vertically from one line to the next.
Literal Meaning: the simplest and most obvious meaning of a word, phrase, or poem based on denotation and not connotation.
Metaphor: a comparison between essentially unlike things, or the application of a name or description to something to which it is not literally applicable.
Meter: the measured pattern of rhythmic accents in a line of verse.
Metonymy: a word or phrase that replaces the name of an object or concept for another to which it is related.
Negative Capability: a phrase coined by John Keats to describe the poet’s ability to live with uncertainty and mystery.
Omniscient: an all-knowledgeable narrator or viewpoint.
Onomatopoeia: the use of language that sounds like the thing or action it describes.
Oral-Formulaic Method: a formula of repetition used by oral epic singers to allow for more fluent composition and memorization.
Oxymoron: a combination of two words that appear to contradict each other.
Paradox: a situation or phrase that appears to be contradictory but that also contains some measure of truth.
Pastoral: referring to a creative tradition as well as individual work idealizing rural life and landscapes.
Pathetic Fallacy: the attribution of human emotion to the natural world through poetic tropes.
Personification: the endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.
Phoneme: a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit.
Poetic Contest: a verbal duel in which two or more contestants face off in a verse-based exchange.
Poetic Diction: the language, including word choice and syntax, that sets poetry apart from other forms of writing.
Proem: A canto prologue can be called a "proem"; it's a term specifically used to refer to the introductory section of a poem, particularly when that poem is divided into cantos, like Dante's "Divine Comedy." It signifies a preliminary part that sets the stage for the main narrative or theme of the poem.
Pun: a play on words or the humorous use of a single sound or word with two or more implied meanings.
Quatrain: a four-line stanza or grouping of four lines of verse.
Refrain: a phrase, line, or set of lines, usually appearing at the end of a stanza. repeated at intervals throughout a poem.
Repetition: the poetic technique of repeating the same word or phrase multiple times within a poem or work.
Rhyme: the correspondence of sounds in words or lines of verse.
Rhyme Scheme: the pattern of rhymes falling at the ends of a poem’s lines.
Rising Meter: meter containing metrical feet that move from unstressed to stressed syllables; the opposite of falling meter.
Saudade: a Portuguese term expressing nostalgia or yearning for something that might have been.
Scansion: the process of determining the meter of a poem or a line of verse.
Simile: a comparison between two essentially unlike things using words “such as,” “like,” and “as.”
Slant Rhyme: a rhyme formed with words with similar but not wholly identical sounds; also called an off rhyme, half rhyme, and imperfect rhyme.
Speaker: the voice of the poem, similar to a narrator in fiction.
Spondee: a less common metrical foot in which two consecutive syllables are stressed.
Stanza: a grouping of lines that forms the main unit in a poem.
Stress: the term describing when a greater amount of force is used to pronounce one syllable over an adjacent, unstressed syllable.
Surrealism: a 1920s artistic movement celebrating imagination over realism and, more broadly, to the incorporation of fantasy and strangeness in poetry and art.
Syllable: a unit of pronunciation in speech.
Symbol: an object or action that stands for something beyond itself.
Synechdoche: a word for part of an object or idea used as a substitution to describe the whole.
Synesthesia: an attempt to fuse different senses by describing one in terms of another.
Tlamatine: a Náhuatl word for "the one who knows" referring to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Aztec poets.
Tone: a literary device that conveys the author’s attitude toward the subject, speaker, or audience of a poem.
Translation: the art of transferring a poem's meaning from one language to another.
Trochee: a metrical foot containing two syllables, the first of which is stressed and the second of which is unstressed.