Glossary
Terms used on this site
- Addressee
- Addressee: The person or thing (for example a tree, idea, or emotion) to whom the
voice in
the poem is speaking.
- Allegory
- Allegory: A story in which objects, actions, or characters have a hidden message or
larger
meaning beyond it, often a moral one.
- Alliteration
- Alliteration: The use of the same consonant sound to begin two or more words or stressed
syllables.
- Allusion
- Allusion: What appears to be an intentional reference to something outside to the
poem (a
person, place, thing, event, a text), often indirect, but adding to and sometimes
complicating the meaning; often an allusion in a poem is made to another poem.
- Ambiguity
- Ambiguity: The presence of two or more possible meanings in a word, phrase, or
figure of speech. Ambiguity allows for alternative
meanings without necessary incorrectness. In a more general sense, ambiguity tells
us things
are not as they seem.
- Assonance
- Assonance: The use of the same or similar vowel sounds in two or more words or syllables,
which
draws attention to the connection between the two words or syllables, and can draw
attention
to what the sounds mimic or suggest (e.g., cave/fate).
- Ballad
- Ballad: A simple narrative poem often in four-line stanzas, usually on a tragic subject,
and often with a refrain. The rhyme is usually in the 2nd and 4th lines, and is
characterized by certain repeating elements. Its origin is in popular song.
- Blank verse
- Blank verse: Poetry of ten regular beats per line, but not rhymed; most often iambic
(and
therefore iambic pentameter); perhaps the most common form in the English tradition.
- Closed form
- Closed Form: Type of poetry that follows a classified, general, or traditional form
(as
opposed to open form).
- Concrete poetry
- Concrete poetry: Poetry shaped by a visual organization of the words on the page;
most of
the meaning is determined by how the poem looks.
- Conflict
- Conflict: Opposing elements within the speaker (inner conflict), between the speaker
and
something else, or between elements.
- Connotation
- Connotation: A word’s suggested meaning in addition to its literal meaning, often
conveying an emotional or sensory response (as opposed to “denotation”).
- Consonance
- Consonance: The repititon of the same consonant sound or sounds in two or more words
or syllables following different vowel sounds, which
draws attention to the connection between the two words or syllables, and can draw
attention
to what the sounds mimic or suggest (e.g., black/block).
- Couplet
- Couplet: Two consequitive end-rhyming lines of poetry, and often of the same metric
length, and often acting as a contained statment.
- Denotation
- Denotation: The literal meaning of a word (as opposed to what it suggests).
- Diction
- Diction: The poem’s manner of speaking; affected by tone, register, and general style;
in
general, word choice or vocabulary.
- Dramatic monologue
- Dramatic monologue: A poem with a created speaker and strongly implied listeners;
often we
learn more about that speaker than her or his subject.
- Enjambment
- Enjambment: A line of poetry that runs on to the next line without being end-stopped
by
punctuation. A line not enjambed is usually called end-stopped.
- End-stopped
- A line of poetry that comes to a natural stop at its end, as a result of its punctuation
or the completion of a thought (a line not end-stopped is enjambed). This can be complicated
by lines that appear purposely end-stopped without a completed thought.
- Epic poem
- Epic poem: A long, serious, narrative poem, usually centered on the adventures or
deeds of
a hero; often has mythological or nationalistic dimensions.
- Figures of speech
- Figures of speech: Words or phrases that are unusual and not literal in their meaning;
metaphors, similes, personification, puns, allusion, and irony are all examples.
- Foot: The basic metrical unit of poetry: a group of syllables determined by accent,
either
stressed (/) or unstressed (x); the trochee (/ x), iamb (x /), dactyl (/ x x ), spondee
(/
/), and anapest (x x /) are the most common feet.
- Genre
- Genre: In the case of poetry, a distinct category of poems with its own history,
conventions, style, form, and/or subject; for example, the epic is a genre. In a more
general sense, genre refers to a literary type, like fiction, poetry, and drama.
- Ideal reader
- Ideal reader: The type of “imagined” person receptive to and understanding of the
poem.
- Imagery
- Imagery: The poem’s sensory content, when senses are evoked by words (for example,
imagery
connoting death and darkness).
- Irony/Ironic
- Irony: Something is ironic when an obvious meaning differs from (and quite often
contradicts) a suggested meaning.
- Lyric poem
- Lyric poem: A poem (usually short) with one speaker; often expresses a person’s feelings,
thoughts, and/or observations, though impersonal lyrics also exist. The most dominant
poetic
form since the Romantic era.
- Metaphor
- Metaphor: A
figure of speech in which two
different things are compared implicitly, so that the comparison clarifies and expands
the
meaning (for example, “All the world’s a stage”). However, some metaphors challenge
or
complicate the meaning, and require some work or conjecture for understanding.
- Meter
- Meter: The pattern of stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables in a poetic line.
There
are several basic types of meter. Each type depends on how many metric feet there
are in the
poetic line.
- Melody
- Melody: The overall sound structure of a poem, as opposed to its rhythm (for example,
rhyme, consonance, and assonance all contribute to a poem’s melody).
- Iambic pentameter
- Iambic pentameter: A ten-syllable line of poetry composed of five iambic feet. An
iamb has
an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and is the most common type of
English
poetic foot.
- Narrative
- Narrative: A series of connected events that form a story.
- Narrator
- Narrator: The person who tells a story.
- Open form
- Open Form: Type of poetry that does not follow a traditional form (as opposed to
closed form).
- Paradox
- Paradox: A
figure of speech that seems
contradictory and impossible, but might actually be true (“cold fire” is a paradoxical
phrase).
- Persona
- Persona: The character or assumed voice in a poem; not the actual poet; for example,
the
persona of a poem might be an animal, an assumed character for poetic reasons or particular
point of view.
- Personification
- Personification: A
figure of speech in which an
idea, object, or thing is described as if it were human (for example, in “The breath
of
autumn’s being,” autumn is personified).
- Point of view
- The perspective from which something is spoken.
- Register
- Register: The level of language often determined as either formal or informal, and
recognizable mainly by vocabulary, syntax, subject, and context.
- Rhyme
- Rhyme: Effect where two words have the same, or nearly the same, final consonant and
vowel
sound. When these sounds are identical, it is a perfect rhyme; when they are not quite
identical, it is a slant rhyme (for example, “less” and “loss” form a slant rhyme;
“less”
and “dress” form a perfect rhyme).
- Rhythm
- Rhythm: The speed at which and cadence of how lines, stanzas, and poems move, as
determined by their meter and/or their length.
- Simile
- Simile: A
figure of speech in which two very
different things are directly compared using the words “as” or “like” (for example,
“My love
is like a melody; She is as the world”).
- Slant rhyme
- Slant rhyme: A kind of imperfect or non-exact rhyme; sometimes called a near-rhyme,
half-rhyme, or imperfect rhyme. For example, world/worm, all/soul, moon/on.
- Speaker
- Speaker: The person “speaking” or writing the words of the poem—not the author of
the
poem, unless the conditions of the poem make the connection between the speaker and
the
author unambiguous.
- Sonnet
- Sonnet: A poem of 14 lines, often in one of two styles—English (Shakespearean) or
Italian
(Petrarchan)—and usually introducing, in order, a problem, a turn, and a resolution.
- Stanza
- Stanza: A group of lines, separated by a space from another group. Stanzas often share
a
distinct “shape” based on line length, meter, and/or rhyme scheme. Free verse stanzas
often
have no fixed shape.
- Stress
- Stress: The emphasis placed upon a particular syllable (called a “stressed
syllable”).
- Style
- Style: The way a poem expresses itself; the qualities that, taken together, make the
poem
distinct.
- Symbol
- Symbol: Something (person, place, thing, event) that represents a quality beyond itself,
often an abstract quality; a rose represents love, and is therefore a symbol of love.
- Syntax
- How words and phrases are organized and arranged in sentences.
- Theme
- Theme: The larger, more general, or universal message (or messages) in the poem.
- Tone
- Tone: The attitude taken by the poem’s voice toward the subject or subjects in the
poem.
- Voice
- Voice: The sound of a particular poetic speaker, encompassing tone, diction, rhythm,
and
melody; it may or may not be embodied in a definable character.