| Alliteration | the repetition of sounds in a sequence of associated words used for onomatopoetic or emphatic effects. ("the furrow followed free" or "artificial aids") | ||
| Ambiguity | a word or phrase with two or multiple different meanings ("ship sails today") | ||
| Anacrusis | (striking up) an additional syllable at the beginning of a verse before the normal rhythm | ||
| Anaphora | the repetition of the same word or phrase in two or more successive clauses. ("Awake, my spirits/awake my glory ...") | ||
| Antithesis | the opposing of ideas by parallelism in grammatical structure ("There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his") | ||
| Apostrophe | an explicit address to an imaginary, dead, or absent person, or to a place, thing, or personified abstraction either to begin a poem or to make a dramatic break in thought somewhere within the poem. | ||
| Ballad Stanza | a simple spirited poem in short stanzas which tells some popular story in verse. The standard ballad verse form is a quatrain, mostly with only one rhyming pair (abcb) and iambic metre. | ||
| Ballade | a poem divided into stanzas of equal length, usually of seven or eight lines. | ||
| Caesura | a pause within a line of poetry, often resulting from the natural rhythm of language and not necessarily indicated by punctuation. A caesura usually occurs near the middle of the line. | ||
| Chiasm | a figure of speech by which the order of words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. ("he saved others; himself he cannot save") | ||
| Cliché | a stereotype expression | ||
| Concrete Poetry | poetry in which the visual arrangement of words or letters suggests something about the subject of the poem
( "s h r i n k" ) | ||
| Consonance | the close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after differing vowel sounds: leave/love, short/shirt. Consonance is used to create emphasis and unity. | ||
| Elegy | "the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind" (Coleridge), now mostly a song of lamentation for the dead | ||
| End Rhyme | rhyme at the ends of lines of verse, distinguished from rhyme within a line (internal rhyme) and rhyme at the beginning of a line (initial rhyme) | ||
| Epic | a poem that celebrates in the form of a continuous narration the achievements of one or more heroic personages of the past. | ||
| Ellipsis | the omission of a word or words necessary to complete the grammatical structure of a sentence ("No life left") | ||
| Epigram | a short poem ending in a witty or ingenious turn of thought | ||
| Euphemism | the substitution of a less distasteful word or phrase for a more offensive one ("to pass away" for "to die") | ||
| Eye Rhyme | rhyme based on spelling rather than sound; for example, bough and though, have and grave. Eye rhyme may be the result of a change in pronunciation since the time the poem was written. | ||
| Foot | the basic unit of rhythmic measurement in a line of poetry. The number and type of feet in a line of a poem determine ist meter. The five most commonly used feet are illustrated below. iamb: one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable ("today/reply" etc.) trochee: one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable ("nonsense/final") anapaest: two unaccented syllables followed by one accented syllable ("understand") dactyl: one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables ("sympathy") spondee: two accented syllables ("Don't move") | ||
| Free Verse | poetry without regular metrical pattern or rhyme-scheme | ||
| Heroic Couplet | English heroic verse, iambic pentameters, rhyming in pairs (aa bb cc ...) | ||
| Heroic Verse | verse used in epic poetry; in English, the iambic of five feet | ||
| Internal Rhyme | the rhyming of two or more words in the same line, most often in the middle and at the end of the line; also called middle rhyme and leonine rhyme. "I am the daughter of Earth and Water" | ||
| Irony | a figure of speech in which one's meaning is expressed by language of an opposite tendency | ||
| Limerick | a type of nonsense verse with a definite pattern: a five-line stanza rhyming aabba in which lines one, two, and five have three anapaestic feet and lines three and four have two anapaestic feet:
| ||
| Lyric | a short poem, of a musical and rhythmical nature, expressing directly the "speaker's" own feelings. | ||
| Metaphor | the transfer of a name or descriptive term to a different but analogous object ("Life is but a voyage") | ||
| Meter | any specific form of verse, determined by the number of the feet it contains, e.g. monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three feet), tetrameter (four feet), pentameter (five feet), hexameter (six feet), heptameter (seven feet), octameter (eight feet) | ||
| Motif | a recurring idea, image or literary device, emphasizing some element of the theme of the poem | ||
| Onomatopoeia | use of words whose sound imitates the sound of the thing being named. | ||
| Oxymoron | an expression uniting two contradictory terms to give it point ("O heavy lightness ... Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health") | ||
| Paradox | statement that seems to be opposite to common sense, but nevertheless may contain a truth. ("More haste, less speed") | ||
| Parallelism | structural arrangement of clauses or larger passages in which elements of equal importance are equally phrased. | ||
| Parataxis | the use of simple, restrictive syntactical patterns (simple clauses, enumeration, ...) | ||
| Parody | a form of literary composition in which a serious original work is criticized or even ridiculed by imitation and exaggeration | ||
| Personification | a figure of speech in which sth. inanimate is referred to as if it were a human being ("Justice is blind") | ||
| Refrain | lines of a song or lyric which are repeated at the end of each stanza | ||
| Rhyme | the identity of sound between two words from the last stressed syllable on. Male end-rhymes have a final accented syllable (got/shot), while in female end-rhymes the last syllable is unaccented flower/power). Beside the perfect rhyme there are less strict patterns as the eye-rhyme (dies/calamities) and other imperfect rhymes (assonance, consonance, nasal rhyme etc.) | ||
| Rhythm | the measured flow of words achieved by the particular arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables | ||
| Run-On Line | (enjambment) the carrying on of the grammatical construction from one line into the next: "This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning." | ||
| Scansion | analyzing the meter in lines of poetry by counting and marking the accented and unaccented syllables, dividing the lines into metrical feet, and showing the major pauses, if any, in the line. | ||
| Simile | an imaginative comparison of two objects, scenes or actions for explanatory, illustrative, or merely ornamental purpose (grammatically indicated by "like" or "as") | ||
| Stanza | a group of lines into which verse is divided. Stanzas may be of all types in length (couplet, tercet, quatrain ...) and metrical form. | ||
| Symbol | a sign that represents an idea | ||
| Typographical Devices | deliberate peculiarities in the printing of a poem |
