| allegory: |
a narrative that
serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the
form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other
style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a
story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types
of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings.
The difference between an allegory and a symbol is that an allegory
is a complete narrative that conveys abstract ideas to get a
point across, while a symbol is a representation of an idea
or concept that can have a different meaning throughout a literary
work. WIKI |
| alliteration: |
a pattern of sound that includes
the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located
at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets
often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that
is taking place. WIKI • Link 1 |
| allusion: |
a reference in a literary work
to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature.
Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known
characters or events. Allusions are often used to summarize
broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image. WIKI |
| anaphora: |
Figure of repetition that occurs when the first word or set of words in one sentence, clause, or phrase is repeated at or very near the beginning of successive sentences, clauses, or phrases; repetition of the initial word(s) over successive phrases or clauses. WIKI |
| assonance : |
(Latin, `to answer with the
same sound') the rhyming of a word with another in one or more
of their accented vowels, but not in their consonants; sometimes
called vowel rhyme. WIKI • Link 1 |
| cadence: |
a term borrowed from music, where it refers to the use of a group of notes or chords used to end a piece of music or a phrase within it. As it can also be used to refer to the audible features of speech—a statement slowing and falling in pitch as it ends, for example, or the pause that a comma demands—it has been taken up by poets to refer to the pitch and rhythm of words within a poem. POETRY ARCHIVE |
| caesura: |
the juncture between two grammatical units (e.g. successive phrases or clauses) when perceived as dividing a line of verse into segments, or half-lines (cola: singular colon). Caesurae may, but need not, be marked by punctuation. WIKI |
| connotation: |
an association that comes along
with a particular word. Connotations relate not to a word's
actual meaning, or denotation, but rather to the ideas or qualities
that are implied by that word. A good example is the word "gold."
The denotation of gold is a malleable, ductile, yellow element.
The connotations, however, are the ideas associated with gold,
such as greed, luxury, or avarice. WIKI |
| couplet: |
a style of poetry defined as
a complete thought written in two lines with rhyming ends. The
most popular of the couplets is the heroic couplet. The heroic
couplet consists of two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter usually
having a pause in the middle of each line. WIKI |
| denotation: |
the exact meaning of a word,
without the feelings or suggestions that the word may imply.
It is the opposite of “connotation” in that it is
the “dictionary” meaning of a word, without attached
feelings or associations. Some examples of denotations are:
1. heart: an organ that circulates blood throughout the body.
Here the word "heart" denotes the actual organ, while
in another context, the word "heart" may connote feelings
of love or heartache.
2. sweater: a knitted garment for the upper body. The word "sweater"
may denote pullover sweaters or cardigans, while “sweater”
may also connote feelings of warmness or security. WIKI |
| elegy: |
a type of literature defined
as a song or poem, written in elegiac couplets, that expresses
sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died. This type
of work stemmed out of a Greek work known as a "elegus,"
a song of mourning or lamentation that is accompanied by the
flute. WIKI |
| enjambment: |
the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line. The term is directly borrowed from the French enjambement, meaning "straddling" or "bestriding." WIKI |
| figurative language: |
a type of language that varies
from the norms of literal language, in which words mean exactly
what they say. Also known as the "ornaments of language,"
figurative language does not mean exactly what it says, but
instead forces the reader to make an imaginative leap in order
to comprehend an author's point. It usually involves a comparison
between two things that may not, at first, seem to relate to
one another. In a simile, for example, an author may compare
a person to an animal: "He ran like a hare down the street"
is the figurative way to describe the man running and "He
ran very quickly down the street" is the literal way to
describe him. Figurative language facilitates understanding
because it relates something unfamiliar to something familiar.
Some popular examples of figurative language include a simile
and metaphor. WIKI |
| foot: |
the basic unit of measurement
of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one
stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The
standard types of feet in English are iambic, trochaic, dactylic,
anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
poem "Metrical Feet" exemplifies the metre the first
five, and of two classical measures, the amphibrach and the
amphimacer (stressed feet are in boldface):
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long; --
With a leap and a bound the swift anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride; --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer. WIKI
|
| free verse: |
(in French, vers libre), a kind of poetry that does not conform to any regular meter: the length of its lines is irregular, as is its use of rhyme—if any. Instead of a regular metrical pattern it uses more flexible cadences or rhythmic groupings, sometimes supported by anaphora and other devices of repetition. Now the most widely practiced verse form in English, it has precedents in translations of the biblical Psalms and in some poems of Blake and Goethe, but established itself only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with Walt Whitman, the French Symbolists, and the poets of modernism. Free verse should not be confused with blank verse, which does observe a regular metre in its unrhymed lines. WIKI |
| hyperbole: |
an extravagant exaggeration.
From the Greek for "overcasting," hyperbole is a figure
of speech that is a grossly exaggerated description or statement.
In literature, such exaggeration is used for emphasis or vivid
descriptions. WIKI |
| hypotaxis: |
Hypotaxis is the grammatical arrangement of functionally similar but "unequal" constructs (hypo="beneath," taxis="arrangement"), i.e., constructs playing an inequal role in a sentence.
A common example of syntactic expression of hypotaxis is subordination in a complex sentence. WIKI |
| iamb: |
a metrical foot consisting of
an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. This is
the rhythm of ordinary English speech. Examples of iambic words
are "divide" and "deter." WIKI |
| lyric: |
a lyric is a song-like poem
written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought
from a particular person, thus separating it from narrative
poems. These poems are generally short, averaging roughly twelve
to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines. These poems
express vivid imagination as well as emotion and all flow fairly
concisely. Because of this aspect, as well as their steady rhythm,
they were often used in song. WIKI |
| metaphor : |
[from the Gk. carrying one place
to another]: a type of figurative language in which a statement
is made that says that one thing is something else but, literally,
it is not. In connecting one object, event, or place, to another,
a metaphor can uncover new and intriguing qualities of the original
thing that we may not normally notice or even consider important.
Metaphoric language is used in order to realize a new and different
meaning. As an effect, a metaphor functions primarily to increase
stylistic colorfulness and variety. Metaphor is a great contributor
to poetry when the reader understands a likeness between two
essentially different things. WIKI |
| metonymy: |
a figure of speech which substitutes
one term with another that is being associated with that term.
A name transfer takes place to demonstrate an association of
a whole to a part or how two things are associated in some way.
This allows a reader to recognize similarities or common features
among terms. It may provide a more common meaning to a word.
However, it may be a parallel shift that provides basically
the same meaning; it is just said another way. For example,
in the book of Genesis 3:19, it refers to Adam by saying that
“by the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food.”
Sweat represents the hard labor that Adam will have to endure
to produce the food that will sustain his life. The sweat on
his brow is a vivid picture of how hard he is working to attain
a goal. WIKI |
| parallelism: |
Parallelism means to give two or more parts of the sentences a similar form so as to give the whole a definite pattern. WIKI |
| parataxis: |
linking clauses just by sequencing
them, often without conjunction(s) and only by means of associations
that are implied, not stated. WIKI |
| personification: |
a figure of speech where animals,
ideas or inorganic objects are given human characteristics. WIKI |
| repetition: |
Repetition of a sound, syllable, word, phrase, line, stanza, or metrical pattern is a basic unifying device in all poetry. It may reinforce, supplement, or even substitute for meter, the other chief controlling factor in the arrangement of words into poetry. Religious chants from all cultures show repetition developing into cadence and song, with parallelism and repetition still constituting, most frequently as anaphora, an important part in the sophisticated and subtle rhetoric of contemporary liturgies (e.g., the Beatitudes). Frequently also, the exact repetition of words in the same metrical pattern at regular intervals forms a refrain, which serves to set off or divide narrative into segments, as in ballads, or, in Iyric poetry, to indicate shifts or developments of emotion. Such repetitions may serve as commentary, a static point against which the rest of the poem develops, or it may be simply a pleasing sound pattern to fill out a form ("hey downe adowne"). As a unifying device, independent of conventional metrics, repetition is found extensively in free verse, where parallelism (repetition of a grammar pattern) reinforced by the recurrence of actual words and phrases governs the rhythm which helps to distinguish free verse from prose. WIKI |
| rhyme: |
repetition of an identical
or similarly accented sound or sounds in a work. Lyricists may
find multiple ways to rhyme within a verse. End rhymes have
words that rhyme at the end of a verse-line. Internal rhymes
have words that rhyme within it. Algernon C. Swinburne (1837-1909),
a rebel and English poet, used internal rhymes in many of his
Victorian poems such as “sister, my sister, O fleet sweet
swallow.” There are cross rhymes in which the rhyme occurs
at the end of one line and in the middle of the next; and random
rhymes, in which the rhymes seem to occur accidentally in no
specific combination, often mixed with unrhymed lines. Rhyme
gives poems flow and rhythm, helping the lyricist tell a story
and convey a mood. WIKI |
| rhyme scheme: |
the pattern of rhyme used in
a poem, generally indicated by matching lowercase letters to
show which lines rhyme. The letter "a" notes the first
line, and all other lines rhyming with the first line. The first
line that does not rhyme with the first, or "a" line,
and all others that rhyme with this line, is noted by the letter
"b", and so on. The rhyme scheme may follow a fixed
pattern (as in a sonnet) or may be arranged freely according
to the poet's requirements. WIKI |
| simile: |
a simile is a type of figurative
language, language that does not mean exactly what it says,
that makes a comparison between two otherwise unalike objects
or ideas by connecting them with the words "like"
or "as." The reader can see a similar connection with
the verbs resemble, compare and liken. Similes allow an author
to emphasize a certain characteristic of an object by comparing
that object to an unrelated object that is an example of that
characteristic. WIKI |
| slant rhyme: |
also known as near rhyme, half
rhyme, off rhyme, imperfect rhyme, oblique rhyme, or pararhyme.
A distinctive system or pattern of metrical structure and verse
composition in which two words have only their final consonant
sounds and no preceding vowel or consonant sounds in common.
Instead of perfect or identical sounds or rhyme, it is the repetition
of near or similar sounds or the pairing of accented and unaccented
sounds that if both were accented would be perfect rhymes (stopped
and wept, parable and shell). Alliteration, assonance, and consonance
are accepted as slant rhyme due to their usage of sound combinations
(spilled and spoiled, chitter and chatter). WIKI |
| sonnet: |
a distinctive poetic style
that uses system or pattern of metrical structure and verse
composition usually consisting of fourteen lines, arranged
in a set rhyme scheme or pattern. There are two main styles
of sonnet, the Italian sonnet and the English sonnet. The
Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, named after
Petrarch (1304-1374) a fourteenth century writer and the best
known poet to use this form, was developed by the Italian
poet Guittone of Arezzo (1230-1294) in the thirteenth century.
Usually written in iambic pentameter, it consists first of
an octave, or eight lines, which asks a question or states
a problem or proposition and follows the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a,
a-b-b-a. The sestet, or last six lines, offers an answer,
or a resolution to the proposed problem, and follows the rhyme
scheme c-d-e-c-d-e.
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
The English or Shakespearean sonnet was
named after William Shakespeare (1564-1616) who most believed
to the best writer to use the form. Adapting the Italian form
to the English, the octave and sestet were replaced by three
quatrains, each having its own independent rhyme scheme typically
rhyming every other line, and ending with a rhyme couplet.
Instead of the Italianic break between the octave and the
sestet, the break comes between the twelfth and thirteenth
lines. The ending couplet is often the main thought change
of the poem, and has an epigrammatic ending. It follows the
rhyme scheme a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. WIKI |
| symbol: |
a word or object that stands
for another word or object. The object or word can be seen with
the eye or not visible. For example a dove stands for Peace.
The dove can be seen and peace cannot. The word is from the
Greek word symbolom. All language is symbolizing one thing or
another. WIKI |
| tercet: |
a three-line stanza. WIKI |
| villanelle: |
an Italian verse form consisting
of five three-line stanzas (tercets) and a final quatrain, possessing
only two rhymes, repeating the first and third lines of the
first stanza alternately in the following stanzas, and combining
those two refrain lines into the final couplet in the quatrain. WIKI |
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