Quiz 2

accentual-syllabic verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. The majority of English poetry is organized in this way

heroic couplet

a couplet consisting of two rhymed lines of iambic pentamenter and written in an elevated style, usually with a full stop at the end

irony

a feeling, tone, mood, or attitude arising from the awareness that what is (reality) is opposite from, and usually worse than, what seems; verbal irony, dramatic irony, or situational irony

paradox

a figure of speech in which a statement initially seeming self-contradictory or absurd turns out, seen in another light, to make good sense; ex "Death, thou shalt die" from Donne's "Death, be not proud"

allusion

a figure of speech that echoes or makes brief reference to a literary or artistic work or a historical figure, event, or object; it is usually a way of placing one's poem within, or alongside, a whole other context that is evoked in a very economical fashion

explication

a literary approach involving close analysis of texts, clarifying how (for poetry) small units such as diction, images, figures of speech, symbols, sound, rhythm, form, and allusions, particularly textual ambiguities, complexities, and interrelationships, contributing toward shaping a work's meaning and effects

ode

a long lyric poem, serious (often intellectual) in tone, elevated and dignified in style, dealing with a single theme. The ode is generally more complicated in form than other lyric poems; ex Keat's "To Autumn"

iamb

a metrical foot consisting of two syllables, an unaccented one followed by an accented one; in iambic pentameter, iambs are the predominant foot in a line or poem

villanelle

a nineteen-line lyric poem divided into five tercets and a final four-line stanza, rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa; line 1 is repeated to form lines 6, 12, and 18; line 3 is repeated to form lines 9, 15, and 19; ex: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

prose poem

a poem printed as prose, with lines wrapping at the right margin rather than being divided through predetermined line breaks

pastoral

a poem that expresses a city poet's nostalgic image of the simple, peaceful life of shepherds and other country folk in an idealized natural setting; ex: "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" by Marlowe

dramatic monologue

a poem with only one speaker, overheard in a dramatic moment (usually addressing another character or characters who do not speak), whose words reveal what is going on in the scene and expose significant depths of the speaker's temperament, attitudes, and values; ex: "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning

open form

a poetic form free of any predetermined metrical and stanzaic patterns

end-stopped line

a poetic line in which both the grammatical structure and the thought reach completion at the end

pentameter

a poetic line with five metrical feet

sprung rhythm

a poetic meter approximating speech, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by a varying number of unstressed ones; accentual meter

convention

a rule, method, practice, or characteristic established by usage; a customary feature

synecdoche

a special kind of metonymy in which a part of a thing is substituted for the whole of which it is a part, as in the commonly used phrases "give me a hand" or "lend me your ear"

Spenserian stanza

a stanza of nine iambic lines, the first eight pentameter and the ninth hexameter; ex: Keat's "The Eve of St. Agnes"

meter

a steady beat, or measured pulse, created by a repeating pattern of accents, syllables, or both

narrative

a story in prose of verse; an account of events involving characters and a sequence of events, told by a narrator

persona

an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting; the poem is an artificial construct distanced from the poet's autobiographical self

closed form

any structural pattern in a poem that employs repetition of meter, rhyme, or stanza

slant rhyme

consonance at the ends of lines, which can also be internal if repeated enough to form a discernible pattern (ex: room and storm)

synesthesia

description of one kind of sense experience in relation to another; such as attribution of color to sounds and vice versa

hyperbole

exaggeration; a figure of speech in which something is stated more strongly than is logically warranted. Hyperbole is often used to make a poem emphatically

epigraph

in literature, a quotation at the beginning of a poem or on the title page or the beginning of an essay or chapter in a book

euphony

language that strikes the ear as smooth, musical, and agreeable; ex in Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" "soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, / and the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows"

blank verse

lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter; it is the most widely used verse form of poetry in English because it is close to the natural rhythm of the spoken language; ex: Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man"

free verse

poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter; open form

fixed form

poetry written in definite, repeating patterns of line, rhyme scheme, or stanza

exact rhyme

rhyme in which all sounds following the vowel sound are the same (art and heart, for example)

internal rhyme

rhyme that occurs between words within a line, between words within lines near each other, or between a word within a line and one at the end of the same or a nearby line

poetic diction

specialized language used in or considered appropriate to poetry

foot

the basic unit in a metrical verse, composed of (usually) one stressed and one or more unstressed syllables

scansion

the division of metrical verse into feet in order to determine and label its meter. Scanning a poem involves marking its stressed syllables with an accent mark and its unstressed syllables with a curved line, marking feet, and labeling the type of foot used most often/number of feet per line

title

the name attached to a work of literature. For poetry, a title in some cases is an integral part of a poem and needs to be considered in interpreting it; in other cases the name has been added as a means of identifying the poem and is not integral to interpretation

rhyme scheme

the patter of end rhymes in a poem or stanza, the recurring sequence is usually described by assigning a letter to each word-sound, the same word-sounds having the same letter

rhythm

the patterned "movement" of language created by the choice of words and their arrangement; affected by meter, line length, line endings, pauses within lines, space in lines, word choice, and combination of sounds

prosody

the principles of versification, especially of meter, rhythm, rhyme, and stanza form

anaphora

the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses

assonance

the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in words relatively near each other, whose consonant sounds differ

rhyme

the repetition of the accented vowel sound of a word and all succeeding consonant sounds

accent

the stress, or greater emphasis, given to some syllables of words relative to that received by adjacent syllables

form

(1) Genre or literary type (2) patterns of meter, lines, and rhymes (3) the organization of the parts of a literary work in relation to its total effect

apostrophe

A figure of speech in which an absent person or personified object is addressed by a speaker; it is a particular type of personification

metonymy

A figure of speech in which something is referred to by using the name of something that is associated with it; see synecdoche

Alexandrine

A poetic line with six iambic feet (iambic hexameter)

onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents