Just as one could not hope to discuss baseball without knowing what a curveball was, or analyze a graph without understand “slope” or “axis”, so too must one know the proper terms for discussing or analyzing poetry. Unfortunately, unlike “curveball”, which is fairly self-explanatory, a number of poetry terms require a bit more deciphering.
Here are some of the most commonly used poetry terms and their definitions:
Accent: An accent, also called the “stress”, is a syllable that receives emphasis. In a line of poetry, accents alternate with unstressed syllables. The number and order of accents creates the meter of a line.
Alliteration: Alliteration occurs when the same consonant or vowel sound begins two or more stressed syllables or words in a line of poetry. The consonant sounds need not be identical, but must start with the same sound; for example, “break” and “bat” alliterate, but “stop” and “shake” do not. Also, the alliterative words or syllables should occur within close proximity to each other, if not immediately follow one another.
Allusion: An allusion is a reference to a (generally well-known) historic, mythic, or literary person, place or event. T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock contains an allusion in the line “I am no Prince Hamlet”.
Blank Verse: Not to be confused with free verse, blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare is perhaps the best known practitioner of blank verse; he used it for most of his plays.
Caesura: A break or a pause in a metrical line of poetry, often marked by punctuation, is called a caesura. When this break occurs near the beginning of a line, it is called an initial caesura. When it occurs toward the end of a line, it is called a terminal caesura. If the caesura splits the line in two, it is known as a medial caesura.
Couplet: A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines occurring in succession in a poem. A closed couplet is a couplet that forms a complete sentence, and a heroic couplet forms a complete thought and is written in iambic pentameter.
Enjambment: A phrase or sentence that continues from one verse to another without end punctuation is called an enjambment, sometimes referred to as a “run-on line”.
Free verse: Unrhymed, unmetered lines of poetry are called “free verse”. Despite their lack of formal structure, free verse poems do have a deliberate rhythm or cadence.
Litote: Sharing an origin with the word “little”, a litote is a deliberate understatement.
Metaphor: Metaphor is a type of imagery in which two things are directly compared, such as in the line “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” from The Highwayman. Here, Noyes is comparing the moon in the night sky to a ship on the sea by simply stating that it is such.
Metric Foot: A metric foot is a unit of poetry consisting of at least one stressed and one unstressed syllable. The number of stressed and unstressed syllables depends on the type of foot (dactyl, trochee, spondee, iamb, etc.), and the number of feet completes the description of the poem’s meter. For example, iambic pentameter consists of five iambs per line, while dactylic tetrameter consists of three dactyls per line.
Metonymy: Metonymy is a figure of speech in which something associated with a thing is used in place of the thing itself — for example, when “the Crown” is used to reference the King or Queen of England.
Onomatopoeia: Onomatopoeia, also spelled onomatopeia and sometimes called “echoism” occurs when a word’s sound imitates its meaning. Examples include “woof”, “meow”, and “hiss”.
Personification: Personification is the act of endowing inanimate objects or abstract ideas with human-like qualities. For example, William Blake wrote, “O Rose, thou art sick!”
Rhyme Scheme: A poem’s rhyme scheme is the order in which rhyming words appear. This is denoted by assigning a letter to each rhyme, starting with “a”. In the verse, “Row, row, row your boat/Gently down the stream/Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/Life is but a dream”, the rhyme scheme would be marked ABCB.
Scansion: Scansion is the process of “scanning” a poem, dividing its lines into metrical feet and marking the stressed and unstressed syllables.
Simile: A simile is a figure of speech in which two things are compared using “like” or “as”. An example occurs later in The Highwayman when Noyes writes, “His face burnt like a brand”.
Stanza: A stanza is a group of lines separated from other such groups within a poem. Commonly, the a stanza is unified by a rhyme scheme.
Synecdoche: Similar to metonymy, synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of a thing is taken in place for the whole of it, such as when a man asks for a woman’s hand in marriage; in this case, the hand represents the whole woman.
Trope: A trope is any figure of speech in which a word is used nonliterally. Metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy are all tropes.
Verse: The term “verse” is sometimes used to refer to poetry as a whole, as distinct from prose. Most commonly, “verse” is used synonymously with “stanza” to refer to a group of lines within a poem. Traditionally, however, “verse” signified a single line of poetry.
With a working knowledge of these major poetic terms, students and poets will be better able to read, analyze, and discuss poetry.
Emily Jones - Emily Jones began her writing career by practising the alphabet on her mother's newly papered kitchen walls. She was promptly given a ...
