Poetic Terminology

IB Edition
Allegory
 is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and
actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie
outside the narrative itself.
 The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political
significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract
ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with
two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
 Plato’s The Cave, Aesop’s fables
Alliteration
 use of the same initial sound at the beginning of each
stressed syllable in a line of verse
 around the rock the ragged rascal ran
 Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
 Sally sells seashells by the seashore
 How much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck
could chuck wood?
Allusion
 is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, a place, event,

literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication.

 M.H. Abrams defined allusion as “a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person,

place or event, or to another literary work or passage”.

 It is left to the reader or hearer to make the connection where the connection is

detailed in depth by the author, it is preferable to call it “a reference”

 April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory

and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

 The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
Anthropomorphism

 the representation of objects (especially a god) as having

human form or traits

 Greek gods appearing in human form

 Arthur the Aardvark

Apostrophe
 an address to a dead or absent person or personification as
if he or she were present.
 Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
 John Donne, The Sun Rising
Archetypes
 something in the world, and described in literature, that,
according to the psychologist Karl Jung, manifests a
dominant theme in the collective unconscious of human
beings. Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism argues
for a taxonomy of consciously literary archetypes in
Western literature.
 Archetypes include: the wise wo/man, a trickster, mentor,
child, hero etc
Assonance
 the repetition of similar or identical vowel sounds (though
with different consonants), usually in literature or poetry
 “On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro‘ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot…”
 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott
Caesura
 In meter, a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a
line of a verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by
punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma,
a semicolon, a full stop (period), a dash, etc. Punctuation,
however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur.
 Who since they went to their account / Have settled with the
year!— Paid all that life had earned
 Emily Dickinson, How Dare the Robin Sing
Canon
 someone's list of authors or works considered to be
"classic," that is, central to the identity of a given literary
tradition or culture.
 Considered Western Canon:
 Kafka, Joyce, Emerson, Newton, Chaucer, Einstein, Tolstoy, Dewey, Sartre,
Wittgenstein, Proust, Freud

 What do you notice is similar about this Western Canon? This

problem plagues the majority of lists of “canon” works
Conceit
 a complicated intellectual metaphor. Metaphysical conceits were

characterized by esoteric, abstract associations and surprising effects. John

Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits in ways that

fused the sensory and the abstract.

 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more

temperate. / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer's

lease hath all too short a date.

 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Connotation
 Connotation is a subjective cultural and/or emotional
coloration in addition to the explicit or denotative
meaning of any specific word or phrase in a language, i.e.
emotional association with a word.
 Communism, poetry, December, college
Denotation
 The primary, literal or explicit meaning of a word, phrase
or symbol
 Home: (noun) the place where one resides on a consistent
basis, the dwelling where one lives.
Diction
 the manner in which something is expressed in words
 I have eaten
the plums
that were
in the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
 William Carlos Williams, This is Just to Say
Dissonance
 cacophony, or harsh-sounding language. Deliberately
avoiding assonance
 Also called cacophony
 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
 Lewis Carroll, The Jabberwocky
Ellision
 omission of a consonant or a vowel, usually to achieve a
metrical effect.
 Ere = ever
 T’was = It was
 O’er = over
Enjambment

 the continuation of a syntactic unit from one line of verse

into the next line without a pause

 A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.
 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Euphony
 a pleasing harmony of sounds.
 Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run
 John Keats, To Autumn
Foot
 a group of 2 or 3 syllables forming the basic unit of poetic
rhythm

Name Adjective Stress Pattern Example

Iamb Iambic da-DUM exCEPT, the DEER
Trochee Trochaic DUM-da ASKing, LOST it
Anapest Anapestic da-da-DUM underSTAND
Dactyl Dactylic DUM-da-da HEAvily, TALK to
me
Spondee Spondaic DUM-DUM Heartbreak, fatihful
Pyrrhic Pyrrhic da-da in the, on a
Hyperbole
 Extreme exaggeration or overstatement; especially as a
literary or rhetorical device; deliberate exaggeration
 I could eat a horse
 I have a million things to do today
Imagery
 an iconic mental representation
 Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
 T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock
Irony
 A figure of speech referring to a difference between the
way something appears and what is actually true. It allows
us to say something but to mean something else, whether
we are being sarcastic, exaggerating, or understating.
 Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Metaphor
 a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer
to something that it does not literally denote in order to
suggest a similarity
 Time is flying/running out/ is money
Meter
 the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse
 Monometer = One Foot
 Dimeter = Two Feet
 Trimeter = Three Feet
 Tetrameter = Four Feet
 Pentameter = Five Feet
 Hexameter = Six Feet
 Heptameter = Seven Feet
 Octameter = Eight Feet
 e.g., iambic pentameter: five feet in a line with the stressed/unstressed pattern
Metonymy
 substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the
name of the thing itself
 They counted heads
 The White House
 Parliament, Ottawa
Motif

 an image or action in a literary work that is shared by

other works and that is sometimes thought to belong to a

collective unconsciousness.

 Good triumphing over evil is a common motif in Harry

Potter novels
Onomatopoeia
 using words that imitate the sound they denote
 Pow, bam, kerplunk, splash
Oxymoron
 conjoining contradictory terms; a paradox
 Deafening silence
 Virtual reality
 Definitely maybe
Pathetic Fallacy

 an expression that endows inanimate things with human

feelings.

 "Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy“

 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

 Angry clouds, harsh wind, happy sunshine

Personification

 the act of attributing human characteristics to abstract

ideas etc.
 I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
 Sylvia Plath, Mirror
Pun
 an expression that uses a homonym (two different words
spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the
same time. (it’s usually pretty punny)
 I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. It's impossible to
put down.
 I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it
hit me.
 The psychotic florist created many flower derangements.
Repetitions
 repeating a word or a phrase in a poem to give that word
or phrase extra meaning or emphasis
 And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
 Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
 Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn....
 T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Rhyme

 be similar in sound, especially with respect to the last

syllable
 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses, And all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again!
Rhythm
 the arrangement of spoken words alternating stressed and
unstressed elements
 When IN / dis GRACE / with FOR / tune AND / men’s
EYES
I ALL / a LONE / be WEEP / my OUT/ cast STATE
 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
Simile
 a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between
things of different kinds (usually formed with `like' or
`as')
 As pretty as a picture, as red as a rose, quiet as a mouse
Stanza
 A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines grouped together, often in recurring
patterns of rhyme, line length, and meter. Stanzas may also serve as units of thought in
a poem much like paragraphs in prose
 "WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed

To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
 William Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply
Style
 the way in which a poem is written. It includes the length
of meters, number of stanzas, subject matter, rhyming
technique, rhythm etc.
 Haiku: A three-line poem in any language, with five syllables in
the first and last lines and seven syllables in the second, usually
with an emphasis on the season or a naturalistic theme.
 Haiku, a poem
five beats, then seven, then five
ends as it began.
Symbol

 Something visible that by association or convention

represents something else that is invisible. Some symbols

are widespread others are more fluid and change along

with society.
 Pumpkin representing Hallowe’en
 Black indicating a sad, dark, morose feeling
 Dove representing purity and peace
 Lamb representing innocence and sacrifice
Synecdoche
 a figure of speech where the part stands for the whole;
often treated as a part of metonymy
 I’ve got wheels = I own a car
 England won the World Cup
 Campbell is holding a Gala
Theme
 a unifying idea that is a recurrent element in literary work.
The controlling message or idea of a poem. It may be
suggested by a title or repetition, but it is almost never
explicitly stated.
 A theme in Wordsworth’s poems are innocence and the
loss of innocence
Tone
 the mood a poem creates within the reader. Much of the tone
depends on the interpretation of the poem.
 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.‘
 Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven