• Poetry Terms

Elements of Poetry• Figurative language: language that is used

imaginatively, rather than literally, to express ideas or feelings in new ways.

• These figure of speech make comparisons between dissimilar things: Similes use like or as to compare 2 essentially unlike things, as in “She runs like the wind”.

• Metaphors speak of one thing in terms of another, as in “All the world’s a stage.”

• Personification gives human traits to nonhuman things, as in “The ocean snarled and pounded against the shore”

Poets use sound devices and prosody to achieve a musical quality.

• Rhythm is the pattern created by stressed and unstressed syllables of words in sequence. A pattern of rhythm is called meter.

• Rhyme is the repetition of identical sounds in the last syllables of words. A pattern of rhyme at the ends of lines is a rhyme scheme.

Poets use sound devices and prosody to achieve a musical quality.

• Alliteration, or initial rhyme, is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds of nearby words, as in the words light and lemon.

• Assonance, the words date and fade. • Consonance is the repetition of

consonants within nearby words in which the preceding vowels differ, as in the words milk and walk.

Poets use graphic elements to help readers to understand the poem and to strengthen the sound or visual appeal of

the poem. • Punctuation marks such as commas

show the reader where to slow down or pause

• Line length can help determine whether a poem has a flowing sound or a short, choppy sound.

• Word position can show relationships between words and ideas.

Types of Poetry

• Narrative poems tells a story with a plot, characters, and a setting.

• An epic is a long narrative poem about the feats of gods or heroes.

• A ballard is a songlike narrative with stanzas and a refrain

Types continued

• Dramatic poetry tells a story using a character’s own thoughts or spoken statements.

• Lyric poems express the feelings of a single speaker. Lyrics are the most common type of poem in modern literature.

Poems can also be categorized by structure, or form.Poetic structures are defined by patterns of

line and stanza length, rhythm, and rhyme.

• A haiku is a verse form with 3 unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

• Tanka is a verse form with 5 unrhymed lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. Both forms use imagery to convey a single vivid emotion.

• Some poems, described as free verse, have neither a set pattern of rhythm nor rhyme.

• A sonnet is a 14-line lyric poem with formal patterns of rhyme, rhythm, and line structure.

Notes