WORD LISTSSome Helpful Poetry TermsSeptember 4, 2014
By Vocabulary.com (NY)
 One of the stumbling blocks when trying to study poetry is that it seems like a different world. Familiar things, like words, are put to unfamiliar use, and there is an entire descriptive vocabulary that is completely foreign and quite often puzzling. This list seeks to explain the words used to describe poetry through examples from famous poems. Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, "If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry," but we are willing to take that risk to make the world of literary analysis a little clearer and further illuminate the mystery of poetry.
  
alliteration
The light from the porthole was a pulsing purple.— Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Your poetry is alive with
alliteration; bursting with evocative images; and brimming with thoughtful rhythms, unexpected wordplay and heartfelt emotion.
—Seattle Times May 6, 2011
allusion
She was dancing below a noose, an
allusion to the hanging of dissidents under her father’s regime.
—New York Times Aug 30, 2014
apostrophe
O stranger of the future!
O inconceivable being! whatever the shape of your house, however you scoot from place to place, no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear, I bet nobody likes a wet dog either. I bet everyone in your pub, even the children, pushes her away. —To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now, Billy Collins Her unfortunate position, and the singular
apostrophe she had addressed to me, pierced me to the heart.
—Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
assonance
Those images that yet,
Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. – Byzantium, W.B. Yeats His work exhibits ease and elasticity of rhythm, liquid smoothness of
assonance, sympathetic beauty of thought, with subtle skill in wedding sense to sound.
—William Henry Oliphant Smeaton
caesura
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! —I'm Nobody ! Who are you?, Emily Dickinson But the third line, with its
caesura before the last foot, complicates the grandfather's absence, extends his influence, and begins to restore his existence.
—The Guardian Jul 15, 2013
consonance
I'll swing by my ankles.
She'll cling to your knees. As you hang by your nose, From a high-up trapeze. But just one thing, please, As we float through the breeze, Don't sneeze. — The Acrobats, Shel Silverstein Occasionally the author breaks into verse, or stretches of
consonance or alliteration.
—New York Times Jan 9, 2012
couplet
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. - Sonnet 94, William Shakespeare In "Keeping Hope Alive," he triggers a world of emotions in a brief
couplet: "Pride and pain/Cloud my brain."
—Los Angeles Times May 28, 2014
enjambment
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and asleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. —Endymion, John Keats But poetry critics have a more precise term for the kind of
enjambment Obama employs: “bad line breaks.”
—Salon Jul 17, 2012
hyperbole
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, I’ll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry — As I Walked One Evening, W.H. Auden That’s not
hyperbole; statistics prove this to be true.
—Time Aug 17, 2014
internal rhyme
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble —Macbeth, William Shakespeare That songlike quality would fit well in a poem, especially the
internal rhyme and near-rhyme of “night and light” with “alike.”
—Washington Post July 17, 2014
litotes
We were going through the three first acts, and not unsuccessfully upon the whole.
--Mansfield Park, Jane Austen The litotes here is "not unsuccessfully." Litotes describes the object to which it refers not directly, but through the negation of the opposite.
—J.R. Bergmann, Veiled Morality
metaphor
She really was a most charming girl, and might have passed for a captive fairy, whom that truculent ogre, Old Barley, had pressed into his service.
-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Her extreme cosmetic aesthetic has been an apt
metaphor for the excesses and vanities of Hollywood.
—Salon Sep 4, 2014
octave
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea. —Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe One of these [two interpretations] must be in the
octave and the other in the sestet.
—Joyce Kilmer
onomatopoeia
It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped,
And whirr when it stood still. I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will. —The Marvelous Toy, Tom Paxton What a succession of groans, hurrahs, cheers, and all the
onomatopoeia of which the American language is so full.
—Jules Verne
paradox
I can resist anything but temptation.
— Oscar Wilde The brilliant
paradox of Flanagan’s introspective novel is that a work of such powerful remembrance should so movingly capture our inmost longing to forget.
—Seattle Times Aug 27, 2014
personification
Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it.
—How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped, Katherine Mansfield Gordon-Levitt may also direct and star in the film, which is to tell the story of the brooding hero Morpheus, the immortal
personification of dreams.
—Los Angeles Times Aug 22, 2014
anapest
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; —'Twas the Night Before Christmas, Clement Clarke Moore An anapest here is "Twas the night". An
Anapest is a three-syllable foot accented on the last syllable.
—William Franklin Webster
dactyl
Half a League, Half a League, Half a League, onward
—The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson There's a lovely contrast between the skippety
dactyl of "Merry mites" and the surprising, ceremonious spondee, "Welcome".
—The Guardian Mar 29, 2010
spondee
'By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water, —The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A spondee here is "By the". "Hot sun" and "cool fire" are both
spondees.
—The Guardian Oct 11, 2010
trochee
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
—The Tyger, William Blake The trochee here is "Burning bright". "Beauty" by this usage, is a
trochee, "beautiful" a dactyl, "relate" an iamb, "intercede" an anapest.
—Paull Franklin Baum
iamb
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. —Acquainted with the Night, Robert Frost “ ‘Feminine’ brand names, like Chanel, are often
iambs; ‘masculine’ ones, like Black & Decker, tend to be trochees,” he writes.
—New York Times Jul 26, 2011
sestet
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming That can sing both high and low; Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journey's end in lovers' meeting— Every wise man's son doth know. —Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 3, William Shakespeare In the
sestet usually the first line rhymes with the fourth, the second with the fifth and the third with the sixth.
—Charles Herbert Sylvester
simile
...impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil . . .
—To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf He repeatedly underlines the inhumanity of the situation prisoners face by using
similes comparing them to animals.
—New York Times Jul 2, 2013
synaesthesia
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth! —Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats Synaesthesia is where the senses are mixed together - for example seeing colour when listening to music - or tasting food and hearing chords.
—BBC Apr 19, 2014
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