Poetic Forms
Figurative Language
Sound Devices
Poetic Rhythm
Diction
100
The poetic form (popularized in the 1830s by American poet, Walt Whitman) that ignores standard rules of meter and rhyme.
What is free verse?
100
The reference to the "Garden of Eden" in the passage, "She transformed her backyard into a Garden of Eden," exemplifies this figure of speech.
What is allusion?
100
The technique used by Edgar Allen Poe in the following passage to create an eerie hissing sound: "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain."
What is alliteration?
100
The most common type of poetic foot (characterized by a pattern of Unstressed + Stressed accented syllables), Shakespeare used this rhythm in almost every line of his poems and plays.
What is an iamb or iambic?
100
Sometimes referred to as "slang," J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn used these expressions that are not used in formal writing. This type of language is only appropriate for casual, ordinary, familiar, or informal conversation or writing.
What are colloquialisms or colloquial language?
200
The poetic form (a 19-line poem with two refrains, repeated in a pattern) most notably employed by the great poet, Dylan Thomas, when he wrote “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
What is a Villanelle?
200
A figure of speech defined as the substitution of a part to stand for the whole, or the whole to stand for a part; the word "eyes" in the phrase "The Confederates have eyes in Lincoln's government," stands for spies, exemplifying this technique.
What is synecdoche?
200
Marked by language that is discordant and difficult to pronounce, the following excerpt from John Updike’s "Player Piano" exemplifies this sound device: "never my numb plunker fumbles."
What is cacophony?
200
A term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse, this device (by way of a dash and later a period) helps reinforce Hamlet's contemplative state of mind in this line from the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy: To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub.
What is caesura?
200
Defined as a combination of contradictory words to reveal a truth, this technique is a form of paradox that places opposing words side by side as in Shakespeare's pairing of "sweet" and "sorrow" in the line "Parting is such sweet sorrow."
What is oxymoron?
300
A form (routinely employed in Shakespeare’s plays and many of Robert Frost's poems) marked by unrhymed iambic pentameter.
What is blank verse?
300
In the passage, "In Shakespeare's time, the crown was anti-Catholic," the "Crown" figuratively stands for Queen Elizabeth I, a literary technique marked by the substitution of one word or phrase to stand for a word or phrase similar in meaning.
What is metonymy or a metonym?
300
A type of end rhyme in which the final two syllables of one line mimic the sound of the final two syllables of another line, this technique is exemplified in rhyming of words like repeat, deplete; farrow, narrow; scarlet; varlet.
What is feminine rhyme?
300
In the phrase "Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike," it's the poetic technique whereby a poet uses words in a second clause or phrase that invert or transpose the order of the first clause or phrase.
What is chiasmus?
300
This word’s multiple denotations in Daisy Buchanan's famous line, "I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool" are often misunderstood because readers fail to see that Daisy is speaking from her own painful experience of being aware of the vast injustices of women’s lot in life.
What is "fool"?
400
The name of the three four-line stanzas that precede the final couplet in an English sonnet.
What is a quatrain?
400
A technique often employed by sonneteers in order to draw an exaggerated comparison of a lover or a loving situation, this figure of speech is also known as an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem.
What is a conceit?
400
Literally meaning "good sound," this refers to language that is smooth and musically pleasant to the ear like the "m" and "s" sounds in the passage: "Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness."
What is euphony?
400
It's the poetic device used in the phrase "They dove, splashed, floated, splashed, swam, snorted," whereby lists of words or phrases in a series without connectives help create a breathless rhythm.
What is asyndeton?
400
Exemplified in the phrase "in order to preserve peace, we must prepare for war," this technique (similar to oxymoron in that both figures of speech use contradictions to state a truth) is a contradictory statement that may actually be true.
What is a paradox?
500
A poem form focusing on some aspect of rural life. It may center on the love of a shepherd for a maiden, on the death of a friend, or on the quiet simplicity of rural life.
What is a pastoral poem?
500
Used by Shakespeare in the phrase "Frailty, thy name is woman," this technique is marked by an address to an abstraction or thing, present or absent, or an address to an absent person or entity.
What is apostrophe?
500
As with her meter, Dickinson’s employment of rhyme is experimental and often not exact. Also known as “approximate rhyme,” this type of rhyme is not perfect but is quite common in modern poetry (though it was less often used in poetry written by Dickinson’s contemporaries). Examples are "queen" and "noon" or "face" and "day."
What is slant rhyme?
500
Shakespeare employs this technique (the repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of word groups occurring one after the other in the line) in the line "To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream."
What is anaphora?
500
A poet's manipulation of this ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases, clauses, and sentences places certain emphasis on particular words.For instance, in this line: "His notice sudden is" the inversion of this conventional word order helps make the snake’s hissing presence all the more "sudden."
What is syntax?
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