Poetry Terms
the narrative voice of the poem.
What is the speaker?
+200
the emotional quality of a passage or the perceived attitude of a speaker towards a thing or idea in the text.
What is tone?
-100
the main idea or most important point in a story. Its position may be varied for effect.
What is climax?
+500
ridiculing to show weakness in order to make a point, teach.
What is satirical?
-500
a basic comparison of two generally unlike things that produced insight.
What is metaphor?
-100
a combination of sounds that produces a harsh or discordant effect.
What is cacophony?
-300
the author's choice of words based on their exact or connotative meaning for effect.
What is diction?
+400
the rhythm or "music" of a sentence that come through parallel elements and repetition.
What is cadence?
-500
instructive; author attempts to educate or instruct the reader.
What is didactic?
-100
an elaborate simile that compares an ordinary event or situation with the more complex idea in the text that is often recognized by the use of "just as, so then."
What is an epic or Homeric simile?
-300
the repetition of vowel sounds: “which din dims the light.”
What is assonance?
-300
what a word suggests beyond its denotative (precise or dictionary) meaning, including social or emotional connections.
What is connotation?
+200
the pace or speed of a sentence (or group of sentences) that comes through a variety of means, such as length of words, number of words, omission of words or punctuation, etc.
What is narrative pace?
+100
serious in purpose and convention (no slang, contractions; no idioms).
What is formal?
+500
a figure of speech in which some significant aspect of an experience is used to represent the whole experience.
What is metonymy?
+200
the speaker addresses something or someone that cannot answer, something nonliving or inanimate.
What is apostrophe?
-200
a clever little story; a short account of an interesting situation relevant to the text and used as example.
What is an anecdote?
-100
what we call a sentence where the most important idea comes first and the rest of the sentence unfolds easily after that (revealing information not critical to the climax).
What is a loose sentence?
+100
short, to the point.
What is terse?
+900
an elaborate, intellectually ingenious metaphor that shows the poet's realm of knowledge; it may be brief or extended.
What is a metaphysical conceit (or simply conceit, for short)?
+100
represented by a two syllable foot that contains one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
What is iambic meter?
+100
a moment of insight, spiritual or personal; a character's sudden revelation about life or his or her own circumstances.
What is epiphany?
-100
this type of sentence construction (or even paragraph construction) contains balanced grammatical structures that provide similar rhetorical value.
What is parallel sentence or parallel structure?
+200
learned, polished, scholarly.
What is erudite?
+400
a short quotation or verse that precedes a poem (or any text) to set the tone, provide a setting, or give other context for the poem.
What is an epigram?
+400