Poetry Terms
General Lit Terms
Syntax
Style
Figurative Language
100
the narrative voice of the poem.
What is the speaker?
100
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 sentence. Its position may be varied for effect.
What is climax?
100
ridiculing to show weakness in order to make a point, teach.
What is satirical?
100
a basic comparison of two generally unlike things that produced insight.
What is metaphor?
200
a combination of sounds that produces a harsh or discordant effect.
What is cacophony?
200
the author's choice of words based on their exact or connotative meaning for effect.
What is diction?
200
the rhythm or "music" of a sentence that come through parallel elements and repetition.
What is cadence?
200
instructive; author attempts to educate or instruct the reader.
What is didactic?
200
addressing a person or personified object not present
What is apostrophe?
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?
300
type of rhetorical balance in which the second part is syntactically balanced against first but with the parts reversed
What is chiasmus?
300
serious in purpose and convention (no slang, contractions; no idioms).
What is formal?
300
a figure of speech in which some significant aspect of an experience is used to represent the whole experience.
What is metonymy?
400
a break or pause (usually for sense) in the middle of a verse line
What is caesura?
400
a clever little story; a short account of an interesting situation relevant to the text and used as example.
What is an anecdote?
400
choosing to have too many conjunctions.
What is polysyndeton?
400
short, to the point.
What is terse?
400
a stylistic scheme where conjunctions are deliberately omitted to speed up the rhythm of the passage and emphasize a single point
What is asyndeton?
500
represented by a two syllable foot that contains one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
What is iambic meter?
500
a moment of insight, spiritual or personal; a character's sudden revelation about life or his or her own circumstances.
What is epiphany?
500
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?
500
involves a direct contrast of structurally parallel word groupings generally for the purpose of contrast
What is antithesis?
500
placing two elements side by side to present a comparison or contrast
What is juxtaposition?
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