Poetry Structure
Lit Terms
Figurative Language
Lit About Town
Repetition
Potpourri
100
The basic unit of poetry. A sonnet has 14 of these and how and where these break off is one of the most distinctive features of poems.

What is a line?

100

A struggle (the problem in the story)

What is Conflict?

100

the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman

What is personification

100

hints or clues about the future of a story

What is foreshadowing?

100

Repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words

What is alliteration?

100

US poet laureate who hails from Gulfport, MS

Who is Natasha Trethewey?

200
When lines are grouped together, it's not a paragraph! It's this word derived from the Italian for "room"

Stanza

200

The choice of words an author uses

What is diction?

200

a direct comparison

What is metaphor?

200

the author's attitude or feeling about a subject that comes across in a piece of literature.

What is tone?

200

Repetition of vowels sounds

What is a assonance?

200

Acclaimed children's author and poet who spent much of his career as a cartoonist for Playboy and a writer of 1960s folk music; also known for his quirky poems about quirky characters such as Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout who appears in a poem in the collection Where the Sidewalk Ends

Who is Shel Silverstein?

300

Instead of "narrator", when analyzing poetry we use this term to discuss who is doing the talking.

What is a Speaker?

300
Descriptive words that mock or mimic the sound they are describing

What is onomatopoeia?

300

an indirect comparison using like or as

What is simile?

300

Five feet in a line of poetry


What is pentameter?

300
Repetition of consonant sounds NOT at the beginning of words

What is consonance?

300

The Divine Comedy, a massive narrative poem including sections for Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (completed in 1320) is his best-known work

Who is Dante?

400

This poetic form comes in English and Italian varieties and (just about) always has 14 lines. Rita Dove's one of these was "In Primary Colors".

What is a sonnet?

400

This term describes the feeling that literature is creating in the reader.

What is mood?

400

Exaggeration

What is hyperbole?

400

a long poem about the extraordinary deeds of characters who often deal with gods or other superhuman entities

What is an epic?

400

Repetition of phrases at the beginning of lines

Half a league

Half a league

Half a league onward

What is a anaphora?

400

The Italian poet who wrote sonnets and inspired Shakespeare to write his own versions of this type of poem

Who is Petrarch?

500
A two-line stanza on its own or the concluding two lines of an English/Shakespearean sonnet.

What is a couplet?

500

A statement that seems illogical or untrue, but makes sense upon reflection:

I must be cruel, only to be kind. (Hamlet)

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. (Animal Farm)

What is paradox?

500

understatement, often sarcastic in tone

What is litotes?

500

The term for a type or subtype of text, which can include not just books but movies, poems, and other texts. Examples of this include Westerns, Sci-fi, realist novels, or anime.

What is Genre?

500

A verse or phrase that is repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem:

London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady

Take the keys and lock her up, my fair lady

What is a refrain?

500

The word "Lesbian" comes from the Greek island of Lesbos, home to this ancient poet.

Who is Sappho?

600

This poetic structure encompasses a range of styles. Examples of it are typically unrhymed but may have lots of different combinations of other structuring elements?

What is Free Verse?

600

A literary device in which a part of something is substituted for the whole:

--offer your hand in marriage

--get new wheels

What is synecdoche?

600

a reference to a well-known person, place, thing or event of historical, cultural or literary merit

What is an allusion?

600

Successful Broadway musical which is based on the poetry of TS Eliot

What is Cats?

600

he same words or phrases are used at the ends of multiple lines of a poem:

Bride in White, and so it goes

Rose petals thrown, and so it goes

I do, I do, and so it goes

 

What is epistrophe?

600

Wade Watts digs through troves of '80s nostalgia to find the Easter eggs of a high stakes virtual game, in a 2011 novel by two-time Austin Poetry Slam winner Ernest Cline; the novel  was also made into a movie by Stephen Spielberg

What is Ready Player One?