The Study of Poetry
The study of rhythms and sounds used in poetry.
What is prosody?
An a-b-a-b rhyme scheme.
What is an alternating rhyme scheme?
Name that meter:
But soft what light from yonder window breaks? / It is the east and Juliet is the sun.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
What is iambic pentameter?
An author whose works were, in part, defined by the deaths of his closest relations by Tuberculosis (consumption).
Who is Edgar Allen Poe?
An unrhymed seven-line poem, where the first and last lines only have one word, the second and sixth, two, the third and fifth, three, and the fourth, four.
What is a diamante poem?
The patterns of inflection are identified as this in the study of poetry.
What are stressed and unstressed syllables?
A three-lined poem with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern.
What is a Haiku?
Name that meter:
If we shadows have offended / think but this and all is mended.
William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
What is trochaic pentameter?
An author who wrote over 1800 poems and spent much of her later life in complete seclusion in her family's house.
Who is Emily Dickinson?
A long poem narrating the adventures of a heroic figure—for example, Homer’s The Odyssey.
What is an Epic Poem or Epic Poetry?
The process of marking a poem for its meter.
What is scansion?
A humorous, frequently bawdy, verse of three long and two short lines rhyming aabba, popularized by Edward Lear.
What is a Limerick?
Name that meter:
Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.
Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicolas”
What is anapestic tetrameter?
An American confessional poet whose father was en entomologist and husband an English poet, who took her famously took her life.
Who is Sylvia Plath?
A poem mourning the dead.
What is an Elegy?
The process of breaking down a words to identify its syllables.
What is syllabification?
The continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.
What is enjambment?
Name that meter:
Tell me not in mournful numbers / Life is but an empty dream . . .
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”
What is trochaic trimeter?
A pulitzer prize winning poet who wrote poetry inspired by nature, whose most famous poem is the most misinterpreted of all time, and who famously read a poem at JFK’s inauguration.
Who is Robert Frost?
A type of poetry in which the meaning of the poem is conveyed, in part, by the shape or design they’re used to make.
What is “concrete poetry”?
The specific patterns of sounds adopted by a poet for a poem.
What is “rhyme scheme”.
The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet.
What is a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g?
Name that meter:
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Forward the Light Brigade!
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
What is Trochaic Dimeter?
He is considered to have established the American form of poetry, that did not follow traditional meter or form, that focused heavily on imagery and patriotic themes, and was meant to be read allowed and not silently, who is affectionately been given the honorific of “Uncle”.
Who is Walt Whitman?
A nineteen-line poetic form made famous by Dylan Thomas, consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.
What is a villanelle poem?