Mrs. Feret's AP Lit Poetic Terms to Know

Beth F.
Terms you need to know for the poetry portion of the AP Lit exam - and, really, for life.
44 words 70 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. allusion
    passing reference or indirect mention
  2. vignette
    a brief literary description
  3. allegory
    a short moral story
  4. polemic
    a verbal or written attack, especially of a belief or dogma
  5. lyric poem
    a short poem of songlike quality
  6. hyperbole
    extravagant exaggeration
  7. cacophonous
    having an unpleasant sound
  8. euphonous
    having a pleasant sound
  9. consonance
    the repetition of sounds especially at the ends of words
  10. assonance
    the repetition of similar vowels in successive words
  11. idiosyncratic
    peculiar to the individual
  12. melodrama
    a story with characters behaving in an extreme emotional way
  13. ballad
    a narrative poem of popular origin
  14. caesura
    a break or pause in the middle of a verse line
  15. enjambment
    continuation from one line of verse into the next line
  16. metonymy
    substituting the name of a feature for the name of the thing
  17. synecdoche
    using part of something to refer to the whole thing
  18. oxymoron
    conjoined contradictory terms
  19. paradox
    a statement that contradicts itself
  20. eponymous
    relating to a name derived from a person
  21. understatement
    something said in a restrained way for ironic contrast
  22. couplet
    a stanza consisting of two successive lines of verse
  23. elegy
    a mournful poem; a lament for the dead
  24. ode
    a lyric poem with complex stanza forms
  25. Elizabethan sonnet
    a sonnet consisting three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg
  26. Shakespearean sonnet
    a sonnet consisting of three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg
  27. Spenserian sonnet
    a sonnet consisting of three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab bcbd cdcd ee
  28. iamb
    a metrical unit with unstressed-stressed syllables
  29. trochee
    a metrical unit with stressed-unstressed syllables
  30. spondee
    a metrical unit with stressed-stressed syllables
  31. dactyl
    metrical unit with stressed-unstressed-unstressed syllables
  32. scansion
    analysis of verse into metrical patterns
  33. anapest
    two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
  34. idyll
    a short poem descriptive of rural or pastoral life
  35. pastoral
    a literary work idealizing the rural life
  36. narrative
    consisting of or characterized by the telling of a story
  37. apostrophe
    an address to an absent or imaginary person
  38. end-rhymed
    rhymed on the terminal syllables of the verses
  39. conceit
    an elaborate poetic image comparing very dissimilar things
  40. onomatopoeia
    using words that imitate the sound they denote
  41. epigram
    a witty saying
  42. internal rhyme
    a rhyme between words in the same line
  43. peroration
    the concluding section of a rhetorical address
  44. ferret
    search and discover through persistent investigation
Created on Sun Mar 11 16:04:25 EDT 2012 (updated Sun Mar 11 16:25:27 EDT 2012)

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