Rhyme’s Reason: Reading: Literature - Poetry - Middle School

If you want to be well-versed in poetry, review this vocabulary list. Learn about parts of a poem, genres of poetry, literary devices, rhyme and meter, and more. This list is truly poetry in motion!
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. accent
    the relative prominence of a syllable or musical note
  2. acrostic
    verse in which the first letter in each line forms a message
  3. alliteration
    use of the same consonant at the beginning of each word
  4. anagram
    a phrase rearranged from the letters of another phrase
  5. assonance
    the repetition of similar vowels in successive words
  6. ballad
    a narrative poem of popular origin
  7. couplet
    a stanza consisting of two successive lines of verse
  8. diction
    the manner in which something is expressed in words
  9. elegy
    a mournful poem; a lament for the dead
  10. English sonnet
    a sonnet consisting three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg
  11. epic
    a long narrative poem telling of a hero's deeds
  12. figurative
    not literal
  13. foot
    a group of syllables forming the basic unit of poetic rhythm
  14. form
    an arrangement of the elements in a composition or discourse
  15. free verse
    poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter
  16. haiku
    an epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines
  17. hymn
    a song of praise, especially a religious song
  18. internal rhyme
    a rhyme between words in the same line
  19. limerick
    a humorous rhymed verse form of five lines
  20. line
    a row of text written across a page or computer screen
  21. lyric
    a short poem of songlike quality
  22. metaphor
    a figure of speech that suggests a non-literal similarity
  23. meter
    a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse
  24. metrical
    relating to the rhythmic arrangement of syllables
  25. mood
    the prevailing psychological state
  26. personification
    representing an abstract quality or idea as a human
  27. poem
    a composition in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines
  28. poet
    a writer of verse consisting of lines that often rhyme
  29. prose poem
    prose that resembles poetry
  30. quatrain
    a stanza of four lines
  31. refrain
    part of a song or poem that recurs at regular intervals
  32. rhyme
    correspondence in the final sounds of two or more lines
  33. rhythm
    alternation of stressed and unstressed elements in speech
  34. scan
    read metrically
  35. simile
    a figure of speech expressing a resemblance between things
  36. sonnet
    a verse form of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme
  37. stanza
    a fixed number of lines of verse forming a unit of a poem
  38. stress
    the relative prominence of a syllable or musical note
  39. tone
    a quality that reveals the attitudes of the author
  40. verse
    literature in metrical form
Created on Tue Jan 17 13:40:15 EST 2017 (updated Wed Mar 29 15:58:41 EDT 2017)

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