Poetic Terms & Devices

1. Poetic Terms & Devices

2. Form • The arrangement of words and the way a poem looks on a page • Examples: haiku, ballad, blank verse, cinquain, limerick, and sonnet

3. Line • The form in which poems are written • The lines may or may not be complete sentences.

4. Stanza • A group of lines within a poem • A stanza is the equivalent of what a paragraph would be in a work of prose.

5. Structured Form vs. free verse • If lines in a stanza have a regular, repeated pattern, the poem has a structured form. • Poems that have no regular pattern are called free verse.

6. Speaker/Voice • The speaker of a poem is the voice that relates the story or ideas of the poem. • The speaker may be the poet, speaking directly to the reader, or the speaker may be a character or voice created by the poet.

7. Dialect • A form of language spoken in a certain place by a certain group of people

8. idiom • A descriptive expression that means something different than the combination of the words that make it up • Example: Hold on a minute.

9. Sound • Because most poems are meant to be read aloud, poets choose and arrange words to create sounds that appeal to the listener. • Examples: rhyme, rhythm, repetition, onomatopoeia

10. Rhyme • The repetition of similar sounds at the ends of words • Ex: place/face, book/cook

11. Rhythm • The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line • Stressed syllables ( ) are read with more emphasis, and unstressed syllables () are read with less emphasis. • Some poems have a regular, repeated arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. This is called meter.

12. Repetition • The repeating of sounds, words, phrases, or whole lines • This is a device poets use to emphasize an idea or create a certain feeling.

13. Alliteration • The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words • Ex: the “w” in the line : “And wait to watch the water clear, I may.”

14. Onomatopoeia • The use of words whose sounds suggest their meanings, such as crack, boom, and bang

15. Imagery • Language that appeals to the reader’s five senses---sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch • Writer’s often use imagery to draw readers into a scene. • Ex. “ blistering sands”/ “feather clouds”

16. Simile • A comparison that uses the signal word like, as or than. An example is “her eyes shone like stars.”

17. Metaphor • A metaphor is a direct comparison, with no signal words. “Into the sea of death” is a metaphor that compares death to the sea.

18. Analogy • A comparison between two things that seem dissimilar, in order to show the ways in which they might be similar

19. Personification • When a poet describes an animal or objects as if it were human or had human qualities • Ex.: “The warm smile of the sun…”