Where are the students? Tonight we'd be discussing on THE GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS.

Hello Mynd. Thanks for joining us.

Poetry can be very structured, or have no structure at all, but many poets use poetic devices.




Poetic devices are tools used to create [b]rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.




These devices help shape the poem. Some of these devices are also used in literature, but we will look at all of these devices through the lens of poetry.




Let's start with some devices used to create rhythm.

Repetition is repeating words, phrases, or lines. An example is Edgar Allen Poe's poem 'The Bells'. It repeats the word 'bells.' By doing this Poe creates a sing-song rhythm similar to bells ringing.


To the swinging and the ringing
of the bells, bells, bells--
Poe was one of my earliest influences. I still love his poetry.

unit of poetic meter, also known as a foot, consists of various combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. There are several types of feet in poetry, and they can all be used to create rhythm. One example is an anapest.


An anapest consists of two unaccented syllables with an accented one right after it, such as com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE.


An anapestic meter creates rhythm in Byron's poem 'The Destruction of Sennacherib.' Read the lines and count out the syllables, noting how every third syllable is the accented one. Anapestic meter is challenging to craft, but it creates a powerful rhythmic flow as seen below.


And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
**********************************

The reverse of an anapest is a dactyl. It is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, such as FLUT-ter-ing or BLACK-ber-ry.
Tennyson's poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' uses dactyl meter. As you read the lines, you'll notice that the poet consistently follows the pattern of one stressed syllable then two unstressed syllables.


Forward, the Light Brigade!
Half a league, half a league

Rhyming is another common poetic device used to create rhythm. There are several types of rhyming devices.


One example is a couplet, or two rhymed lines that are together and may or may not stand alone within a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in couplets, as in his Sonnet 29. Shakespeare's couplet below consists of two lines that have end rhyme because of the words 'brings' and 'kings.'


For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Simile


A simile is a comparison between two unlike things. Similes use the words 'like' or 'as.' A simile can get the reader to look at something in a different way.
In 'Harlem,' Langston Hughes compares a dream deferred to a raisin using the word 'like.' His comparison encourages the reader to look at raisins and dreams postponed in a new way.


What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun

metaphor


In contrast to a simile, a metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things without using the words like or as. A metaphor uses the senses and compares two things in a meaningful way. John Donne's poem 'The Sun Rising' uses a powerful metaphor:


She is all states, and all princes, I.


Through this comparison, Donne is saying that his beloved is richer than all states, while he is richer than the princes because of their love, and he does not use 'like' or 'as' in his comparison

Many poets also use a symbol, or an object that means more than itself and represents something else.


In Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken,' he talks about deciding which path to take when coming to a fork in the road. The fork and the two routes that result symbolize choices in life, a specific decision that must be made, etc. So, the actual road that he describes represents something much greater that what it is.

Poets may also use imagery, or words to create an image in the reader's mind.


Imagery is based on our five senses, though visual imagery is used the most. The images contribute to a poem's meaning.


In William Wordsworth's poem 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,' his emotions build with the images he creates. Notice how Wordsworth's lines create images in your head because of the specific details that he uses, thereby creating imagery.


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;

Hyperbole


Some devices are used solely to intensify the mood of the poem. An example is a hyperbole, an exaggeration that is used for dramatic effect. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem 'Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star.'


Ride ten thousand days and nights,
'Til age snow white hairs on thee,


Obviously, ten thousand days and nights might be a bit of an exaggeration (as is claiming that we'll be white-haired by the time the journey is over), but the point gets across: a long, long time will pass.

Another good example is onomatopoeia.


This device uses words that resemble or imitate sounds. It creates a sound effect that mimics the thing described, making the description more expressive and interesting. Examples are: Bang, Boom, Tweet, Purr, Moo, Buzz, Whisper…
In ‘The Tempest by William Shakespeare’ the character of Ariel uses several examples of onomatopoeia in one short passage. The dogs “bark” and say “bow-wow” while the chanticleer criws “cock-a-diddle-dow”.


Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark!
Hark, hak! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, ‘cock-=a-diddle-dow!’

Personification


Personification is a device in which a thing, an idea or an animal i given human attributes. They seem like people.


Example:


Paradise Lost by John Milton
Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing, through all her works, gave signs of woe.


Milton makes the earth sigh as the great fall happens.

These are only a few example of poetic devices. Try them out. Let us know how it goes. We would enjoy seeing what you come up with. Here is a link with more poetic terms/devices.


http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0072405228/student_view0/poetic_glossary.html


Thanks for taking a moment with us. Any questions or comments?

From the link

Allegory
A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities. The most famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical nature. Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.

Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."

Anapest
Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."

Antagonist
A character or force against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King.

Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."

Aubade
A love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover. John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.

Ballad
A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan," exemplifies the genre.

Blank verse
A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": "When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them."

Caesura
A strong pause within a line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed" contains caesuras in the middle two lines:

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand-like--just as I--
Was out of work-had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Character
An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.

Characterization
The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.

Climax
The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.

Closed form
A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Complication
An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work. Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."

Conflict
A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies both types of conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.

Connotation
The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Convention
A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.

Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

There are so many. I'll post more later. I hope you try a few and show us your work. Thanks again.

Gratitude

Kudos to you all.

Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My Son" the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words:

To be specific, between the peony and rose
Plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;
Beauty is nectar and nectar, in a desert, saves--
...
and always serve bread with your wine.
But, son,
always serve wine.

Denouement
The resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.

Dialogue
The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Diction
The selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction.

Elegy
A lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues."

Elision
The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."

Enjambment
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped and the second enjambed:

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now....

Epic
A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. Examples from western literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

Epigram
A brief witty poem, often satirical. Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog" exemplifies the genre:

I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

Exposition
The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided. Ibsen's A Doll's House, for instance, begins with a conversation between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are important in the development of its plot.

Falling action
In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution. The falling action of Othello begins after Othello realizes that Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on to murder his wife, Desdemona.

Falling meter
Poetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic, with the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling off from that accent in each word. Trochaic meter is represented by this line: "Hip-hop, be-bop, treetop--freedom."

Fiction
An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem "My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."

Figurative language
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Flashback
An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.

Foil
A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.

Foot
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.

Foreshadowing
Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story. Ibsen's A Doll's House includes foreshadowing as does Synge's Riders to the Sea. So, too, do Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and Chopin's "Story of an Hour."

Free verse
Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples.

Hyperbole
A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."

Iamb
An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. See Foot.

Image
A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous examples is Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Imagery
The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery.

Irony
A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."

Literal language
A form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote. See Figurative language, Denotation, and Connotation.

Lyric poem
A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of the poems in this book are lyrics. The anonymous "Western Wind" epitomizes the genre:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

Metaphor
A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"

From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of language. Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing and interpreting and unraveling them. Compare Simile.

Meter
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. See Foot and Iamb.

Metonymy
A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example: "We have always remained loyal to the crown." See Synecdoche.

Narrative poem
A poem that tells a story. See Ballad.

Narrator
The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we." See Point of view.

Octave
An eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.

Ode
A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."

Onomatopoeia
The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes:

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow.

Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees,"[i]which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.

Open form
A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo Bill's]" is one example. See also Free verse.

Parody
A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation. Examples include Bob McKenty's parody of Frost's "Dust of Snow" and Kenneth Koch's parody of Williams's "This is Just to Say."

Plot
The unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, andFlashback.

Point of view
The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.

Protagonist
The main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."

Pyrrhic
A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the".

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