Similie
A comparison made between two dissimilar things using like or as
Metaphor
A comparison made between two unlike things (without like or as)
Personification
An animal, object, natural force, or idea is given personality is described as if it were human
Hyperbole
Exaggeration, or overstatement, for effect
Irony
(Same as short story)
Antithesis
The balancing of two contrasting ideas, words, phrases, or sentences (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”)
Allusion
A reference to a person, place, event, or literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and understand
Metonymy
Something very closely associated with anything is used to stand for just the thing itself (Ex. Crown for king)
Synecdoche
Substitutes a part for a whole (Ex. Feet or hands for people)
Apostrophe
And absent or a dead person, an abstract quality, or something nonhuman is addressed directly (“O Spring”)
Litotes
Understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary (“not a bad singer”)
Oxymoron
Combines opposite or contradictory ideas or terms (“wise fool”)
Paradox
Truth in both sides of a contradictory statement
Meter
A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllable’s in poetry
Metric foot
A unit of meter
Iambus
Unstressed, stressed
Pentameter
5 feet
Elision
The dropping of a syllable for purposes of meter (over > o’er)
Caesura
A forced pause in poetry
Enjambment
Turning the line
End rhyme
Rhyme at the end of lines
Internal rhyme
Rhyme within a line of poetry
Alliteration
Repetition of consonant sounds (“She sells sea shells)
Assonance
Repetition of vowel sounds.
Onomatopoeia
The use of a word whose sound in some degree imitates or suggests its meaning
Refrain
A word, phrase, line, or group of lines repeated regularly in a poem, usually at the end of each stanza
Rhyme scheme
The pattern of the end rhyme
Popular ballad
A story told in verse and usually meant to be song (passed down orally from generation to generation)
Literary ballad
Imitates the style of the folk ballad
Narrative poem
A poem that tells a story
Limerick
A type of light humorous poem
Lyric poem
A poem that expresses a speaker’s thoughts or feelings
Sonnet
A 14 line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter
Ode
A complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or serious subject
Stanza or verse
Used in poetry (as a paragraph is used for prose)
Inverted word order
Words arranged in an unusual order
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentamerer
Free verse
No rhyme scheme, no meter
Parallelism
The use of phrases, clauses, or sentences that are similar or complementary in structure or in meaning
Persona
The person who speaks in a literary work, from the Latin word mask
Paradox
A statement that reveals a kind of true, although it seems at first to be self contradictory and untrue