Poetry and Literary Terms 2D-
Symbols are physical objects used to suggest deeper meanings; they are MORE than just objects – they compress and clarify meaning. A symbol has a literal meaning in the story, but it also represents abstract ideas. Its symbolic meaning must be supported by the entire context of the story. As well, it suggests a cluster of meanings because it is multi-faceted. This COMPLEX MEANING and its emotional power give the symbol value.
Allusion: An allusion is a brief, indirect reference to a person, place, object or event, assumed to be known to the reader. The writer does not explain the background information, but assumes knowledge on the part of the reader. For example: Salma was a Mother Theresa in training, but more so, because she also “had a dream.”
Authorial intrusion: Authorial intrusion occurs when the author steps away from the text and addresses the reader. It serves to develop a close, one to one relationship between the writer and the reader in which the reader becomes one of the main subjects of the author’s attention. ***Here is a small fact *** You are going to die. From The Book Thief
Diction: Diction refers to the specific words used because of the connotations and implications: for their power to convey complex, multi-layered meaning.
Juxtaposition is a type of contrast. Two unrelated images are juxtaposed, or brought together, in order to make the reader to see them both in new ways.
Imagery refers to the images in a work. It is a technique that appeals primarily, but not exclusively, to the five senses. Imagery refers to any specific, powerful, and expressive language that captures something distinctively. It also refers to the collective set of images found in a work of literature (the text).
Repetition: Repetition is a device used to produce emphasis, clarity, amplification or an emotional effect. Many different types of things may be repeated, such as sounds, words, phrases, images, ideas, allusions, literary devices, stylistic devices, etc.
Figurative language is the imaginative use of words to imply more than their literal meaning. It relies on abstract and imagistic meaning that is expressed in figures of speech, such as, metaphor, simile, and personification.
Analogy: An analogy brings together two unrelated items and uses one as a blueprint for explaining the other. The assumption is that if the two items share one attribute, they will share others.
Metaphor: A metaphor is a comparison where the writer compares two things to each other by saying that the first thing actually is the other thing.
Example: Life is a highway. Or Her hair was a wave of sunlight.
Extended metaphor: a metaphor introduced and then further developed throughout all or part of a literary work, especially a poem.
Simile: A simile is a comparison where the writer compares two unlike things to each other using “like” or “as” in the comparision.
Example: Life is like a highway.
Personification is a type of comparison in which an inanimate object is described as having the qualities or abilities of a person.
Synesthesia: Synesthesia is a stylistic device that describes one sensory experience using terms associated with another sense. For example, it describes something visual using sounds, or something heard using taste. Ie: Even Papa’s music was the colour of darkness. From The Book Thief.
Hyperbole occurs when the writer exaggerates in a very obvious way.
Example: You’ve likely heard this a million times.
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Sound Devices are techniques used by the author to link their meaning into the sound of the language. By manipulating and toying with the sounds of the vowels and consonants in the text, poets can emphasize certain ideas and images.
Assonance: Assonance is a sound device used by writers in which the vowel sounds, in words close to each other, repeat.
Example: To be alive without hiding, to breathe freely in flight…
Consonance: Consonance is a sound device used by writers in which the consonant sounds, in words close to each other, repeat.
Example: Clicking and creaking, the crank turned…
Alliteration: Alliteration is a sound device where the first letters of two or more words are the same.
Example: The red, red rain fell resplendent and relentless…
Onomatopoeia: Onomatopoeia is a sound device where the sound the word makes when spoken imitates its meaning.
Example: Splishing and splashing through puddled spring…
Internal Rhyme: Internal rhyme occurs when the words within a line rhyme with each other.
Example: “We were the first that ever burst”
Context: Generally, context refers to the surroundings or circumstances of something. It can refer to the circumstances within a text.
Example: When Romeo first sees Juliet at the Capulet masque, he marvels at how Juliet’s stunning beauty “doth teach the torches to burn bright.” The tag before the quotation provides context about the play’s events for the reader of the essay.
Voice: This term refers to the personality of the speaker or narrator coming through in the work. It is created by a combination of POV, tone, and diction.
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Types of Poetry … just a few…
Blank verse: A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets include many lines of blank verse.
Concrete poetry: Verse in which the meaning is reinforced by the shape of the poem on the page; by the way the text is arranged and printed to create a visual image.
Elegy: A lyric poem that laments the dead.
Enjambment: The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next.
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.
Narrative poem: A poem that tells a story.
Villanelle: A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. See Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Found Poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.