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POETIC INTERPRETATION OF LIFE
Components of Poetry

Poems are a literary work written in stanzas and lines using rhythm (beat) to convey ideas and emotions.​ Sentence length, word placement and line groupings make up the structure and form of a poem. ​
BUT REALLY, WHAT IS POETRY?
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance

Rocking the
​STRUCTURE & FORM


​Accent: The prominence or emphasis given to a syllable or word.

Accentual verse: Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line.

Accentual-syllabic verse: Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet.

Alliteration: Close repetition of consonant sounds, especially initial consonant sounds.

Anagram: A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word

Anaphora: Repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.

Assonance: Close repetition of vowel sounds.

Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Cacophony: Harsh or discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination of consonants within a group of words

Cadence: The patterning of rhythm in natural speech, or in poetry without a distinct meter (i.e., free verse).

Caesura: A deliberate rhetorical, grammatical, or rhythmic pause, break, cut, turn, division, or pivot in poetry.

Canto: A long subsection of an epic or long narrative poem.

Chiasmus: Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA.

Choriamb: Greek and Latin metrical foot consisting of two stressed syllables enclosing two unstressed; a trochee followed by an iamb.

Circumlocution: A roundabout wording.

Common measure: A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines.

Conceit: A fanciful poetic image or metaphor that likens one thing to something else that is seemingly very different.

Consonance: Close repetition of consonant sounds–anywhere within the words.

Couplet: In a poem, a pair of lines that are the same length and usually rhyme and form a complete thought.

Deconstruction: Meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate because language itself is indeterminate. It is a system that can never fully “mean”: A word can refer to an object but can never be that object.

Deep Image: A term originally coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe poetry that operates under the Symbolist theory of a connection between the physical and spiritual realms.

Elision: The omission of unstressed syllables (e.g., “ere” for “ever,” “tother” for “the other”), usually to fit a metrical scheme.

Ellipsis: In poetry, the omission of words whose absence does not impede the reader’s ability to understand the expression.

End-stopped: A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break (a dash or closing parenthesis) or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period.

Enjambment: Continuation of sense and rhythmic movement from one line to the next. Also called a “run-on” line.

Envoi (or Envoy): The brief stanza that ends French poetic forms such as the ballade or sestina.

Feminine rhyme: A multi-syllable rhyme that ends with one or more unstressed syllables.

Fixed and unfixed forms: Poems that have a set number of lines, rhymes, and/or metrical arrangements per line.

Gnomic verse: Poems laced with proverbs, aphorisms, or maxims.

Iambic pentameter: A line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable,

Imagery: Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images.

Invocation: An address to a deity or muse that often takes the form of a request for help in composing the poem at hand.

In Memoriam stanza: A stanza of four lines of iambic tetrameter, rhyming abba.

Kenning: A figurative compound word that takes the place of an ordinary noun. Many kennings rely on myths or legends.

Line: Basic unit of a poem; measured in feet if metrical.

Meter: The rhythmic measure of a line.

Masculine rhyme: A rhyme that occurs in a final stressed syllable: cat/hat, endow/vow, observe/deserve.

Motif: A central or recurring image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works.

Neologism: A newly coined word.

Palindrome: A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward and forward.

Poetic diction: The vocabulary, phrasing, and grammatical usage deemed appropriate to verse as well as the deviations allowable for effect within it.

Poetic license: A poet’s departure from the rules of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in order to maintain a metrical or rhyme scheme. It can also mean the manipulation of facts to suit the needs of a poem.

Prosody: The principles of metrical structure in poetry

Pyrrhic meter: A metrical unit consisting of two unstressed syllables, in accentual-syllabic verse, or two short syllables, in quantitative meter.

Quantitative meter. The dominant metrical system in Classical Greek and Italian poetry, in which the rhythm depends not on the number of stresses, but on the length of time it takes to utter a line.

Refrain: A repeated line within a poem, similar to the chorus of a song.

Rhyme: Words that sound alike, especially words that end in the same sound.

Rhythm: The beat and movement of language including rise and fall, repetition and variation, change of pitch, mix of syllables, and melody of words.

Scansion: The analysis of a poem's meter. This is usually done by marking the stressed and unstressed syllables in each line and then, based on the pattern of the stresses, dividing the line into feet.

Spondee: A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is “hog-wild.”

Sprung rhythm: A metrical system devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins composed of one- to four-syllable feet that start with a stressed syllable.

Stanza: Group of lines making up a single unit; like a paragraph in prose.

Stress: The prominence or emphasis given to particular syllables.

Strophe: Often used to mean “stanza”; also a stanza of irregular line lengths.

Syllabic verse: Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses.

Syllable: A single unit of speech sound as written or spoken.

Tautology: A statement redundant in itself.

Triadic/stepped line: A poetic line that unfolds in three descending or “stepped” parts.

Verse: A single metrical line of poetry, or poetry in general (as opposed to prose).

Verse paragraph: A group of verse lines that make up a single rhetorical unit.

Versification: The system of rhyme and meter in poetry.

Volta: Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument.

POETRY WORD LIST INDEX

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