Poetry

Narrative Poetry  A verse that tells a story  Example: “The Raven”, by Edgar Allen Poe, page 244 of text

Dramatic Poetry  A verse that relies heavily on dramatic elements such as monologue (speech by a single character) or dialogue (conversation involving two or more characters)  Example: “Home Burial” by Robert Frost – page 513 of text

Lyric Poetry  A highly musical verse that expresses the emotions of a speaker.

Types of Lyric Poetry  Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem that follows one of a number of different rhyme schemes.  Many sonnets deal with the subject of love.  Example: “Sonnet XXX” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Page 19 of text

Types of Lyric Poetry  Ode: lofty lyric poem on a serious theme.  Example: “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. Page 199 of text.

Types of Lyric Poetry  Free Verse: poetry that avoids use of regular rhyme, meter, or division into stanzas.  Example: “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, page 365 of text.

Types of Lyric Poetry  Elegaic Poetry: expresses a speaker’s feelings of loss, often because of the death of a loved one or friend.  Example: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman, page 387 of text.

Types of Lyric Poetry  Imagist Poetry: a lyric poem that presents a single vivid picture in words. Example: “The Red Wheelbarrow”, by William Carlos Williams, page 532 of text

Meter  Meter is a technique of poetry.  Meter is the rhythmical pattern of the poem.  The rhythmical units are called “feet”  A “foot” consists of weakly stressed and strongly stressed syllables arranged in a pattern.  See page 15 of text for examples

Stanza Forms  Couplet: 2 lines  Triplet or Tercet: 3 lines  Quatrain: 4 lines  Quintain:5 lines  Sestet6 lines  Heptastich7 lines  Octave8 lines

Poetry Sound  Rhythm: the pattern of beats or stresses in a line of verse or prose.

Poetry Sounds  Rhyme: the repetition of sounds at the ends of words. End rhyme: rhyme that occurs at the end of lines. Internal rhyme: rhyme within a line. Slant rhyme: substitution of assonance or consonance for true rhyme. Example: bear/bore, or world/boiled.

Poetry Sounds  Alliteration: the repetition of consonant SOUNDS!!!  Example: Sally sold seashells by the seashore.

Poetry Sounds  Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds  Example: “…weak and weary…”

Poetry Sounds  Onomatopoeia: sound words  Example: “POW”, “ CLINK”, “BAM”

Figurative Language  Writing or speech meant to be understood imaginatively instead of literally.

Types of Figurative Language  Hyperbole: an exaggeration made for rhetorical effect.

Types of Figurative Language  Metaphor: one thing is spoken or written about as if it were another  Example: The teacher was a tall giant when she entered the room.

Types of Figurative Language  Personification: Giving human characteristics to something non-human.  Example: When people give their cars a gender – “When I hit the accelerator, she moves!” A car obviously does not have a gender.

Types of Figurative Language  Simile: A comparison using like or as.  Example: I’m as hungry as a horse!

Types of Figurative Language  Synecdoche: the name or part of something is used in place of the name of the whole, or vice versa.  Example: The use of hired hands for laborers.

Rhetorical Techniques  Antithesis: words, phrases, or ideas are strongly contrasted – often by means of repetition of grammatical structures.  Example: Lofty land / little men

Rhetorical Techniques  Chiasmus: the order of occurrence of words or phrases is reversed.  Example: We can weather the changes, but we can’t change the weather.

Rhetorical Techniques  Parallelism: equal weight of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form.  Example: Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Rhetorical Techniques  Repetition: the writer’s conscious reuse of a sound, word, phrase, sentence, or other element.

Rhetorical Techniques  Rhetorical Question: a question is asked for effect but not meant to be answered.

Abstract or Abstraction  Something that you cannot see, touch, or feel with your hands, but it generates an emotion.  Example: Love, Death, Birth, etc.

Fulcrum  A fulcrum is a poem that has balance – similar to a see-saw.  It follows the format of an equal number of words on the first and third lines.  The second line is shorter, but has the most impact, and the top and bottom lines balance on its axis.

Acrostic  A poem where the first letter of each word spells a word when you put them all together.  Example: P – Perfect E – Excellent N – Nice N – Neat Y - Yellow

Word Walk Poem  The first word of the first line becomes the second word of the second line, then the third word of the third line, fourth word of the fourth line, and so forth.

The End!!!