1. Poetic Elements and Devices

2. Genres of Poetry:
Lyric: Highly musical, expresses feelings to the listener.
Narrative: A poem that tells a story in verse.
Concrete: Shape poems. The shape gives it meaning.
Blank Verse: Sounds like the way we speak. UNRHYMED IAMBIC PENTAMETER.

3. Genres Continued:
Free Verse: No specific rhyme scheme or rhythm necessary.

4. Poetic Elements Rhyme: Repetition of sounds at the ends of words.
Rhythm: The beats. The way your voice naturally stresses certain parts of a line.
Stanza: A group of lines in a poem considered as a unit.

5. Elements Continued:
Imagery: a word or phrase that appeals to one of the five senses.
Metaphors: A comparison, one thing is spoken of as if it were something else. Ex. Death is the long sleep.
Similes: A comparison, using like or as. Ex. Death is like the long sleep.
Personification: giving human characteristics to non-human things.

6. Sound Effects: Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds.
Alliteration: Repetition of initial (beginning) consonant sounds. Ex. She sells sea shells by the seashore.
Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds in a word of phrase.
Onomatopoeia: Words that imitate sounds. Ex. gurgle, quack, hiss.

7. Elements Continued:
Hyperbole: gross exaggeration for effect: overstatement.
Oxymoron: contradictory terms brought together to express a paradox for strong effect.
Ex. Beautiful tyrant, jumbo shrimp

8. Elements Continued:
Euphemism: a figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness, such as “deceased” for “dead” or “remains” for “corpse.”
Parable: a story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question.
Paradox: a statement that seems to be self-contradicting, but in fact, is true.

9. Elements Continued:
Parody: a composition that imitates the style of another composition normally for comic effect.
Heroic couplet: two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc, with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit.
Iamb: a two-syllable foot with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The iamb is the most common foot in English poetry.

10. Elements Continued:
Internal rhyme: rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end.
Pentameter: a line containing five feet.
Hexameter: a line containing six feet.
Sonnet: normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem with two rhyming couplets at the end.
Tetrameter: a line of four feet.
Terza rima: a three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc.