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| A reference to a statement, a person, a place, or an event from literature, history religion, mythology, politics, sports, science, or pop culture. For example, O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” alludes to the Christmas Story of the three wise men. |
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| : The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." (from Hopkins’s "In the Valley of the Elwy") |
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| Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, /When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee." |
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| The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself." |
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| A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. Some types of ballads are old folk ballads and literary ballads. Folk ballads were composed by unknown singers and passed along orally for decades before they were written down. Literary ballads are written in imitation of the old ballads. |
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| : A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them. |
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| The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." |
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| The repetition at close intervals of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words (for example, "book-plaque-thicker") |
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| A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings /That then I scorn to change my state with kings." |
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: A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. The following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two dactyls per line:
Higgledy, piggledy,
Emily Dickinson
Gibbering, jabbering. |
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The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My Son" the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words:
To be specific, between the peony and rose
Plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;
Beauty is nectar and nectar, in a desert, saves--...
and always serve bread with your wine.
But, son,
always serve wine. |
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| The selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction. |
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| A lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues." |
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| A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. Examples from western literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost. |
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| : A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole |
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| A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot. |
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| : 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. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples. |
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| A three-line poem, Japanese in origin, narrowly conceived of as a fixed form in which the lines contain respectively five, seven, and five syllables (in American practice this requirement is frequently dispensed with). Haiku are generally concerned with some aspect of nature and present a single image or two juxtaposed images without comment, relying on suggestion rather than on explicit statement to communicate their meaning |
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| (overstatement): A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth. For example: "I'm starved!" Hyperbole’s opposite is meiosis (understatement): A figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants. For example: "If, for instance, upon sitting down to a loaded dinner plate, you say, 'This looks like a nice snack,' you are actually stating less than the truth" |
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| An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. See Foot. |
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| : A basic measure of English poetry, five iambic feet in each line. Blank verse is in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Heroic verse is in rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
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: A concrete representation of a sense impression (sight, smell, sound, taste, touch), a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous examples is Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. |
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| The pattern of related, comparative, sensory aspects of language, particularly of images that engage the senses (sight, smell, sound, taste, touch), in a literary work. For example, imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery. |
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| : A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado." |
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| is a short verse of five lines known for its humorous wit, following an AABBA rhyming pattern. |
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| A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of the poems in this book are lyrics. Ho Xuan Ho’o’ng “Country Scene" epitomizes this genre: “The waterfall plunges in mist. Who can describe this desolate scene/ . . . A bell is tolling, fading, fading/just like love. Only poetry lasts.” |
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| directly compares using the verb to be. |
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| develops a comparison throughout the lines of the poem |
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| suggests a comparison without stating it directly. From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of language. Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing and interpreting and unraveling them |
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| The measured pattern of rhythmic accents of stressed and unstressed syllables in poems. See Foot and Iamb. |
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| Shakespearean or English sonnet |
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| Petrarchan or Italian sonnet |
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