English Poetry Terms Flashcards

Poetry Terms

• Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; closest to natural English speech; prevalent in Shakespeare's works and traditional narrative/dramatic poetry.

• Classicism: Embodies the artistic principles and ideals of beauty from Greek and Roman art, architecture, and literature.

• Epic: A long narrative poem in formal style, emphasizing serious subjects, heroic deeds, and events significant to a culture or nation.

• Free Verse: A poetry form lacking established meter, rhyme, and stanzaic patterns; employs natural speech rhythms and line breaks determined by emphasis and pauses.

• Limerick: A humorous five-line poem with a specific meter and an aabba rhyme scheme; lines 1, 2, and 5 consist of three feet, while 3 and 4 have two feet; classified as fixed form poetry.

• Sestina: A structured poem of thirty-six lines, organized into six sestets and one tercet; features repetitive end words from the first sestet in varied order across subsequent stanzas, often reflecting pivotal themes.

• Sonnet: A lyric poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter; includes Italian and English sonnet forms, each with unique structural characteristics.

• Italian Sonnet: Known as the Petrarchan sonnet; consists of an octave with an abbaabba rhyme scheme and a sestet featuring varying rhymes; typically presents a problem in the octave resolved in the sestet.

• English Sonnet: Also called the Shakespearean sonnet; has three quatrains and a final couplet with an abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme; offers thematic flexibility due to its four-part structure.

• Villanelle: A fixed form of nineteen lines, composed of five tercets followed by a quatrain; features repeated lines from the initial tercet as refrain lines throughout the poem.

• Couplet: Two consecutive rhyming lines in poetry that typically share the same meter.

• Heroic Couplet: A special type of couplet written in rhymed iambic pentameter, often used in narrative poetry.

• Foot: The basic metrical unit of poetry; consists of one stressed syllable combined with one or two unstressed syllables.

• Iambic Foot: A foot comprised of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable; recognized as the most prevalent metrical foot in English poetry.

• Trochaic Foot: A metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.

• Anapestic Foot: A three-syllable foot containing two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.

• Dactylic Foot: A metrical unit with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.

• Spondee: A foot characterized by two stressed syllables; typically used for variation or emphasis rather than as a sustained metrical foot.

• Octave: An eight-line stanza, often constituting a section of a sonnet.

• Quatrain: The most common four-line stanza in English poetry, with diverse meters and rhyme schemes.

• Sestet: A stanza made up of exactly six lines.

• Stanza: A grouped set of lines in poetry, delineated by space, with a defined meter and rhyme pattern.

• Tercet: A stanza comprised of three lines.

• Allegory: A narrative with a single, often symbolic meaning, where events and actions represent deeper truths or concepts.