February 27 - Literary Devices
1. Characteristics of Poetry
2. Sound Devices
3. Three Main Types of Poetry
4. Other Important Poetry Definitions
- Figurative Language is language that is used imaginatively, rather than literally, to express ideas or feelings in new ways.
- Similes use like or as to compare two unlike things. (Example: Her hair blonde hair glistened in the sun like pure gold.)
- Metaphors are comparisons without using like or as. (Example: Gym class is torture.)
- Personification gives human traits to non-human things. (Example: The wind whispered in my ear.)
- Imagery is a descriptive language that creates vivid impressions (images) in the reader’s mind. (The deep blue waves of the ocean cascaded over the sandy shore.)
- Poets use Sensory Language to create imagery in their poems. Sensory Language provides details related to the five senses- sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell.
- Hyperbole is extreme exaggeration. (Example: My head is going to explode!)
- The theme is the central topic or idea of a text. (Examples of themes: the importance of friendship, life is fragile, choices have consequences)
- An allusion is a reference to a person, place, thing in history or another work of literature. (Examples: The Pixar movies contain allusions to other Pixar movies. Click on this link to see some of them!)
- Tone is the attitude of the poet towards the poem. (Tone and auThor both have T's in each word.)
- Mood is the overall feeling that the reader has towards a work. (mooD and reaDer both have D's in each word.)
2. Sound Devices
- Rhythm is the pattern created by stressed and unstressed syllables of words in a sequence. (Example: In Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening", the rhythm in the first line is whose WOODS these ARE i THINK i KNOW.)
- A pattern of rhythm is called meter.
- When you stress a word, you make it sound more important and pronounced than other words in a line of poetry. Unstressed words are said without importance.
- A syllable is a single unit of sound.
- Rhyme is the repetition of identical sounds in the last syllables of words.
- A pattern of rhyme at the ends of lines is called a rhyme scheme.
- A couplet is a pair of two lines in a row that rhyme.
- Alliteration, or initial rhyme, is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds of words. (Aka: Same consonant sounds at the beginning of words. Example: Peter Picked a Pack of Purple Peppers)
- Assonance, or vowel rhyme, is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words. (Aka: Same vowel sounds in nearby words. Example: whO flEW to the mOOn in jUne?)
- Consonance is the repetition of consonants within nearby words in which the preceding vowels differ. (Aka: Same consonant sounds in the middle or end of words. Example: The fuZZy beeS were buSy buZZing.)
- Onomatopoeia is the use of words whose sounds imitate their meaning. (Example: Bam! Pow! Zap! Moo!)
3. Three Main Types of Poetry
- Narrative poetry tells a story and has a plot, characters, and setting. An epic is a long narrative poem about the feats of gods or heroes. A ballad is a songlike narrative poem that has short stanzas and a refrain (chorus).
- Dramatic poetry tells a story using a character’s own thoughts or spoken statements.
- Lyric poems express the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker. They are the most common type of poem in modern literature.
4. Other Important Poetry Definitions
- To paraphrase a text means to rephrase and explain it in your own words.
- An allegory is a story where the characters or events are symbols of human ideas. (Example: Aesop's fables, such as the Tortoise and the Hare, all teach lessons using animals to represent different kinds of people.)
- A caesura is an intended pause in a line of poetry.
- A stanza is a formal separation in a poem (like a paragraph in an essay).
- Enjambment is when the poet writes complete sentences that contain more than one line of poetry.
- Ekphrasis is a written description or commentary on another work of art. Ekphrastic poetry is a poem about another work of art.
- Blank verse is a type of poem, written in unrhymed (iambic pentameter) verse, where there are 10 syllables in every line.
- Free verse is a type of poetry written without regular meter or rhyme scheme. No rules!
- Poetic license is the individual liberty taken by a poet.
- An explication is a detailed explanation of something. To explicate a poem means to analyze and explain its meaning in detail.