Monday- Poetry Terms

Alliteration- the repetition of an initial consonant sound
Anaphora- the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses
Antithesis- the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases
Apostrophe- breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, an inanimate object, or a nonexistent character
Assonance- identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words
Chiasmus- A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed
Euphemism- the substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit
Hyperbole- an extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened affect
Irony- the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. a statement or situation where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or presentation of the idea.
Litotes- a figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
Metaphor- an implied comparison between two unlike things that actually important in common
Metonym- a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it
Onomatopeia- the use of words that imitate the sounds associated with objects or actions they refer to
Oxymoron- a figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side
Paradox- a statement that appears to contradict itself
Personification- a figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities
Pun- a play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words
Simile- a stated comparison between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common
Synecdoche- a figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole or the whole for a part
Understatement- a figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is