Vocab Chapters 1 – 7

Poetry

 

Chapter 1: Reading Poetry

Doggerel – a term used for lines whose subject matter is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed

Paraphrase – a prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem in your own language.

Metaphor –

Speaker – is the voice used by the author in the poem; the speaker is often a created identity rather than the author’s actual self.

Anagrams – words made from the letters of other words, such as read and dare

Theme – central idea or meaning

Narrative Poem – a poem that tells a story

Epic – a long narrative poem on a serious subject chronicling heroic deeds and important events

 

Hallmarks of Weak Writing:

Cliché – ideas or expressions that have become tired and trite from overuse.

Stock Responses – predictable, conventional reactions to language, characters, symbols, or situations

Sentimentality – exploits the reader by inducing responses that exceed what the situation warrants; Sentimentality cons readers into falling for the mass murder who is devoted to stray cats, and it requires that we do not think twice about what we’re feeling because those tears shed might disappear under the slightest scrutiny

 

Chapter 2: Writing about Poetry (Pages 63 -66 Important look over important)

Discuss at least 5 of the following:

Diction and Tone                    Irony                                       Form

Images                                     Sound and Rhyme                 Speaker

Figures of Speech                   Rhythm and meter                 setting and situation

Symbols

Chapter 3: Word Choice                                                        

• Diction– choice of words
  • o Poetic Diction – the use of elevated language rather than ordinary language
  • o Formal Diction – consist of dignified, impersonal and elevated use of language
  • o Middle Diction – less formal level of diction; spoken by most educated people
  • o Informal Diction – informal diction, use of slang
    • Colloquially – slang expressions not used by the majority
    • Dialect – informal diction spoken by a definable group of people.
    • Jargon – professional slang
• Denotations and connotations
  • o Denotations – literal, dictionary meanings of a word
  • o Connotations– associations and implications that go beyond a word’s literal meanings.
    • o Persona – a speaker created by a poet
    • o Ambiguity – allows for two or more simultaneous interpretations of a word, a phrase, an action, or a situation, all of which can be supported by the context of a work.
      • Word Order
        • o Syntax – the ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns
• Tone – is the writer’s attitude toward the subject, the mood created by all of the elements in a poem
• Themes
  • Carpe diem – “Seize the day”; Male urging the female that love should not be delayed because time is short.
  • Allusion – is a brief cultural reference to a person, a place, a thing, an event, or an idea in history and economical; allusions imply reading and cultural experiences shard by the poet and reader.

 

Chapter 4: Images                                                         

• Image – is language that addresses the senses.

 

Chapter 5: Figures of Speech

• Figures of speech – are broadly defined as a way of saying one thing in terms or something else.
  • Simile – makes an explicit comparison between two things by using words such as like, as, than, appears, or seems
  • Metaphor – makes a comparison between two unlike things, but it does so implicitly, without words such as like or as. Metaphor asserts the identity of dissimilar things. They are subtle and powerful
  • Implied Metaphor – does not explicitly refer to what it means
  • Extended metaphor – when the metaphor extends to a more general idea
  • Controlling metaphor – when the metaphor extends through the entire poem, extended comparison that serves as an organizing principle for the poem
    • Synecdoche – a figure of speech in which part of something is used to signify the whole (“behind bars” – prison; “wagging tongue” – gossip)
    • Metonymy – something closely related to a subject is substituted for it. (“Silver screen’ – Motion picture; “paper shufflers” – office workers)
    • Personification – giving human attributes to nonhuman things
    • Apostrophe – an address either to someone who is absent or to something nonhuman that cannot hear the speaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend.
    • Overstatement/ hyperbole – exaggeration that adds emphasis without intending to be literally true
    • Understatement – says less than what is intended
    • Paradox – Statement that seems to be self-contradictory but that, on closer inspection, turns out to make sense.
    • Oxymoron – condensed form of a paradox in two contradictory words

 

 

 

Chapter 6: Symbol, Allegory, and Irony

• Symbol – everything that represents something else.
  • Conventional Symbol – something that is recognized by many people to represent certain ideas.
  • Literary or Contextual symbol – goes beyond traditional, public meanings
  • Allegory – (suggestive symbols) is a narration or description usually restricted to a single meaning because its events, actions, characteristics, and objects represent specific abstractions or ideas.
  • Didactic poetry – allegory lends itself for this, which is designed to teach an ethical, moral, or religious lesson.
  • Situational irony – what happens is entirely different from what is expected.
  • Verbal irony – saying something different from what is meant
  • Satire – an example of the literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in an effort to expose it or correct it.
  • Dramatic Irony – is used when a writer allows a reader to know more about a situation than a character does.  

Chapter 7: Sounds

• Ballad – Told a story that was sung from one generation to the next until it was finally transcribed.
• Literary ballads – narrative form that imitates ballads.
• Onomatopoeia – words that resemble sounds it denotes: quack, buzz, rattle
• Alliteration – repetition of the same consonant sounds as the beginning of nearby words: “descending dewdrops,” “luscious lemons.”
• Assonance – is the repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby words: “asleep under a tree,” “time and tide,” “haunt” and “awesome,” “each evening”
• Euphony – lines that are musically pleasant to the ear and smooth: “A Bird came down the Walk-“)
• Cacophony – lines that are discordant and difficult to pronounce: “never my numb plunker fumbles”
• Rhyme – is a way of creating sound patterns
  • Broad definition: consists of two or more words or phrases that repeat the same sounds.
  • Ear Rhyme – spelling are similar but pronunciations are not, as with bough and cough, or brow and blow.
  • End Rhyme – Comes at the ends of the lines
  • “It runs through the reeds

And away it proceeds.

Through the meadow and glade,

In the sun and in the shade.”

• Internal Rhyme – places at least one of the rhymed words within the line
• “In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud”
  • Masculine Rhyme – rhyming of single-syllable words
  • “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough.”

• Feminine Rhyme – consists of a rhymed stressed syllable followed by one or more rhymed unstressed syllables
• “Lord counfound this surly sister,
• Blight her brow and blotch and blister”
  • Exact Rhymes – all before are examples of this; they share the same stressed vowel sounds as well as any sounds that follow the vowel.
  • Near Rhyme – the sounds are almost but not exactly alike
  • Consonance – an identical consonant sound preceded by a different vowel sound: home, same; worth, breath; trophy, daffy.