Key Literary Terms for Analyzing Poetry

Anaphora: a rhetorical device involving the repetition of a word or group of words in

successive clauses. For example the repetition of “I’ve known rivers” in Hughes’s “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead
or absent person is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.

Assonance (vocalic rhyme): the repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together.
Example: bean-green in line 12 of Plath’s “Daddy.”

Confessional poetry: designates a type of narrative and lyric verse, given impetus by Robert
Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), which deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical
experiences of the poet’s own life. Confessional poems were written by Allen Ginsberg,
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and other American poets.

Domestic poem: represents and comments on a protagonist’s relationship to one or more

family members, usually a parent, child or spouse. Appeared on the scene in the 1950s in the
poetry of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and others. A reaction against the
modernist aesthetic of impersonality.

End-stopped line: a line of verse in which the pause in reading coincides with the end of a
line. This is in contract with the run-on line or enjambment, in which the pressure of the
uncompleted syntactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse-line.

Eye rhyme: gives to the eye the impression of an exact rhyme, but does not possess identical
sounds. Example: know-now in lines 74-75 of “Daddy.”

Foot: a group of syllables forming a metrical unit; a unit of rhythm. The most common feet in
English are the iamb (u /), trochee (/ u), anapaest (u u /), dactyl (/ u u), and spondee (/ /),
where “u” indicates an unstressed syllable and “/” a stressed syllable.

Internal rhyme: occurs when two or more words rhyme within a single line of verse.
Example: foot-root (here pronounced /rut/) in “Daddy,” line 23.

Lyric: a fairly short poem (often between a dozen and thirty lines) which usually expresses
the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker (not necessarily the poet) in a personal and
subjective fashion. This is a very common type of poem and Dickinson’s “I like a look of
Agony” is an example.

Metaphor: a figure of speech in which one thing is implicitly described in terms of another
through substitution. For example:

The ship sailed the seas. The ship ploughed the seas.

The plough ploughed the field The plough sailed (across) the field.

ENG1304 Nissen Literary Terms Poetry

This is in contrast to simile, which is an explicit comparison between two things using “like”
or “as.” For example, the comparison between the branches of the birch tree and girls drying
their hair in the sun in Frost’s “Birches.”

Meter (rhythm): refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse.
The following terms denote the number of metrical feet per line: monometer (1); dimeter (2);
trimeter (3); tetrameter (4); pentameter (5); hexameter (6); heptameter (7); octameter (8)

Metonymy: a figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for
the things itself, the part standing for the whole (pars pro toto). Thus we speak of “the Stage”
when we mean the theatre, “the crowned heads of Europe” when we mean its kings and
queens and we ask “Do you like Ibsen?” when we want to know if someone enjoys his plays.

Persona: the “I” who speaks in a poem or novel or other form of literature and who is not the
same as the author.

Rhyme scheme: the pattern of rhymes in a stanza or poem, usually represented by small
letters (for example, abab or ababbcc).

Subject: what a literary text is about. In other words, the general topic of the work of
literature. See also theme.

Symbol: an object which represents or stands for something else. Scales symbolize justice,
the orb and scepter symbolize monarchy and rule, a dove symbolizes peace, etc. There are
various kinds of symbols. A private symbol is one whose meaning is constructed in an
author’s individual text or in the body of his or her works or may be used to signify a private
meaning attached to an object by a character. The opposite of the private symbol is the
universal symbol, that is a symbol taken from the language, nation or culture to which a given
literary text belongs and which will be familiar to a large part of the reading audience.

Theme: what the author wants to say about the subject (above). In other words, the specific
message or understanding an author has of a topic in a specific text.

ENG1304 Nissen Literary Terms Poetry