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. (Contrast with epiphora and epistrophe.)

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 effect.

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 have something important in common.

Metonymy- 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.

Onomatopoeia- The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the 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 (usually formed with "like" or "as") between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities.

Synecdoche- A figure of speech in which part is used to represent the whole (for example, ABCs for alphabet) or the whole for a part ( "England won the World Cup in 1996").

Understatement- Afigure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.