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Anaphora: the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to give emphasis. [1] Apostrophe: an address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if that person were present. Example: "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman. [1] Blason: describes the physical attributes of a subject, usually ...
Crosswordese is the group of words frequently found in US crossword puzzles but seldom found in everyday conversation. The words are usually short, three to five letters, with letter combinations which crossword constructors find useful in the creation of crossword puzzles, such as words that start or end with vowels (or both), abbreviations consisting entirely of consonants, unusual ...
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
The English word "foot" is a translation of the Latin term pes, plural pedes, which in turn is a translation of the Ancient Greek πούς, pl. πόδες. The Ancient Greek prosodists, who invented this terminology, specified that a foot must have both an arsis and a thesis, [ 2 ] that is, a place where the foot was raised ("arsis") and where ...
It allows the poet to stress certain words and shape the meaning of the poem. There are two main divisions within the meters of ancient Greek poetry: lyric and non-lyric meters. "Lyric meters (literally, meters sung to a lyre) are usually less regular than non-lyric meters. The lines are made up of feet of different kinds, and can be of varying ...
The English word "trapeze" is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables ("tra-peze") and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable ("tra-PEZE", rather than "TRA-peze"). A line of iambic pentameter is made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.
In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm. [2] These poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked ...
In the earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in the United States, [27] Europe, and the British colonies. The English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman , Walter de la Mare , and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form.