Poetic devices are tricks poets use to make a poem more powerful, and, ultimately, to make it a poem. Without these devices, poetry is prose. In some cases, poetic devices are ones usually thought of in terms of short stories: i.e., imagery, characters, structure, plot, etc. And you will often find poetic devices in prose (metaphors, symbols, alliteration).
I. Words
1. Denotation: The dictionary definition of a word
2. Connotation: The emotional, psychological or social overtones of a word
3. Diction: This refers to the specific words and types of words selected by a writer to produce a desired effect. (specific vs. general, concrete vs. abstract, levels of diction: middle or neutral, informal or low; dialect, idiom, slang, jargon)
4. Imagery: Literary references to sensory impressions, making for immediacy and vividness.
5. Tone: The means by which a poet reveals attitudes and feelings. Certain tones include irony (situational, verbal, dramatic) and satire including a host of other emotions and attitudes.
6. Symbolism & Allusion: A symbol is an object or person that represents something else, as a flag represents our country. An allusion is a reference to some person, historical event, work of art, etc.; Virginia Scott, in her poem "Snow," alludes to Socrates and his drinking of poison made from hemlock when she writes of the "green trees black in the hemlock night."
II. Word Order
1. Syntax: This refers to word order and sentence structure
2. Repetition
3. Parallelism: a rhetorical figure in which the same grammatical forms are repeated in the same order (think Whitman)
III. Figurative Language
1. Metaphor: A comparison between two unlike things using "is."
2. Simile: A comparison between two unlike things using "as" or "like."
3. Paradox: a device in which a seeming contradiction may reveal an unexpected truth.
4. Apostrophe: the addressing of discourse to a real or imagined listener. (I write this poem to you, Walt Whitman... I speak my words to you, O Autumn!")
5. Personification: the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or abstractions.
6. Synecdoche: a device in which the part stands for a whole. "All hands on board."
7. Metonymy: a device whereby one thing is used as a substitute for another with which it is closely identified. "Word today came from the White House..." (it actually came from someone in the White House)
8. Synesthesia: a union or fusion of separate sensations or feelings. With this device, a poet describes one type of perception or thought with words that are appropriate to another. Andrew Marvell, for example, in his poem "The Garden," speaks of a "green thought in a green shade" in reference to thinking conducive to life and the preservation and nurturing of living things. A thought cannot be green, nevertheless, "green thought" makes vivid sense."
9. Pun: Word play in which the writer surprisingly reveals that words with totally different meanings have similar or identical sounds. "I'm like a firefly in the rain: I'm de-lighted."
10. Overstatement: (hyperbole): a device of exaggeration.
11. Understatement: the deliberate underplaying or undervaluing of a thing.
IV. Sound Devices
1. Rhythm: Think of rhythm in a poem in terms of rough or smooth, fast or slow; scan a poem to find repeating patterns or where the pattern is varied. Often a poet establishes a pattern and breaks it where he or she wants you to pay close attention, as in Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright," where he writes: "The land was ours before we were the lands." Here, the off-beat is on "we" to emphasize the community that the people in America have become.
2. Know the various names for lengths of lines: dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter or septenary, octameter.
3. Know the various names for kinds of beats:
iamb: u / (the winds) trochee: / u (flower) spondee: / / (brute beast) pyrrhic: u u (on the)
anapest: u u / (by the dawn's) dactyl: / u u (mightiest)
4. alliteration: the repetition of consonant sound: "While pensive poets, painful vigils keep."
5. assonance: the repetition of vowel sound: "The great rain..."
6. onomatopoeia: a blending of consonant and vowel sounds designed to imitate or suggest a sense or action. Think of it, too, as imitating a sound in nature (bow-wow).
7. Euphony & cacophony: pleasant and unpleasant sounds: "Thy hair soft-lifted by winnowing wind" is euphonious while "black bug's blood" sounds unpleasant.
8. Rhyme: know masculine rhyme: combine & refine; feminine rhyme: seasons & reasons; slant rhyme (also called near rhyme, off rhyme, half rhyme): could & solitude; eye-rhyme (sight rhyme): prove & love.
9. Rhyme scheme: the pattern of rhyme in a poem.
V. Poetic Forms
1. Closed forms
a. blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
b. sonnet (three kinds: Elizabethan, Italian and Spenserian)
c. villanelle: "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke
d. sestina: Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" (not in your text)
e. pantoum: a rarely used form
f. closed or heroic couplet: two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter that are end-stopped.
g. ballad: long series of quatrains in which lines of iambic tetrameter alternate with iambic trimeter with an "abcb, defe" rhyme scheme: "Barbara Allan" is an example.
h. lyric: originally designed to be sung; the individual stanzas of a lyric may be built from any combination of single lines, couplets, triplets and quatrains; the line lengths may shift and a great deal of metrical variation is common. A. E. Houseman's "Loveliest of Trees" is an example.
i. ode: stanzaic form far more complex than the lyric with intricate rhyme schemes and varying line lengths. "Ode to a Nightingale," is an example.
j. epigram: a short, witty poem usually humorous or satiric
k. epitaph: lines that mark the death of someone.
l. prose poems: poems that look like prose and appear in prose form.
m. visual poetry, also called shaped verse or concrete poetry: Poems that look like what they're about: see e.e. cummings's "Grasshopper"
2. Open form: any darn thing you want to do.