British Poetry

Unit Review Sheet

Facts and Definitions

Lesson 1: Rhythm and Meter

• Modernism is a movement in the arts, including poetry, that threw out traditional forms in favor of novel, original ones. In poetry it brought about forms such as free verse.
• Meter is the rhythm of poetry, as measured in stressed and unstressed syllables. All poems have meter, but some types of poetry, such as sonnets, have their own defined meter that all poems of that type must follow.
• Iambic pentameter is a specific meter with five feet per line. Each foot includes an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Lesson 2: Voice and Rhyme

• Sonnets have fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter. They often use an abbaabbacdcdcd rhyme scheme. They were commonly written by male writers to their muses. As you will read, muses are usually women, goddesses, or emotions that inspire poets and authors.
• Munificence is a synonym for generosity.

Lesson 3: Graphic Elements

• Mete means to punish fairly.
• Azure is a pale blue color with purple undertones.
• Blank verse uses iambic pentameter but does not rhyme.

Lesson 4: Figurative Language

• Turbid means hazy, cloudy, or opaque.
• Cloying means something is so sweet that it is disgusting.
• A metaphor compares two ideas or objects without using the words "like" or "as." For example, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," from Shakespeare, is a metaphor comparing the woman the poem is written to and a summer day.
• A simile compares two ideas or objects, using the words "like" or "as." For example, in "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," the line, "Like a diamond in the sky," compares a star and a diamond.
• Idioms are common phrases that mean something different than the words say. For example, "raining cats and dogs" means heavily raining.
• Personification means writing as if an inanimate object or natural element has a human personality.
• Onomatopoeia means words that sound like what they are describing, like whoop, smash, or crackle.
• Connotation is the feeling and meaning that is implied by a word and its emotional associations as opposed to its explicit dictionary definition.

Lesson 5: Allusions

• A facade is a decorative front on a building or an artificial presentation of someone or something that disguises its true personality.
• An armistice is a truce or ceasefire.
• Poets use allusions to make the reader think of a person, place, historical event, or work of art or literature without directly naming it. Allusions use words or phrases that make the reader think of the desired event, person, or work. Stillwell alludes to the play Dr. Faustus in "Still Falls the Rain" by using 3 words from the play.

Lesson 6: Tone

• Free verse uses short lines of poetry with no set rhyme or meter.

Lesson 7: Themes

• To juxtapose means to put two or more things next to one another.
• A villanelle is a poem with a strict format with only two rhyme sounds.
• An elegy is a poem written to honor someone who has died.

Final Project: Autobiography of a Poet

• [none]