Poetry I

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published English Lit course framework for Unit 2. English Lit publishes no per-unit weighting, so there is no percentage to chase here.

Lessons in this unit

• Imagery & the Senses13 min · 3 objectivesIdentify imagery and the senses a poet engages · Explain how imagery creates mood and conveys emotion · Connect a pattern of images to a poem’s meaning
• Figurative Language14 min · 3 objectivesIdentify metaphor, simile, personification, and other figures of speech · Explain how a figure of speech creates meaning beyond the literal · Analyze an extended metaphor or conceit across a passage
• Structure, Form & Speaker14 min · 3 objectivesAnalyze how form, stanza, and line breaks shape a poem’s meaning · Identify a poem’s speaker and distinguish speaker from poet · Explain how a shift (volta) marks a turn in thought or feeling

Every term in Unit 2

All 56 terms we publish for Poetry I, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Imagery

Sensory detail. Identify the dominant sense and its pattern (Keats: taste and weight; Shelley: barren visual expanse). “Vivid imagery” alone earns nothing; the pattern and its effect do.

Sonnet forms

Petrarchan: octave + sestet, rhyme abbaabba cdecde (problem/resolution). Shakespearean: three quatrains + couplet, ababcdcdefefgg (development/epigram). Form predicts where the argument turns.

Lyric, narrative and dramatic poetry

Lyric expresses a speaker's state; narrative tells a story; dramatic presents a speaker addressing a situation. The mode sets what counts as evidence.

Dramatic monologue

A single speaker addresses a silent listener at a charged moment, revealing more than intended — Browning's "My Last Duchess" is the type case. Irony arises from the gap between what the speaker means and what we understand.

Elegy

A poem of mourning, conventionally moving through grief toward some form of consolation. Where an elegy refuses consolation, the refusal is the argument.

Ode

A formal address to a subject, elevated in diction. Keats's odes typically stage an approach to an object and a retreat from it, so the ending is where the thinking happens.

Ballad

Narrative poem in quatrains, often alternating four and three beats, with refrain and abrupt transitions. Descends from oral tradition, which explains its repetitions.

Villanelle

Nineteen lines on two rhymes with two refrains repeating in a fixed pattern. The form enacts obsession, which is why so many villanelles are about loss.

Sestina

Six sestets plus a tercet, cycling the same six end-words. The constraint forces the words into shifting meanings, which is the form's real subject.

Terza rima

Interlocking tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc. Each stanza generates the next, producing a sense of forward compulsion — Dante's form.

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter. The default for English dramatic and meditative verse because it approximates speech while retaining measure.

Free verse

Verse without regular meter or rhyme. Not formless: line break, syntax, repetition and white space do the structural work rhyme would otherwise do.

Prose poem

Written in paragraphs but working by compression, image and sound rather than narrative. Its form asks the reader to bring poetic attention to prose shape.

Trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee

Trochee is stressed-unstressed; anapest two unstressed then stressed; dactyl stressed then two unstressed; spondee two stressed. Naming a foot is only useful if you say what the rhythm does.

Trimeter, tetrameter, hexameter

Three, four and six feet per line. Shorter lines quicken and can trivialize; longer lines slow and can grow ceremonial.

Sprung rhythm

Hopkins's metric counting stresses rather than syllables, so a foot may hold several unstressed syllables. Produces speech-like acceleration inside strict form.

Scansion in practice

Mark stresses, identify the base meter, then find the departures. The departures carry the meaning — regular meter is the background against which a substitution registers.

Feminine and masculine endings

A line ending on an unstressed syllable is feminine; on a stressed syllable, masculine. Feminine endings soften closure and are common where a thought trails.

Internal rhyme

Rhyme within a line rather than at its end. Speeds a line and binds phrases that syntax keeps apart.

Eye rhyme

Words that look like rhymes but do not sound alike — love and move. Signals the visual dimension of poems and often marks historical pronunciation shift.

Refrain

A repeated line or phrase. Because context changes around it, a refrain rarely means the same thing twice; tracking the change is the analysis.

Anaphora and epistrophe

Anaphora repeats at the beginnings of successive clauses, epistrophe at the ends. Both build insistence; anaphora accumulates, epistrophe lands.

Chiasmus

Reversed parallel structure — ABBA. Creates the sense of a closed loop, which is why it suits statements of paradox or mutual definition.

Zeugma and syllepsis

One word governing two others in different senses. The yoking of a concrete and an abstract term produces wit and usually judgment.

Synecdoche vs metonymy

Synecdoche substitutes part for whole; metonymy substitutes an associated thing. "All hands on deck" is synecdoche; "the crown decided" is metonymy.

Metaphysical conceit

An extended, intellectually elaborate comparison between unlike things — Donne's compasses. Judged by how far it can be sustained without collapsing.

Pathetic fallacy

Attributing human feeling to nature. Distinct from personification in that it specifically mirrors a character's emotional state in the landscape.

Litotes and understatement

Affirming by negating the opposite — "no small feat." Produces dry emphasis, and in some traditions signals restraint as a value.

Hyperbole in verse

Deliberate exaggeration. In love poetry it is conventional, so the interesting question is when a poet exceeds the convention or refuses it.

Euphony and cacophony

Pleasant against harsh sound. Liquids and long vowels smooth a line; plosives and clustered consonants roughen it, and the roughness is usually doing semantic work.

Sibilance

Repeated s and sh sounds. Hisses, hushes or suggests secrecy depending on context — the effect is never fixed by the sound alone.

Concrete and abstract diction

Concrete words name what can be sensed; abstract words name concepts. Poems that earn abstraction usually do so by grounding it in the concrete first.

Register and tonal shift

A move between formal and colloquial vocabulary. Marks a change in the speaker's stance and is one of the most reliable places to locate a volta in free verse.

White space and the line break

Where a line ends creates a hesitation the sentence does not have. A line break mid-phrase creates two readings, one held for a beat before the next line resolves it.

Romanticism in poetry

Emphasis on individual feeling, imagination, nature and the sublime, against Enlightenment order — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley.

The sublime

The experience of something vast enough to overwhelm comprehension, producing awe mixed with terror. Distinguished from the beautiful, which is contained and pleasing.

Imagism

Early modernist insistence on the direct treatment of the thing, economy of language, and rhythm in the musical phrase rather than in the metronome.

Confessional poetry

Mid-century mode drawing openly on private life and mental illness — Lowell, Plath, Sexton. The speaker invites biographical reading, which is precisely why the speaker-poet distinction still matters.

Speaker

The voice of the poem, who is not the poet. Distinguishing them is the first move in any poetry analysis.

Structure of a poem

How it is organized into lines, stanzas and sections. Structural turns often mark the poem's argument more clearly than any single image.

Stanza forms

Couplet (2), tercet (3), quatrain (4), sestet (6), octave (8). Naming the form matters only when it does something to meaning.

Volta

The turn in a poem, classically at line 9 of a Petrarchan sonnet or the closing couplet of a Shakespearean one. Where the argument changes direction.

Enjambment

A sentence running past the line break. Creates momentum, and can suspend a meaning that the next line then revises.

End-stopped line

A line whose end coincides with a grammatical pause. Produces containment and finality, in contrast to enjambment's spill.

Caesura

A pause within a line, usually punctuated. Breaks rhythm, and often marks a hesitation or a change of thought.

Meter and iambic pentameter

Five iambs — unstressed then stressed — per line, the meter closest to English speech rhythm, which is why it dominates English verse.

Metrical substitution

A deviation from the established meter. The deviation is where to look, since it is the poet breaking a pattern they set up.

Rhyme scheme

The pattern of end rhymes, lettered ABAB and so on. Note where the pattern breaks, not only what it is.

Slant rhyme

Near rather than exact rhyme. Creates unease or incompleteness where a full rhyme would resolve.

Alliteration, assonance, consonance

Repetition of initial consonants, of vowel sounds, and of consonants anywhere. All bind words together so the reader hears a connection.

Diction in poetry

Word choice carrying connotation and register. In a compressed form every word is doing more work, so diction analysis pays more.

Extended metaphor and conceit

A metaphor sustained through a passage or whole poem; a conceit is an elaborate and surprising one, characteristic of metaphysical poetry.

Apostrophe

Direct address to someone absent, dead or abstract. Creates intimacy and lets the poem argue with what cannot answer.

Paradox and oxymoron

A paradox is a self-contradictory statement that proves true on reflection; an oxymoron is a two-word compression of one.

Ambiguity

Language sustaining more than one reading at once. In poetry this is usually deliberate richness rather than a failure of clarity.

Tone shift in poetry

A change in the speaker's attitude, often at a volta or a stanza break. Locating it usually locates the poem's argument.

What examiners penalize here

• On the poetry essay, track imagery as a **pattern across the whole poem**, not one line in isolation. Noting where the imagery shifts — and what that shift reveals — is the kind of structural insight that lifts an essay toward the top of the reasoning row.
• When a poem sustains one image, analyze it as an **extended metaphor**: trace how the comparison develops and what each new detail adds. Reading the whole arc of the metaphor — not just spotting it once — is what earns depth on the poetry essay.
• On the poetry essay, connect **form to content**: show how the shape enacts the meaning. "The rigid, end-stopped couplets mirror the speaker’s emotional restraint, until the enjambment in the final lines lets feeling spill over." Form-as-meaning is prime sophistication territory.

Practice English Lit

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 4 units of AP English Literature & Composition

1. Unit 1 · Short Fiction I
2. Unit 2 · Poetry I
3. Unit 3 · Longer Fiction / Drama
4. Unit 4 · Literary Argumentation