Unit 2 · Poetry I

Line break ● (core concept) — Where a line of poetry ends. Line breaks — together with stanza breaks — help develop a poem's ideas and shape how those ideas relate to one another.

Stanza ● (core concept) — A grouped set of lines in a poem, set off by breaks — the poetic counterpart of a paragraph. The arrangement of lines and stanzas develops a poem's ideas and their relationships.

Contrast ● (core concept) — A deliberate, pointed difference built into a text. Writers introduce contrast through focus, tone, point of view, the perspective of a character, narrator, or speaker, the dramatic situation or moment, setting or time, or imagery; contrasts arise from shifts, juxtapositions, or both.

Shift ● (core concept) — A pivot in a text — which a single word, a structural device, or even punctuation can mark — that throws the contrast between one stretch of the text and another into relief.

Dramatic monologue ○ — A poem in which a character is the speaker — the Unit 2 Developing Understanding cites Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Tennyson's 'Ulysses' as examples.

Antecedent ● (core concept) — The word, phrase, or clause that a later referent points back to.

Referent ● (core concept) — A pronoun, noun, phrase, or clause that points back to an antecedent. When a referent could point to more than one antecedent, it is ambiguous — and that ambiguity affects interpretation.

Repetition ● (core concept) — Echoing words or phrases — which spotlights the repeated ideas and what they evoke.

Alliteration ● (core concept) — Repeating the same opening sound in adjacent or nearby words, which emphasizes those words and the associations or meanings they carry.

Simile ● (core concept) — A 'like'/'as' comparison linking two different things so that traits or qualities of one rub off on the other. What it achieves depends on which objects are chosen and which traits get transferred.

Metaphor ● (core concept) — An implied likeness between two usually unrelated things, offered to bring out something about one of them — though what differs between the two can be revealing too. Which traits carry over can depend on the context in the text.

Main subject and comparison subject ● (core concept) — The CED's paired terms for taking a comparison apart: the main subject is the thing being compared, and the comparison subject is the thing it is likened to.

Literal and figurative meaning ○ — The literal meaning of language is its plain, surface sense; the figurative meaning is what comparisons, representations, and associations invite readers to interpret beyond the literal.