Literary Terms

1
Literary Terms

• Persona
• Meter/rhythm
• Image
• Image pattern
• Stanza

2
Persona

• The voice or speaker of a poem or other work of
  literature
• The persona is NOT the writer as s/he exists in
  the world. Even when the persona is an aspect of
  the writer, the speaker of a literary work is a
  literary fiction
• The persona will have certain characteristics,
  which can be determined with reference to the
  content, tone, and diction of the utterance

3
Meter and Rhyme

• In English poetry, the meter is a pattern of
  stressed and unstressed syllables. When you
  figure out the meter of a poem, you are
  scanning the lines.
• Rhyme is the repetition of the sound of the last
  stressed syllable late/fate
• Rhymes can come in the middle of a line, but when
  we talk about a rhyme scheme, we are talking
  about the ends of lines or end rhymes.

4
Image/Imagery/Image Patterns

• An image is a word that stands for a sensory
  element something you can see, hear, taste,
  smell, or touch
• Imagery is the collective term for images
• An image pattern is a set of images that share
  some common element such as a pattern of
  comforting images or frightening images or sharp
  images or smooth images

5
Stanza

• A stanza is a group of lines in a poem, usually
  set off with white space
• There are numerous standard stanzas
• Couplets
• Quatrains
• Tercet or triplet
• Sestet