General literature

General literature

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General literature

picture poem

Literature; General literature

A type of open form poetry in which the poet arranges the lines of the poem so as to create a particular shape on the page. The shape of the poem embodies its subject; the poem becomes a picture of ...

personification

Literature; General literature

A form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things. Personification offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human behaviors ...

petrarchan sonnet

Literature; General literature

It is a sonnet form popularized by Petrarch, consisting of an octave with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and of a sestet with one of several rhyme schemes, such as a fourteen-line poem in iambic ...

persona

Literature; General literature

Literally, a persona is a mask. In literature, a persona is a speaker created by a writer to tell a story or to speak in a poem. A persona is not a character in a story or narrative, nor does a ...

parody

Literature; General literature

A humorous imitation of another, usually serious, work. It can take any fixed or open form, because parodists imitate the tone, language, and shape of the original in order to deflate the subject ...

paraphrase

Literature; General literature

A prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem, in your own language.

paradox

Literature; General literature

A statement that initially appears to be contradictory but then, on closer inspection, turns out to make sense. For example, John Donne ends his sonnet "Death, Be Not Proud" with the paradoxical ...