From the American Academy of Poets (Poets.org)
Allegory: a narrative or visual representation with an underlying meaning, moral message, or political significance.
Alliteration: the repetition of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginnings of words.
Allusion: a reference to a person, event, or literary work outside the poem.
Anaphora: a technique in which successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany.
Aphorism: a short, pithy statement offering instruction, truth, or opinion; like a maxim or an adage.
Assonance: the repetition of similar vowel sounds.
Ballad: a plot-driven song with one or more characters and often constructed in quatrain stanzas.
Blank Verse: poetry that does not rhyme but follows a regular meter, most commonly iambic pentameter.
Canto: a unit of division or subsection found in epics or long narrative poetry.
Couplet: a two-line stanza, or two lines of verse, rhymed or unrhymed.
Elegy: a form of poetry in which the poet or speaker expresses grief, sadness, or loss.
Enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause across one poetic line break.
Epic: a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person, or group of persons.
Epigram: a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end.
Epigraph: a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme.
Erasure: a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.
Free Verse: open form poetry not dictated by an established form or meter and often influenced by the rhythms of speech.
Hymn: a lyric poem of devotion or reverence, typically written as a prayer addressing a deity or deities, or personified subjects.
Iambic Pentameter: a rising meter form consisting of five pairs of unstressed and stressed or accented syllables as five iambic feet per line.
Idiom: a short expression that is peculiar to a language, people, or place that conveys a figurative meaning without a literal interpretation of the words used in the phrase.
Imagery: language in a poem representing a sensory experience, including visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory.
Inaugural Poem: a poem read at a Presidential inauguration
Line: a fundamental unit in verse, carrying meaning both horizontally across the page and vertically from one line to the next.
Lyric Poetry: a non-narrative poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker’s personal emotions and feelings.
Metaphor: a comparison between essentially unlike things, or the application of a name or description to something to which it is not literally applicable.
Meter: the measured pattern of rhythmic accents in a line of verse.
Negative Capability: a phrase coined by John Keats to describe the poet’s ability to live with uncertainty and mystery.
Ode: a poem celebrating an event, a person, or a thing that is not present.
Onomatopoeia: the use of language that sounds like the thing or action it describes.
Pastoral: referring to a creative tradition as well as individual work idealizing rural life and landscapes.
Poetic Diction: the language, including word choice and syntax, that sets poetry apart from other forms of writing.
Poetry: a form of writing vital to culture, art, and life.
Point of View: the perspective or viewpoint of the speaker in a poem.
Proverb: a short statement or saying that expresses a basic truth.
Prosody: the systematic study of meter, rhythm, and intonation of language found in poetry, but also prose.
Repetition: the poetic technique of repeating the same word or phrase multiple times within a poem or work.
Rhyme: the correspondence of sounds in words or lines of verse.
Simile: a comparison between two essentially unlike things using words “such as,” “like,” and “as.”
Stanza: a grouping of lines that forms the main unit in a poem.
Syntax: the arrangement of language and order of words used to convey the poem’s content.
Tone: a literary device that conveys the author’s attitude toward the subject, speaker, or audience of a poem.
Voice: an expression denoting the comprehensive style of a speaker adopted by the author in a poem.