Cousin Terms That Confuse (Poetry)

(Part 2/3) Motif, Symbol; Conceit, Analogy, Metaphor; Apostrophe, Persona; Personification, Anthropomorphism, Pathetic Fallacy; Synecdoche, Metonymy.

In Part I, we tackled some of poetry’s structural cousin terms: refrain and anaphora; enjambment and line break; caesura and white space; volta, hinge, arc, and tonal shift; tone, emotion, subject, and theme. This time, we’re moving into the terms that describe how poems create and carry meaning.

And, once again, most of these terms aren’t especially difficult on their own. What makes them confusing is that they overlap, or sometimes a poem is doing several of these things at once.