Poet's Glossary
Every craft has its vocabulary, and poetry's is one of the most beautiful. This glossary explains the forms, meters, rhymes and devices poets reach for, in plain and warm language. Whether you are decoding a sonnet or naming a technique you already use by instinct, start with a letter below.
Terms starting with S
Scansion
The practice of marking the stressed and unstressed syllables of a poem to reveal its meter. Scanning a poem is like reading its X-ray.
Senryu
A Japanese form with the same shape as haiku but aimed at human nature rather than the natural world, usually with a wry or satirical edge.
Sestet
A six line stanza, particularly the closing movement of a Petrarchan sonnet, where the poem answers or transforms what the octave proposed.
Sestina
A thirty nine line form in which the same six end words rotate through six stanzas and a closing envoi. Its obsessive machinery suits poems that circle what they cannot let go.
Simile
A comparison made openly with like or as. The simile keeps both things visible at once, the world and the image laid side by side.
Slam Poetry
Poetry written for live competitive performance, judged by the audience, prizing voice, presence and immediacy on stage.
Slant Rhyme
Rhyme that is close but not exact, as in worm and swarm. Emily Dickinson made it a signature, letting near misses carry unease.
Sonnet
A fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter with a defined rhyme scheme and a turn of thought. Its two great traditions are the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean.
Spondee
A metrical foot of two stressed syllables together, as in heartbreak. Spondees slow a line and strike it like two hammer blows.
Stanza
A grouped set of lines separated by white space, the poem's paragraph. Stanzas shape the reader's breathing and the poem's architecture.
Stress
The emphasis given to a syllable in speech. English meter is built on the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Symbolism
The use of concrete images to stand for larger ideas, so a road becomes a life and a season becomes a state of the soul.
Synecdoche
A figure in which a part stands for the whole, as when hired hands means workers, or the whole stands for a part.
All letters
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