Caesura is a fancy word for a not-so-awkward pause that occurs in the middle of a line of verse in poetry. You can use this term if you want to sound smart, but we think "pause" is just fine [..]

An abstraction is something that you can't directly experience using your five senses. Love. War. Culture. If you know it exists, but you can't see it, smell it, taste it, touch it, or hear [..]

Accents are all the rage in poetry. And no, we don't mean reciting some W.B. Yeats in an Irish brogue. We're talking syllables here, Shmoopers. The accent is the stressed syllable in a word. [..]

An acrostic is a spiffy kind of poem that uses all of the letters from a single word to make a whole new set of words, phrases, or lines. Think of it as vertical poetry.What's that? You want an e [..]

An act is the traditional way playwrights break up the action of a play. The number of acts in a play varies. You'll usually find five acts in plays by Big Willy Shakespeare, while modern playwri [..]

If you're cool with appreciating a work of art just because it looks awesome, sounds awesome, or otherwise tickles your senses, then the Aesthetic Movement might be for you. Simply put, it's [..]

I get so emotional, baby! Every time I think of you-oo-ou!Sorry, we were just gettin' down to some classic Whitney Houston.That's because we get so emotional, baby, every time we think of th [..]

Named after the ever-so-heroic Alexander the Great, an alexandrine is a line of verse made up of six iambs. If you want to get all fancy about it, you can even say that an alexandrine is a line of poe [..]

An allegory is a story with (count 'em) two levels of meaning. First, there's the surface of the story. You know, the characters and plot and all that obvious stuff. Then there's the sy [..]

Open up your ears, Shmoopers. Alliteration is a term used to describe the repetition of initial consonant sounds. More simply put, alliteration is what happens when words that begin with the same cons [..]