poetic devices

Allusion

A reference to a well-known person, place, event, or work of art in literature. It allows writers to convey complex ideas or emotions by drawing on the reader's prior knowledge. This allows for a less literal interpretation of the poem.

Alliteration

A literary device where words in a sentence or phrase begin with the same sound. It is often used in poetry and prose to create rhythm, playful musiacal and emphasize certain words or ideas.

Sibilance

A literary device where a hissing sound is created by repeating the "s" sound in words close to each other. It adds a sense of musicality and can convey emotions like serenity or tension.

consonance

The repetition of consonant sounds in close proximity within a phrase or sentence, often used in poetry and literature for rhythmic effect. Adds musicality and emphasis to the poem, and it also helps to evoke emotions. Like assonance, consonance works in the poem to create patterning and music, to connect words and their meanings with each other, and to contrast words and their meanings.

Slant rhymes

Words that have similar but not identical sounds, like "prove" and "love." They create a subtle rhyme effect in poetry.

Diacope

A rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase broken up by other words. It is used for emphasis or to create a memorable effect in writing or speech. The repetition makes the speaker sounds casual and conversational, as though she's speaking to the reader in real-time.

Onomatopoeia

A figure of speech where words imitate sounds they represent, enhancing sensory experience in writing. Common examples include "buzz," "hiss," and "clang." Make the speaker's frustration sound all the more lively and vivid.

Simile

A figure of speech that compares two different things using "like" or "as". It helps create vivid imagery and make comparisons more relatable. Help to bring the poem to life for readers.

Parallelism

A figure of speech in which two or more elements of a sentence (or series of sentences) have the same grammatical structure. These "parallel" elements can be used to intensify the rhythm of language, or to draw a comparison, emphasize, or elaborate on an idea. The following well-known adage is an example of parallelism: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." The grammatical structures of the first and second sentences parallel each other.

Rhetorical Question

A figure of speech in which a question is asked for a reason other than to get an answer—most commonly, it's asked to make a persuasive point. For example, if a person asks, "How many times do I have to tell you not to eat my dessert?" he or she does not want to know the exact number of times the request will need to be repeated. Rather, the speaker's goal is to emphasize his or her growing frustration and—ideally—change the dessert-thief's behavior.

Colloquialism

The use of informal words or phrases in writing or speech. Colloquialisms are usually defined in geographical terms, meaning that they are often defined by their use within a dialect, a regionally-defined variant of a larger language. Colloquialisms can include aphorisms, idioms, profanity, or other words. These make the poem feel more casual and conversational. Using these very modern phrases also reminds readers that the poem is using the myth of Sisyphus to comment on the nature of modern work.

Asyndeton

A figure of speech in which coordinating conjunctions—words such as "and", "or", and "but" that join other words or clauses in a sentence into relationships of equal importance—are omitted. The use of asyndeton can speed up the rhythm of a phrase, make it more memorable or urgent, or offer other stylistic effects. For instance, take the sentence: "I expect my dog to chew my pillows, my cat to claw my furniture." Here, the writer omits the "and" from between "pillows" and "my". This omission transforms the sentence from one that merely states what the pets often do, to one that implies exasperation as well as a fatalistic sense that the pets' actions are inevitable and unchangeable.

Anaphora

A rhetorical device where a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences for emphasis. It is commonly used in literature and speeches to create a powerful effect. - create rhythm, momentum, and emphasis

Epizeuxis

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated in immediate succession, with no intervening words. In the play Hamlet, when Hamlet responds to a question about what he's reading by saying "Words, words, words," that's an example of epizeuxis.

Anadiplosis.

A figure of speech in which a word or group of words located at the end of one clause or sentence is repeated at or near the beginning of the following clause or sentence. This line from the novelist Henry James is an example of anadiplosis: "Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task."

Imagery

Any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain …… that engages the senses of touch, movement, and hearing: "I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in."

Metaphor

A figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as in the sentence "Love is a battlefield." Other times, the writer may make this equation between two things implicitly, as in, "He was wounded by love." The comparisons created by metaphor are not meant to be taken literally. Rather, metaphors are figurative—they create meaning beyond the literal meanings of their words. For instance, these examples are, of course, not saying that love is actually a field of battle or that the person actually got a physical injury from love. Instead, they capture how love can be painful, a struggle, even a showdown between opponents, and—as many good metaphors do—through their comparison they make description more vivid, more relatable, or reveal new ways of seeing the world.

Assonance

A figure of speech in which the same vowel sound repeats within a group of words. An example of assonance is: "Who gave Newt and Scooter the blue tuna? It was too soon!"

Euphony

The combining of words that sound pleasant together or are easy to pronounce, usually because they contain lots of consonants with soft or muffled sounds (like L, M, N, and R) instead of consonants with harsh, percussive sounds (like T, P, and K). Other factors, like rhyme and rhythm, can also be used to create euphony. An example of euphony is the end of Shakespeare's famous "Sonnet 18," which goes "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The plain pleasure of these harmoniously repeated sounds helps readers to share in Penelope's delight.

Personification

A type of figurative language in which non-human things are described as having human attributes, as in the sentence, "The rain poured down on the wedding guests, indifferent to their plans." Describing the rain as "indifferent" is an example of personification, because rain can't be "indifferent," nor can it feel any other human emotion. However, saying that the rain feels indifferent poetically emphasizes the cruel timing of the rain. Personification can help writers to create more vivid descriptions, to make readers see the world in new ways, and to more powerfully capture the human experience of the world (since people really do often interpret the non-human entities of the world as having human traits).

Juxtaposition

Occurs when an author places two things side by side as a way of highlighting their differences. Ideas, images, characters, and actions are all things that can be juxtaposed with one another. For example, it's a common plot device in fairy tales such as Cinderella to juxtapose the good-natured main character with a cruel step-sibling. The differences between the characters, as well as their close relation to one another, serve to highlight the main character's good qualities.

Antanaclasis

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated within a sentence, but the word or phrase means something different each time it appears. A famous example of antanaclasis is Benjamin Franklin's statement that: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." In this example, the first time "hang" appears it means "stay" or "stand," while the second time it refers to being "hanged."

Pun

A figure of speech that plays with words that have multiple meanings, or that plays with words that sound similar but mean different things. The comic novelist Douglas Adams uses both types of pun when he writes: "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass." In the first sentence, Adams puns on the similar sounds of "tune a" and "tuna," while in the second he puns on the two meanings of the word "bass"—the musical instrument, and the fish. By using familiar words and phrases in unusual ways and calling attention to the multiple meanings of a single word or phrase, the poem includes moments of wit. Also, though, and perhaps more importantly, it enacts at the level of language the experience of transformation and change that the speaker describes, and how, in the face of such stunning selfishness and greed, everything familiar becomes strange.

Irony

A literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition, don't worry—it is. Irony is a broad term that encompasses three different types of irony, each with their own specific definition: verbal irony, dramatic irony, and situational irony. Most of the time when people use the word irony, they're actually referring to one of these specific types of irony.

Dramatic irony

A plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the audience. More specifically, in dramatic irony the reader or audience has knowledge of some critical piece of information, while the character or characters to whom the information pertains are "in the dark"—that is, they do not yet themselves have the same knowledge as the audience. A straightforward example of this would be any scene from a horror film in which the audience might shout "Don't go in there!"—since that character doesn't suspect anything, but the audience already knows their fate.

Parataxis

A figure of speech in which words, phrases, clauses, or sentences are set next to each other so that each element is equally important. Parataxis usually involves simple sentences or phrases whose relationships to one another—relationships of logic, space, time, or cause-and-effect—are left to the reader to interpret. Julius Caesar's declaration, "I came, I saw, I conquered," is an example of it.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence or clause across a line break. For example, the poet John Donne uses enjambment in his poem "The Good-Morrow" when he continues the opening sentence across the line break between the first and second lines: "I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?"

Free verse

The name given to poetry that doesn’t use any strict meter or rhyme scheme. Because it has no set meter, poems written in free verse can have lines of any length, from a single word to much longer. William Carlos Williams’s short poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is written in free verse. It reads: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.”

End-stopped

A line of poetry in which a sentence or phrase comes to a conclusion at the end of the line. For example, the poet C.P. Cavafy uses end-stopped lines in his poem "Ithaka" when he writes "Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. / Without her you wouldn't have set out. / She has nothing left to give you now." If a line of poetry contains a complete phrase whose meaning doesn't change in light of what follows, it is considered to be end-stopped. However, an end-stopped line is often the end of a longer sentence that stretches across several lines.

Caesura

A pause that occurs within a line of poetry, usually marked by some form of punctuation such as a period, comma, ellipsis, or dash. A caesura doesn't have to be placed in the exact middle of a line of poetry. It can be placed anywhere after the first word and before the last word of a line. In the following line from the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, the comma after "Verona" marks a caesura: "In fair Verona, where we lay our scene."

Epistrophe

A figure of speech in which one or more words repeat at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences. In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln urged the American people to ensure that, "government of the people, by the people, for the people,shall not perish from the earth." His repetition of "the people" at the end of each clause is an example of epistrophe.

Comic relief

A literary device used to provide humor and break tension in a serious work, such as a play or novel. It offers a moment of light-heartedness amidst heavier themes.

Enumeration

rythm, transformation

Revisionism

in literature the rewriting of a well-known text in which character and / or plot is changed in order to challenge the view presented in the original

Poetic licence

license or liberty taken by a poet, prose writer, or other artist in

deviating from rule, conventional form, logic, or fact, in order to produce a desired effect.

Dramatic monologue

a poetic form in which a single voice addresses the reader , creating a strong sense of personality. It allows the poet to foreground the voice of those who are not usually heard. A poem may contain more than one voice, or voices in unison

Persona

In literature the voice of the speaker or narrator, not the author’s voice, presenting a point of view