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- Allegory. An allegory is a story, poem, or other written work that can be interpreted to have a secondary meaning. Aesop’s Fables are examples of allegories, as they are ostensibly about one thing (such as “The Ant and the Grasshopper”) but actually have a secondary meaning.
- Alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of a sound or letter at the beginning of multiple words in a series. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…”
- Allusion. An allusion is an indirect reference to something. “The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.” - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Apostrophe. An apostrophe is a poetic device where the writer addresses a person or thing that isn’t present with an exclamation. “O stranger of the future!
- Alliteration
- Allusion
- Anaphora
- Assonance
- Blank Verse
- Chiasmus
- Consonance
- Enjambment
- Epistrophe
- Imagery
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Hearkening back to the days when poetry was mostly sung or read out loud, this literary device uses repeating opening sounds at the start of a series of successive words, giving them a lovely musical quality. The “Wicked Witch of the West” is an example of alliteration. So are “political power play” and “false friends.” “Cold cider” is notan exampl...
Allusion is where the poet makes an indirect reference to something outside of the poem, whether that’s a real person, a well-known mythological cycle, or a struggle that’s happening in the world we know. Sometimes this is simply to draw a parallel that the reader will easily understand, but often allusions are used to hint at something that it wou...
Anaphora is the act of beginning a series of successive sentences or clauses (sentence fragments) with the same phrase. It’s an older literary device that many writers instinctively still use today, knowing that it lends a unique emphasis and rhythm even if they don’t know the specific term for it. You may have even used it yourself without realizi...
Also called “vowel rhyme,” assonance is a poetic device that repeats vowel sounds in a word or phrase to create rhythm (we’ll talk about rhythm a little more later on). “Go slow down that lonely road” is an example of well-balanced assonance: we hear similar sounds in the “oh,” “go,” and “slow,” and then later in “lonely” and “road” (there’s also a...
Blank verse is poetry that’s written in a regular meter, but with unrhymed line. It falls somewhere between formal and free verse poetry. While blank verse never has a formal rhyme scheme, it does have a formal meter (you’ll read more about meter a bit further on). Most blank verse is written in iambic pentameter, which was popularized by Shakespea...
A chiasmus (a word that brings to mind the word “chimera”, coincidentally enough) is a stylized literary device that plays with the reversal of words or ideas. Sometimes the words might be used together in a different way—“Never let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You”—or sometimes it may be the concepts of the idea that are presented in reflection...
Compared to assonance, consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in a word or phrase. Repeated consonants can occur at the beginning, middle, or ending of a word. You may recognize this from classic children’s tongue twisters like “Betty Botter bought some butter but she said the butter’s bitter”… the repeated B’s and T’s add a jig-and-reel ...
Enjambment, from a Middle French word meaning “to step over,” is a poetic device in which a thought or an idea in a poem carries over from one line to another without pause. For example, T. S, Eliot’s The Waste Landsays, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.” Instead of ending his lines on...
Unlike to anaphora, epistrophe is a literary device in which successive sentences or sentence fragments end with the same phrase. Our ears naturally attune to the landing point of any given word grouping, and so writers and speakers can use this tool to draw particular attention to a word or idea. One famous example is Abraham Lincoln’s speech, “A ...
Imagery one of the most important poetic devices—it’s how you make the big ideas in your poem, as well as the poem’s meaning, come alive for the reader. Poets will make the most of their limited space by using strong visual, auditory, olfactory, and even tactile sensations to give the reader a sense of time and place. It’s popular in both poetry an...
Learn what poetic devices are and how to use them in your poetry. This web page explains 27 poetic devices with definitions and examples, from alliteration to zeugma.
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. Poems are created out of poetic devices via a composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essential tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.
- Poetic Devices of Sound. These are poetic devices that use specific sonic effects to evoke emotions or thoughts, in the readers of the poem. The following examples represent some of the most common sonic literary devices in poetry
- #4. Alliteration. Alliteration is when two or more words start with the same consonant sound are used to emphasize an idea or action and create an emotional response.
- #5. Assonance. Whereas alliteration repeats the same consonant sounds at the start of words, assonance is repetition of vowel sounds (anywhere within the word) on the same or following lines of a poem to give a musical, internal rhyme.
- #6: Consonance. Consonance is a similar device to alliteration and assonance in that it involves repetition of sounds. But consonance consists of repeating consonant sounds at the end (and sometimes middle) rather than beginning of words.
- Anaphora. Anaphora describes a poem that repeats the same phrase at the beginning of each line. Sometimes the anaphora is a central element of the poem’s construction; other times, poets only use anaphora in one or two stanzas, not the whole piece.
- Conceit. A conceit is, essentially, an extended metaphor. Which, when you think about it, it’s kind of stuck-up to have a fancy word for an extended metaphor, so a conceit is pretty conceited, don’t you think?
- Apostrophe. Don’t confuse this with the punctuation mark for possessive nouns—the literary device apostrophe is different. Apostrophe describes any instance when the speaker talks to a person or object that is absent from the poem.
- Metonymy & Synecdoche. Metonymy and synecdoche are very similar poetic devices, so we’ll include them as one item. A metonymy is when the writer replaces “a part for a part,” choosing one noun to describe a different noun.
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Nov 21, 2023 · Learn what poetic devices are and how they shape words, sounds, and phrases in poetry. Explore different types of poetic devices with examples and activities.
In literature, any technique used to help the author achieve his or her purpose is called a literary device. Typically, these devices are used for an aesthetic purpose – that is, they’re intended to make the piece more beautiful. However, it’s a very broad term and isn’t strictly limited to this meaning.
