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Kunitz’s use of understatement (when describing the speaker’s mother’s pregnancy as an “awkward time”) and irony (i.e. one of the mother’s main gripes over the suicide of her husband is that it happened in a public park) underscore the many complicated emotions attached to a traumatic death of a loved one.
- Male
- May 13, 1994
- Poetry Analyst
In many ways, Kunitz’s work declares allegiance to the “flinty, maverick side” of American literature, the side inhabited by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and holds to humanistic ...
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Nov 27, 2023 · Why use an understatement? Understatements are often used for rhetorical effect, humor, emphasis, or to create a sense of irony. They depend on the audience’s ability to recognize that the meaning is not literal.
Why Do Writers Use Understatement? A writer might use understatement for a number of different reasons: When it's used ironically, understatement can be an effective way of creating humor and adding depth to a text. It can also serve to emphasize exactly the thing being understated, through the juxtaposition of the literal meaning and the ...
In the form of a litany, the poem briefly describes, in dignified understatement, the works and lives of five of the representative women: an embroiderer, a quilter, and three painters, “a ...
Feb 2, 2024 · February 2, 2024 by Story Arcadia. Understatement is a rhetorical device where a speaker or writer intentionally makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is. It’s a subtle tool in communication and literature, often used to convey irony, add humor, or impart a sense of calmness.
Irony is a literary and rhetorical device in which a reader’s expectation is sharply contrasted against what’s really happening. This might be when someone says the opposite of what they mean, or when a situation concludes the opposite of how one would expect. There are five types of irony: Tragic, Comic, Situational, Verbal, and Socratic.
