Dear SunWinkers:

We’ve been talking about a whole ‘nother aspect of the music of poetry: figures of speech, a.k.a. rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures are ways to manipulate the rhythms of speech to give your poetry or oratory or prose rhythm, momentum, and impact. I just used three of them.

“a whole ‘nother” is a tmesis: splitting a word in two, usually to put another word in between.

“…rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures…” is an anadiplosis: repeating a word or phrase from the end of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next.

“poetry or oratory or prose” is polysyndeton: using extra conjunctions (that is, “or” instead of a comma between “poetry” and “oratory”.

We can’t cover all of the 60 figures of speech described in Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982]. If you want to get all obsessive over this, I mean, if you want to make a methodical study of this topic, you can get ahold of Quinn’s book or go to a wonderful website called The Forest of Rhetoric http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ which describes many times 60 rhetorical figures.

Many of the figures we’ve looked at are repetitive figures, and I did want to cover a few more of those. The reason is that they are pretty easy to understand, and to get a feeling for how they can improve the rhythm and music of your poetry.

So far, we’ve covered these:

Epistrophe is repeating a word or words at the end of a succession of phrases: “of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln. Continue reading →