Technical terms

Abstract

There are a great many technical terms, such as alliteration and assonance, which are the correct descriptive names for the various effects we encounter in poetry. I t is quite possible to be a very good critic of poetry without knowing any of these terms; sometimes, indeed, knowledge of the correct name for an effect can actually weaken an analysis. What we mean by this is that when you are writing about poetry it is important that you describe what you can see happening in the poem. It could be the case that your analysis might work better if you present a vivid description of the effect you have noticed, rather than just saying, as some students do, ‘this line contains a lot of alliteration’. The rule is, therefore, that it is never enough just to name the device or feature that you have spotted in the poem, you must also make sure that you describe how the device or feature functions in and contributes to the poem. A fuller sense of what we mean should become apparent in the following glossary, where we not only define terms but also try to show these concepts at work in poetry.