Literary
Devices
Personal Poetry Glossary
Refrain
A
regularly repeated line or group of lines
in a poem or song, usually at the end of a
stanza
"Do you believe in life after love
I can feel something inside me say
I really don't think you're strong enough, no.“
“Believe”
-Cher
Tone

A writer’s or speaker’s attitude towards a subject
"I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and
ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,/I took the one
less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.“
“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost
Imagery
The verbal expression of sensory experience;
descriptive or figurative language used to create
word pictures; imagery is created by details that
appeal to one or more of the five senses.
"His skin shined and sparkled like thousands of
diamonds, as shiny and smooth as marble.”
Twilight

What other literary device is used beautifully in this
excerpt?
Diction

The writer’s choice of words; a stylistic element
that conveys voice and tone.
Example:
ominous glow vs. beaming light
They both pertain to light, but create a different
feeling due to the choice of words.
Hyberbole

Exaggeration used to suggest strong emotion or create a comic
effect.
What Am I?
I’m bigger than the entire earth
More powerful than the sea
Though a million, billion have tried
Not one could ever stop me.
I control each person with my hand
and hold up fleets of ships.
I can make them bend to my will
with one word from my lips.
I’m the greatest power in the world
In this entire nation.
No one should ever try to stop
a child’s imagination.
Allusion
A
reference to a well-known person,
event, or place from history, music, art,
another literary work.
Connotation

The associations and emotional overtones attached to a word beyond its literal
definition or denotation. A connotation may positive, negative, or neutral.

negative There are over 2,000 vagrants in the city.
neutral There are over 2,000 people with no fixed address in the city.
positive There are over 2,000 homeless in the city.


All three of these expressions refer to exactly the same people, but they will
invoke different associations in the reader's mind: a "vagrant" is a public nuisance while
a "homeless" person is a worthy object of pity and charity. Presumably, someone writing
an editorial in support of a new shelter would use the positive form, while someone
writing an editorial in support of antiloitering laws would use the negative form.
In this case, the dry legal expression "with no fixed address" quite deliberately
avoids most of the positive or negative associations of the other two terms -- a legal
specialist will try to avoid connotative language altogether when writing legislation,
often resorting to archaic Latin or French terms which are not a part of ordinary spoken
English, and thus, relatively free of strong emotional associations.
Extended Metaphor

A metaphor extended over several lines or
throughout an entire poem or piece of literature.
Will Ferrell's Extended Metaphor: The University of Life
"I graduated from the University of Life. All right? I
received a degree from the School of Hard Knocks.
And our colors were black and blue, baby. I had office
hours with the Dean of Bloody Noses. All right? I
borrowed my class notes from Professor Knuckle
Sandwich and his Teaching Assistant, Ms. Fat Lip Thon
Nyun. That’s the kind of school I went to for real, okay?"
(Will Ferrell, Commencement Address at
Harvard University, 2003)
Symbol
 Anything
(object, animal, event, person,
or place) that represent itself but also
stands for something else on a figurative
level.
Onomatopoeia

Words whose sound suggest their meaning.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in
the dark inn-yard,
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all
was locked and barred...
'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes
Alliteration
 The
repetition of initial consonant sounds
in words that are close together.
Betty Botter by Mother Goose
Betty Botter bought some butter, but,
she said, the butter’s bitter; if I put it in
my batter it will make my batter bitter,
but a bit of better butter will make my
batter better.
Rhyme
 The
repetition of sounds at the ends of
words.
Mary Mary quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Does any one know the history of this
Nursery Rhyme?
Theme
A
writer’s central idea or main message
about life.
What would be a theme of The Odyssey?
Anaphora

The repetition of the same word or group of words
at the beginnings of two or more clauses or lines.
“I go back to December, turn around and make it
alright
I go back to December, turn around and change
my own mind
I go back to December all the time, all the time”
“Back to December”
Taylor Swift
Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in
accented syllables, followed by different
consonant sounds, in words that are together.
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the
side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my
bride
--Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee"
Consonance
The repetition of final consonant sounds in
stressed syllables with different vowels sounds.
Consonance . . . is quite often employed in rap,
whether to underscore rhyme or to offer a kind
of rhyme substitute. Lauryn Hill's lines from the
Fugees 'Zealots' show consonance at work
alongside rhyme:

Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
Many styles, More powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays