A Guide to Literary Terms

* Alliteration * Allusion * Anaphora * Imagery * Irony * Metaphor * Meter

* Personification *  Satire * Simile * Stanza * Stream of Consciousness * Tone

* Imagery  

All of the sections of this web page are listed in alphabetical order, with this exception of this section on imagery, metaphor and simile, since these set the groundwork for further discussion. This section also includes several terms used in poetry.

Images can be literal or figurative. Imagery in writing can be extremely descriptive and pictorial and can, in fact, sound very "flowery" and "poetic" without using any of the figures of speech that make up figurative writing. An example is this excerpt from Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, which won the National Book Award in 1998:

This excerpt shows, in the clearest way, a good description, which calls upon all of your senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile. Despite the beauty of this writing, McCourt does not utilize figures of speech (or figurative writing) to describe church-going in his city.

Similarly, this excerpt does a beautiful job utilizing literal description (with the exception of one simile). Again, the author calls upon the senses of smell, sight, touch and hearing:

The swollen creek, sliding through the trees, was about eight feet higher than it had been yesterday. The log bridge we had crossed was under water because, Maurice told us, the dam where I had smelled the smell of the Brazilian cerrado had been washed out. Indri were calling in the distance--a sad, beautiful sound, like the song of the humpback whale, or the wail of a loon. That morning we saw more kinds of birds than I had ever seen in a single outing. They were so unfazed that they obliged you to walk right up to them. Among the ones we identified were blue couas, opalescent green doves, magpie robins, rollers, vermilion foudias, sunbirds, drongos, warblers, forest kingfishers, rails, honeycreepers, cuckoo shrikes, blue vangas and bulbuls. Seventy species have been identified in the preserve, but there were more.                                                                    --from "The Last of the Dog-Headed Men,"                                                                         African Madness ,by Alex Shoumatoff

Pauli Murray's litany of adjectives makes this description all the more powerful as she talks about growing up in North Carolina in the early 1900s. This excerpt is taken from Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, by Leon F. Litwack:

Figurative writing uses specific techniques, called figures of speech, that are all metaphoric or symbolic in nature. In its broadest sense, a figure of speech is any intentional departure from the ordinary form, use, or arrangement of words for the purpose of making expression more striking or effective. Describing a man as "tall, strong and decisive" is literal imagery. Saying a man is a "stately, never-bending oak" is figurative imagery.

Ancient rhetoricians identified about 250 figures of speech. However, only a handful of these literary devices will be analyzed in class and are explained here.

Return to Top

Before moving on, take a brief look at the way  figurative meaning is used in everyday life:

Return to Top

Metaphor and Simile

1. Metaphor and Simile are both used to compare things that are essentially unlike. In simile, the comparison is clearly expressed by some word or phrase, such as like, as, than, similar to, resembles or seems. In metaphor, the comparison is not clearly expressed. The figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term. In general, a simile refers only to a limited range of characteristics that the two things have in common. A metaphor may open up a whole range of symbolic or figurative meaning:

• Literal Imagery: He is a glutton and extremely messy when eating.
  
• Simile: He eats like a pig.

• Metaphor: He is a pig.

  • The metaphor evokes many other images in your mind, above and beyond being a messy eater. For example, you could be saying he is "a male, chauvinist pig" or a "rude, obnoxious boar." And, of course, policeman have also been called "pigs" in a derogatory way.

In metaphor, the figurative term need not be clearly identified, but can be suggested by the   words used. This is called an implied metaphor.

• Literal imagery: My girlfriend is very pretty and very nice.
  
• Simile: Oh, my love is like a red, red rose
  • My girlfriend is extremely lovely, beautiful and precious to me.

• Implied metaphor: Oh, I placed my love into a long-stem vase.
                               And I bandaged my bleeding thumb.
  • The metaphor here is "my love is a rose with thorns," meaning "she may look beautiful, but she is really cruel."

The following poem is a great example of both simile and implied metaphor:

Similes: A dream deferred is like a raisin in the sun, a sore, rotten meat ...

Implied Metaphor: A dream deferred is a ticking time bomb.

By using these similes and implied metaphor, Hughes is saying something incredibly powerful about not letting people achieve their dreams.

Similes: A book is like a frigate; a page is like courser (horse).

Metaphors: A book is a chariot; a book is a freeway.

Metaphors are also evident in prose, as well as poetry:

Dawn came and as far as the eye could see the ocean was dotted with islands and fields of ice. Some floated with tapering mastheads. Some sailed with monstrous bows rising sheer to the pink-flushed sky, some glided the water in the shapes of ancient vessels. Between this pale fleet, the little life-boats rocked. There were other things caught upon the water--chairs and tables, crates, an empty gin bottle, a set of bagpipes, a cup without a handle, a creased square of canvas with a girl's face painted on it; and two bodies, she in a gown of ice with a mermaid's tail, he in shirt sleeves, the curls as stiff as wood shavings on his head, his two hands frozen to the curve of a metal rail. Beyond, where the sun was beginning to show its burning rim, smoke blew from a funnel. --From Every Man for Himself, by Beryl Bainbridge

Bainbridge, who won England's equivalent of the National Book Award for this novel, uses ships as a metaphor for icebergs--entirely appropriate for a book about the Titanic.

The way people die in caves is by going forward too fast, into wedges that trap them, rivers that drown them and mazes that defeat them until they give up for starve. The journey to what Bill Clinton called "the rock-bottom truth" feels now like a headlong descent, a process no one can control, toward resolutions no one can assure. There are Republicans looking for treasure down here--political power embedded for years to come. And there are Democrats looking for someone to blame. But for the rest of us, there is too little light, too little air, no compass, no ropes: this is not a spectator sport. We just want someone to show us the way out.                                                                                                                                               --from Time Magazine, Sept. 28, 1998

This excerpt from a news story shows that metaphor is not just limited to novels and poetry.

Return to Top

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, used to achieve a strong texture of sound. It can be either cacophony, which means dissonance, or euphony, which means harmony.

What are the consonant sounds that are repeated? Does it project a feeling of dissonance or harmony?

Does the use of alliteration help or hinder the mood the poet is trying to project?

Another related literary device is onomatopoeia,  the imitation of natural sounds by words. Some examples are: "the humming bee," "the cackling hen," "the whizzing arrow," and "the buzzing saw."

Return to Top

Allusion

Allusion is a reference to literary, historical, political or cultural events or facts that the writer assumes that the reader knows about. In the poem "Paranoia "by Michael Dennis Brown, the author writes:

The allusion is to Tristram Shandy, an 18th Century novel that was very popular with the upper class in both England and United States, but which is fairly obscure today. In the poem, we assume the writer is a literature professor. If the person is worried about people thinking he does not know Tristram Shandy, what does it say about the person?

The allusions in "Earthly Greatness" are to mastodons, Charlemagne, bears and Caesar.

The allusions in "The Portent" are to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and to John Brown, who incited a slave uprising and was later hung.

The poem also uses the metaphors "portent " and "meteor of war" for John Brown himself.

Return to Top

Anaphora

Anaphora--the repetition of key words or phrases--is demonstrated well by this excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech:

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skins, but by the content of their character.... And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slops of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"                                                             --delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, Aug. 28, 1963

Return to Top

Irony

Irony is among a variety of stylistic techniques in satire that may include incongruity, mockery, exaggeration and understatement, with which the satirist attacks a vice or folly. In irony, the intention of a statement or phrase is in sharp contrast to the literal meaning of the words and what is expected. Derived from the Greek eironeia ("simulated ignorance"), irony is a rhetorical device that depends on a knowing audience participating or collaborating with the author or speaker. Included in this is situational irony--Running enthusiast James Fixx dying of a heart attack; Princess Diana dying on night she was going to be proposed to. An example of literary irony is the suggestion, put forward with apparent seriousness by the English satirist Jonathan Swift in his Modest Proposal, that the poor people of Ireland should rid themselves of poverty by selling their children to the rich to eat.

Closely related to irony is incongruity, in which a part of the whole seems out of place. An example is the skin lotion commercial in which the crocodile walks through the white, elegant room. Situational irony reveals a striking incongruity between what is expected and what results, as when a pickpocket discovers that his or her pocket has been picked. Other examples of incongruity includes the old woman in The Wedding Singer or Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan as partners in Rush Hour.

All three of the following poems on the subject of love use irony and incongruity. The first--with its unexpected ending--satirizes drunkenness. The second is a powerful political statement made stronger by the incongruity of its title. The incongruity use of the words "gentle pornography" and "mad, mangled crocodile" in the third greatly contribute to the tone of the poem.

Return to Top

Meter

Meter is the formal measure of the rhythm of the language of poetry as it falls into regular patterns of stress and cadence when read. For example, iambic pentameter is a poetic form with each line containing five "feet"--each foot containing one stressed and one unstressed syllable--for a total of 10 syllables in each line. Here is the first line of the following poem, as it is broken down according to the meter of iambic pentameter:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

If ev-er mer-cy move you mur-der me,

In contrast, blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter and free verse is poetry of any line length and placement on the page, with no fixed measure or meter. While writing according to an established meter sounds formal and restrictive, the following poem proves it can be anything but boring:

What does the author mean when he says "even though I turn such traitor to myself as be to die, do not accomplice me"?

This poem can be viewed as a criticism of what current social issue?

How do the meter and rhythm of this poem accentuate its meaning?

What line in particular shows how meter can help stress a poem's meaning?

Return to Top

Personification and Anthropomorphism

Personification is the representation of inanimate objects or abstract ideas as living beings, as in the sentences "Lean famine stalked the land," "Night enfolded the town in its ebon wings," and "So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready." These can also be described as "implied metaphor," with a thin, starving animal the metaphor for famine, a raven or crow a metaphor for night and a man the metaphor for death. Similarly, the following poem uses both personification and metaphor:

In Greek, anthropos means "human being" and morphe means "shape."Anthropomorphism is the assigning of human characteristics to animals, natural phenomena, inanimate objects, or abstract ideas. The literary strategies of allegory  and fable often employ anthropomorphic characters. George Orwell's Animal Farm and Disney's The Lion King are examples.

Return to Top

Satire (See also Irony)

Satire is an attack on human follies or vices, as measured against a religious, moral or social standard. Satire can involve a number of techniques, including:

• Irony and incongruity (See Irony).
  
• Mockery--to goad or mimic sportively and derisively.
  
• Exaggeration/hyperbole--an intentional exaggeration meant to highlight the speaker or writer's message-- not intended to be taken literally.
  
• Understatement--to represent less strongly than the facts bear out.

Satire is frequently used to make a specific point in social commentary, editorials and politcal writing. Everyone can probably name at least two or three "Monica and Bill" jokes. A recent example of political satire is Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, by Harvard-educated humorist and screenwriter Al Franken. In something usually dry and utilitarian--the book's index--Franken shows the use of hyperbole and mockery:

Satire is not something restricted to modern political pundits and comics. Jonathan Swift's 1726 book, Gulliver's Travels, known by generations of children as an adventure tale, was intended as a satiric criticism

 If the censure of Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of my own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.

The English 18th Century author Laurence Sterne mocks religious and philosophical pntificaters in this excerpt from Tristram Shandy:

...inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west--So, says Locke,--so are farting and hickuping, say I. But in answer to this, Didius, the great church lawyer, in his code "de fartandi et illustrandi fallaciis," doth mention and make fully appear, That an illustration is no argument,--nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism...

Return to Top

Stanzas

Stanzas are the organized units of poetic lines that are divided into regular, separate groups. Stanzas can have--although not necessarily--a strict meter and a recurring rhyme pattern.

The meter and wording of this poem is reminiscent of what other kind of language? How does this style create a greater irony?

Return to Top

Stream of Consciousness

A technique or method in modern narrative fiction that attempts to convey the characters' rambling thoughts. It is easily identified by a lack of or minimal amount of punctuation and the use of what are essentially long, run-on sentences.

The first known use of stream of consciousness is from the English 18th Century novel, Tristram Shandy, referred to earlier in the poem "Paranoia." Also known as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and written by Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy has been called "a strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece." (Its use of irreverence and satire is demonstrated elsewhere on this webpage. See Satire.)

The first widely-recognized example of this style is from the part of  James Joyce's Ulysses called  "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy." Written in 1922, Ulysses was banned in many countries and was not available in the United States until a major court case on obscenity in 1933. Ulysses is considered by many to be the single greatest written work in the English language! Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, written entirely in stream of consciousness, is literally one single sentence that goes on for 35 pages. Here is a sample:

Like Dalton Trumbo in Johnny Got His Gun, Vietnam War Veteran Ron Kovic purposefully used stream of consciousness in parts of his famous book, Born on the Fourth , published in 1972:

Don't think that "stream of consciousness" is just found in older, or more esoteric literature. This excerpt from How Stella Got Her Groove Back, by Terry McMillan, written in 1996 and made into a movie in 1998 is an example of  a popular, best-selling work in this style:

Return to Top

Tone

Tone is the accumulated effect of style, mood and texture. What tone is conveyed by the following two well-known poems?

Return to Top

Want more? Click here for a detailed website on literary terms and rhetorical language.

A less-specialized survey of literature is available if you click here.