Alliteration
Alliteration is a literary device characterized by the repetition of consonant or vowel sounds across words in close proximity, often enhancing the musicality and rhythm of language. It includes two main subsets: assonance, which focuses on the repetition of vowel sounds, and consonance, which involves the repetition of consonant sounds. Commonly found in poetry, nursery rhymes, and prose, alliteration serves to capture readers' attention and create memorable phrases. It is used to set the tone and mood of a text, with softer sounds eliciting calmness and harsher sounds conveying intensity.
Historically, alliteration has been a prominent feature in renowned literary works, such as "Beowulf" and "Romeo and Juliet." Beyond literature, it appears in everyday language, product names, and speeches, where it can enhance persuasive communication and audience engagement. Notable examples of alliteration in public speeches include phrases from Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, showcasing its effectiveness in invoking emotion and significance. Additionally, alliteration can also adopt a sarcastic tone, as seen in the political rhetoric of figures like Spiro Agnew. Overall, alliteration is a versatile technique that enriches both written and spoken language.
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Alliteration
A literary device used in both poetry and prose, alliteration is to the repetition of either consonant or vowel sounds. Alliteration has two subsets, assonance and consonance. Assonance occurs when two or more words in a phrase repeat the same vowel sound but may begin with different consonants. An example of assonance is the following sentence: “Johnny went here, there, and everywhere.” Overall, assonance provides a musical or rhythmic quality and is more commonly used in poetry than prose. Consonance is when two or more words repeat the same consonant in quick succession, as in the phrase “Sally sells seashells by the seashore,” where the consonant sound (in this case, s) appears at the beginning of several words in the sentence. Assonance and consonance designate the mechanical and syntactical qualities of the overall technique of alliteration.
In addition to its subsets, alliteration has specialized forms. These include symmetrical alliteration, which involves the device of parallelism (a definitive pattern of two or more parts of the sentence structure). This type of alliterative technique is often found in oral traditions such as proverbs and in oral histories passed down through generations. An example of this type of alliteration is “flower color constant forever.”
Background
Commonly found in nursery rhymes, alliteration is not just a simple technique to apply a rhythmic quality to text. Rather, alliteration has been used for centuries by writers and poets in a multitude of languages and appears in hundreds of well-known literary works as well as in modern speeches and texts. Its lyrical quality may mean it is sometimes considered a florid literary technique, but alliteration is not typically taken lightly. Writers employ this repetition of sounds through sequential words to affects readers’ interpretations of and experiences with the text and, ultimately, to aid in establishing the tone, mood, and setting of a literary work.
Overview
Writers use alliteration to gain the attention of readers or listeners, providing melodious or rhythmic ways in which to remember lines or phrases. Poets often use alliteration to bring readers’ attention to certain lines of poetry or to aid the rhythmic effect of stanzas, leading most poetic alliteration to have a musical quality, which enhances the reader’s experience and makes passages more memorable. When alliteration is used to add to the mood of a poem, poets often employ alliterative techniques that repeat soft sounds, such as the consonants s, f, or l, to bring a calming quality to the poem. Alliteration of harsher sounds, such as k, t, or d, can be used to illustrate a certain intensity or excited quality.
Beowulf (ca. 1000) is a classic example of alliterative technique in a poem, as its more than three thousand lines constantly employ alliteration. Beowulf is possibly the earliest example of vernacular English literature. Other literary and poetic texts famous for their use of alliteration include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1300s), James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” (1914), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou, and Romeo and Juliet (1597) by William Shakespeare.
Alliteration is found not only in great literary works but also in everyday culture, in the names of products, companies, and even people. Alliteration typically makes names more memorable and is often used by marketing companies to enhance the name recognition of products. Examples of alliteration in popular culture include company names such as American Airlines and Krispy Kreme, stage names such as Marilyn Monroe, and character names such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Public speakers often use alliteration to enhance the persuasive nature of their arguments. Rhetorical alliteration can provide a level of intensity to a speech or particular component of a speech as well as convey a mood or attitude to an audience. Using alliteration in this way helps speakers captivate their audience and typically results in an engaging or distinctive speech. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for example, opens with a famous example of alliteration: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.” Barack Obama used alliteration in his second inaugural address in 2013 to invoke a sense of historical significance by naming places significant to the issue of civil rights: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
In addition to its use in classical texts and formal speeches, alliteration can take on a tone of sarcasm, evoking images that reinforce a negative impression of a situation or group of people. White House speechwriter William Safire served Vice President Spiro T. Agnew during the Nixon administration and would routinely write alliterative phrases for Agnew to use in reference to critics, especially the media, with whom Agnew had an bitter relationship. One of Safire’s more famous alliterative phrases is “nattering nabobs of negativism,” which Agnew used to describe the media during the California Republican State Convention of 1970. The same speech included the phrase “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” These phrases caught on with Agnew’s audience and impacted the relationship between journalists and politicians of the time.
Bibliography
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