Literary Devices and Their Use in Poetry
LITERARY DEVICES AND THEIR USE IN POETRY
The task set out in this essay is to examine the listed devices (accentuation, creation of hierarchies, shifts of accent, ambiguity, semanticisation and creation of relationship) of syntactic foregrounding, using examples from poems as illustration. The word ‘foregrounding’ when used in a literary context means to ‘make strange’. In other words poets use various literary and poetic devices in order to highlight a particular unit within a poem, in order to give the reader ‘clues’ as she goes about interpreting and ascertaining meaning in a given work.
We will start at the top of the list with accentuation. As can be denoted from its meaning, accentuation is a form or type of foregrounding. It emphasises certain language structures in order to make them stand out and draw the reader’s attention. There are five syntactic devices that a poet can use to create accentuation in her poem, namely displacement, deletion, selective deviation, repetition and typography. Displacement refers to a device whereby a poet takes conventional grammar and rearranges it. For example, in the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost the first line reads “Something there is that does not love a wall.” (Moffet, Mphahlele 2006: 103) Had the poet used conventional language the sentence would read ‘there is something that does not love a wall.” As can be seen from the given example although the syntactic structure is foregrounded the semantic essence has not changed. Another example of displacement comes in the poem The art of Edgar Degas by David Campbell. Line two in this poem states ‘limning the gestures of defeat” (www.poemhunter.com) I found it necessary to look up the definition of the word limning, so obviously it stood out for me immediately. Next we come to deletion. I believe that the term is self-explanatory, so I will just give an example from the poem Letter to My Aunt, by Dylan Thomas where line 44 to 45 read as follows: “Never
The task set out in this essay is to examine the listed devices (accentuation, creation of hierarchies, shifts of accent, ambiguity, semanticisation and creation of relationship) of syntactic foregrounding, using examples from poems as illustration. The word ‘foregrounding’ when used in a literary context means to ‘make strange’. In other words poets use various literary and poetic devices in order to highlight a particular unit within a poem, in order to give the reader ‘clues’ as she goes about interpreting and ascertaining meaning in a given work.
We will start at the top of the list with accentuation. As can be denoted from its meaning, accentuation is a form or type of foregrounding. It emphasises certain language structures in order to make them stand out and draw the reader’s attention. There are five syntactic devices that a poet can use to create accentuation in her poem, namely displacement, deletion, selective deviation, repetition and typography. Displacement refers to a device whereby a poet takes conventional grammar and rearranges it. For example, in the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost the first line reads “Something there is that does not love a wall.” (Moffet, Mphahlele 2006: 103) Had the poet used conventional language the sentence would read ‘there is something that does not love a wall.” As can be seen from the given example although the syntactic structure is foregrounded the semantic essence has not changed. Another example of displacement comes in the poem The art of Edgar Degas by David Campbell. Line two in this poem states ‘limning the gestures of defeat” (www.poemhunter.com) I found it necessary to look up the definition of the word limning, so obviously it stood out for me immediately. Next we come to deletion. I believe that the term is self-explanatory, so I will just give an example from the poem Letter to My Aunt, by Dylan Thomas where line 44 to 45 read as follows: “Never