Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[BG]

Hi everybody
I would like to know what the literary devices in poems are.I know irony,similie,metaphore,ryme and rythem but what are the others?

[oinrocinu]

Hi!

I'm not going to say anything about the poems (but I like them, of course). This is just a question: Does your name come from a mathematical concept (the classifying space of a topological group?)? It's just a curiosity

Lola
_________________
Para sentir no bastan cinco sentidos...

[lou clamdip]

Pick up a copy of "Perrine's Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry," by Laurence Perrine, Thomas R. Arp, ed. Harcourt Brace Publishers.

This is an excellent text for learning about poetry and for teaching poetry.

[LucentShade]

I knew what they were at some point, but there's too many to recall and type here.

[Mary Cat]

so, you already know - irony, simile, metaphor, rhyme, and rhythm... there are a TON of others, but off the top of my head, here are just a few more:
metonymy - talking about a poem within a poem
- talking about the part as representative of the whole *(there's a name for that, but it eludes me at the moment)
- by rhythm, you probably mean the number of syllables to a line... there's pentameter, which you're probably heard about as associated with Elizabethan sonnets and shakespeare (he wrote a lot in iambic pentameter, which is offbeat onbeat five times a line) and any number of other "ameters" depending on the number of syllables...
alliteration - starting consecutive words with the same letter or sound
assonance - using the same vowel sound within different words
consonance - same consonant sounds within different words
half rhyme, which isn't exact, but is similar sounds
and then there are a ton of forms of poems... free verse, sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, blank verse... i recommend you get that book the other person recommended! a lot of these things aren't necessarily "poetic" but are just facts of language... like onamonopoeia, certain sounds resonating differently on the ear (staccato-like harsh sounds versus "soft" sounds, etc.)