Common Literary Devices and Their Usage
Literary Devices
Repetition
Alliteration: Repetition of sounds or groups of similar sounds. Example: The silence seemed to say something, a soft susurrus like a bee.
Anaphora: Repetition of one or more items at the beginning of several lines or syntactic groups. Example: No death in love forgives, no heedless life, do not forgive the earth or nothing.
Parallelism: Repetition of similar constructions in two or more verses or syntactic groups. Example: Oh, my linen shirts! Oh, my poppy thighs!
Polysyndeton: Insistent repetition of the same conjunction. Example: But there will be stars and flowers and sighs and fragrances…
Contrast
Antithesis: Juxtaposition of words with opposite meanings in syntactic groups. Example: It is not yesterday, tomorrow has not arrived.
Paradox: Joining two seemingly incompatible ideas. Example: If you do not know, I have not lived; if I die without knowing, I do not die, for I have not lived.
Paronomasia: Placing words with very similar signifiers next to each other, but with different meanings. Example: Archangels and angels meet the man, and hunger makes its prey, the mounds field day.
Chiasmus: Employing the same syntactic structure, but in reverse or crossed order. Example: The gray sun and brown earth. How simple, the when fulminant!
Deletion or Omission
Asyndeton: Deletion of conjunctions, often giving the impression of speed or alertness. Example: A pure day, happy, free I want.
Ellipsis: Omission of one or more elements that are fairly obvious. Example: The good, if brief, is twice as good.
Intensification
Gradation: Listing in a determined order. Depending on the order, it can be ascending or descending. Example: On earth, smoke, powder, shadow, nothing.
Hyperbole: Exaggeration. Example: I run after her, crying in rivers.
Hyperbaton: Large disorder of the usual words. Example: These, Fabio, oh pain! that you see now withered fields, of solitude hill.
Rhetorical Question: A question that does not expect an answer, only intends to emphasize a statement. Example: What would the color of light be without you, girl, painter of painters?
Pleonasm: Use of redundant words to intensify the idea expressed. Example: What persuasion was enough to persuade that there are apes in the world guessing, as I have seen now with my own eyes?
Element Replacement
Irony: Saying the opposite of what is meant, in a way that the reader can understand the true intent. Example: Who doubts that we have freedom of the press? Do you want to print an obituary, or even a card with your name and any well-specified name? Nobody hinders you.
Metaphor: Substitution of a real term for an imaginary one with which it maintains a relationship of similarity. Example: Our lives are rivers that will end in the sea, which is death. / Suspicions escape from the strawberry mouth. / I’ve been marking Atlas, crossfire white of your body. / I know in his heart, the nest of serpents… If only the imaginary term is seen and the real one is omitted, it is called a pure metaphor: Concha left a prisoner in her daughter’s braid, a comb of ivory, and took from between the strands of gold a pale hand.
Metonymy: Substitution of one term for another with which it maintains a relationship of proximity. Example: The two rivers of Granada fall from snow to wheat.
Personification: Attribution of human qualities to inanimate or irrational beings. Example: The eyes of statues weeping their immortality.
Simile: Comparison of one item with another. Example: When I look at your body stretched out like a river that never ends.