Literary Devices and Their Use in Poetry

Poetry is known to be a creative thought or impassioned feeling using language and is expressed in many places in the world. A poem can have many different meanings according to how an individual interprets it. Various literary devices are used to bring out that interpretation and the sense of what the person thinks that is going to happen. In the poem “Saturday at the Canal” by Gary Soto and “Nothing Better” by The Postal Service the theme is sometimes in life you may go through tough times but it is up to you whether they will continue. Some literary devices that show the coming up from tough times are figurative language, imagery, and the mood of the poems/songs.

In the short stories “Stones” and “To Every Thing There is a Season” the authors Sandra Birdsell and Alistair MacLeod both use literary devices in a similar manner in order to achieve their thematic objectives. This essay will compare the way the authors use three literary devices such as imagery, metaphor and similes in their short stories to portray the thematic objective of loss of innocence.

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

Clint Smith is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society. Smith Clint wrote a poem called “Something You should Know.” The poem is about an early job he had in a Petsmart. The poet allows the readers into his personal life, but before he had trouble opening up to people and his work. Moreover, Clint wrote an insight in the poem about relying in anything to feel safe and he says it is the most terrifying thing any person can do.

Bernard Malamud’s award winning novel The Natural achieves organic unity through his expletory use of details to help maintain and sustain the major themes throughout the novel. The Natural contains many themes, perhaps the most visible of these themes is dissatisfaction. Roy Hobbs a once great, thriving baseball player projected for great things is shot by a serial killer that attacks young star athletes. Hobbs was dissatisfied with how his life turned out and how he couldn’t play the game he loves. You see Hobbs’ physical ability and mental strength taken from him after he is no longer a sought after. Through his ambition to return to the game that was taken from him when he was so young you see his strength and skill return to him,

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien expresses the importance of a story-truth, as opposed to a happening-truth by use of literary elements in his writing. The novel is about war and the guilt it leaves on everyone involved in the war. Story-truth is not exactly what happened, but uses part of the truth and part made up in order to express the truth of what emotion was felt, which an important thematic element in the novel is. The three literary devices he uses to express this are diction, imagery, juxtaposition, and hyperbole. All of these elements allow the reader to identify emotion that is expressed in each story, as though that were the complete truth.

Take a minute to imagine “Men looking like they had been/attacked repeatedly by a succession /of wild animals,” “never/ ending blasted field of corpses,” and “throats half gone, /eyes bleeding, raw meat heaped/ in piles.” These are the vividly, grotesque images Edward Mayes describes to readers in his poem, “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976.” Before even reading the poem, the title gave me a preconceived idea of what the poem might be about. “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976” describes what an extreme version of what I expected the poem to be about. The images I

Similarly, in Williams' poem, "The Great Figure," he reinforces the idea of brevity over elaboration in order to draw the reader into a moment of pure objectivism. Williams employs a visually disjointed poetic pattern to express the minute details of an ordinary scene. Between line six and line nine, Williams places single words as enjambed lines. The power of each word is emphasized by its solitary line placement. The lines "firetruck," "moving," and "unheeded" each ends with mute sounds (Williams 1). The sound at the end of each line creates a hard stop, further emphasizing the solitary power of each word. Additionally, "moving" and "tense" are placed at the center of the poem each shaping both the motion and mood of the poetic landscape (Williams 1). The structure of "The Great Figure" carries the observant reader swiftly through each component of the scene. The reader's attention is drawn between different objects by using prepositions. An example of prepositional use to direct attention occurs in the line "on a red" (Williams 1). When using the objectivist style, the perception of the poet is emphasized

The dead have no guilt. No responsibilities. No memory. They need not to follow any rules but two; be still and silent. But for those unlucky enough to have to live, they must carry the burden, and guilt of life and survival. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses imagery, mood, tone, and repetition to answer the question, what is the effect of conflict on humanity?

Stephen King’s action thriller 11.23.63 has the main character, Jake Epping, traveling back in time through a portal in Al’s Diner. His main goal throughout the novel is to research the past and stop JFK from being killed that fateful afternoon in Dallas Texas. King chooses many literary devices that make this story come alive and fun and easy to read.

First of all, E.E Cummings uses two techniques one of them is visual techniques to create meaning and make poems look like drawings, for example “a leaf falls” in Document A.The poem is like if a leaf is falling down from a tree.And also in the poem the word “loneliness” is spelled for the leaf getting separated from the others.In “the grasshopper jumps” document B is it like a grasshopper leaping

There are several examples of when tone is being used throughout the poem. One example is when the author says, “he is black, and I am white.”

"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." [It is] "a sign of real genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." Aristotle in Poetics.

Poetry is literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm, poems collectively or as a genre of literature. It is also a quality of beauty and intensity of emotion regarded as characteristic of poems. Poetry (poem) is something that follows a particular flow of rhythm and meter. Compare to prose, where there is no such restriction, and the content of the piece flows according to the story, a poem may or may not have a story, but definitely has structured method of writing.

Some of the poems and essays I have read during this class were relatable to me. Being away from college, I have struggled with not being at home. I have become a different person when I am at school, but when I am home, I feel like I am my normal self again. Some of these authors of the poems and essays that I have read throughout this class has struggled with being somewhere where they don’t belong and that they are someone else when they are not home. Unlike the other poems and essays we have read throughout the course. I enjoyed reading the ones about “home” because I actually understood what they are going through and that I can relate. Some of these poems and essays include “Going Home” by Maurice Kenny, Postcard from Kashmir”, by Agha Shahid Ali, “Returning” by Elias Miguel Munoz and “Hometown” by Luis Cabalquinto. All of these poems deal with duality.