Entertainment / Literature / Alliteration: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound. For instance, the phrase 'buckets of big blue berries' alliterates with the consonant b. Coleridge describes the sacred river Alph in Kubla Khan as 'Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,' which alliterates with the consonant m. The line 'apt alliteration's artful aid' alliterates with the vowel sound a. One of Dryden's couplets in Absalom and Achitophel reads, 'In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, / Before polygamy was made a sin.' It alliterates with the letter p. Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' employs the technique: I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Most frequently, the alliteration involves the sounds at the beginning of words in close proximity to each other. Alliteration is an example of a rhetorical scheme. Alliteration in which the first letters of words are the same (as opposed to consonants alliterating in the middles or ends of words) is more specifically called head rhyme, which is a bit of a misnomer since it doesn't actually involve rhyme in a technical sense. If alliteration also involves changes in the intervening vowels between repeated consonants, the technique is called consonance. See alliterative verse, alliterative prose, assonance, and consonance. See also alliterative revival and sound symbolism.
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Entertainment / Literature / Prosody: The mechanics of verse poetry--its sounds, rhythms, scansion and meter, stanzaic form, alliteration, assonance, euphony, onomatopoeia, and rhyme. (2) The study or analysis of the previously listed mat MORE