Literary device
Imagery
Language that calls on the reader's senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, motion, temperature — to produce a vivid mental picture. The foundational sense-device of lyric verse.
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Literary devices
How metaphor, enjambment, radif, and other devices work — guidelines a poet considers, then bends with care.
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Literary device
Metaphor
A figure of speech that names one thing as another, asking the reader to read both at once. Foundational to figurative language across nearly every tradition.
Literary device
Personification
Giving human qualities, actions, or speech to a non-human thing — an animal, an object, an abstraction, a force of nature. One of the oldest figures of sense, and a near-relative of metaphor.
Literary device
Simile
A figure of speech that compares two things using *like* or *as*. The metaphor's hinged, open cousin — slower to land, more visibly marked, often kinder to the reader.