poetic language
Figurative, musical prose
Poetic language is expression that emphasizes imagery, rhythm, sound, and figurative meaning over plain communication.
It includes devices like metaphor, alliteration, and unusual word order.
The term often appears in contrast to prose or everyday speech: The script relies heavily on poetic language.
Something described as poetic language may be praised as evocative or criticized as impractical: That's poetic language, but what does it actually mean?
- metaphorImplied identity comparison
- dead metaphorFigurative phrase now literal-seeming
- oxymoronSelf-contradicting phrase device
- rhythmPatterned stress and silence
- iambic pentameterUnstressed-stressed pattern, five feet
rhyme scheme · alliteration · assonance · pathos · allegory · caesura · personification · cacophony · enjambment · free verse · onomatopoeia · synecdoche · sibilance · symbolism · anaphora · litotes · cadence · euphemism
- literary devicesmetaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, alliteration
- figurative languagemetaphor, simile, figure of speech, analogy, personification
- imageryvisual imagery, metaphor, symbolism, allegory, sensory detail
- Romantic PoetryWordsworth, Keats, William Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge
- writing craftcreative writing, diction, fiction writing, pacing, novel writing
- linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
poetic languageplain speech
Unembellished verbal expression
plain language · everyday speech · vernacular · colloquial speech · colloquial language
poetic languagetechnical language
Specialized vocabulary of a field
legalese · business English · jargon · legal language · technical writing