Writing in Credo: Figures of Speech

A term specifically applied to the work of late-19th-century French writers who reacted against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism. Originating in France in the 1880s, Symbolism developed after Romanticism and before surrealism in its exploration of the world of imaginative, dreamlike fantasy.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A figure of speech most conservatively defined as an explicit comparison using “like” or “as”—e.g. “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs” (Elizabeth Bishop).

Figure of speech using an analogy or close comparison between two things that are not normally treated as if they had anything in common. Metaphor is a common means of extending the uses and references of words.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Gr., "turn"). In its most restricted definition, a trope is a figure of speech that uses a word or phrase in a sense other than what is proper to it. The artful deviation of a word from its ordinary signification, a deviation that usually involves the substitution of one word or concept for another.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Gr., "act of taking together," "understanding one thing with another"). A trope (change of meaning) in which part is substituted for whole (ex. hired "hands" for hired men) or vice versa. Definitions of synecdoche and metonymy have always overlapped.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A poet’s deliberate incorporation of identifiable elements from other sources, preceding or contemporaneous, textual or extratextual. A. may be used merely to display knowledge, as in some Alexandrian poems; to appeal to those sharing experience or knowledge with the poet; or to enrich a poem by incorporating further meaning.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected.

From Good Word Guide
Refers to a phrase or idiom that has become stale through overuse.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A figure or trope, common to all lits., consisting of bold exaggeration, apparently first discussed by Isocrates and Aristotle (Rhetoric 1413a28).

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Group of words with a meaning of its own that is different from the meanings of each individual word in the group. For example, ‘It's raining cats and dogs’ means ‘It's raining heavily.’

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The traditional term for words which seem to imitate the things they refer to, as in this line from Collins’ “Ode to Evening”: “Now the air is hushed, somewhere the weak-eyed bat / With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing.”