Consonance is a poetic device characterized repetition of the same consonant two or more times in short succession, as in "pitter patter" or in "all mammals named Sam are clammy".
Consonance should not be confused with assonance, which is the repetition of vowel sounds. Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is at the beginning of each word, as in "few flocked to the fight". Alliteration is usually distinguished from other types of consonance in poetic analysis, and has different uses and effects.
Another special case of consonance is sibilance, the use of several sibilant sounds such as /s/ and /sh/. An example is the verse from Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." (This example also contains assonance around the "ur" sound.) Another example of consonance is the word "sibilance" itself.
Consonance is an element of half-rhyme poetic format, sometimes called "slant rhyme." It is common in hip-hop music, as for example in the song Zealots by the Fugees: "Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile/Whether Jew or gentile I rank top percentile." (This is also an example of internal rhyme.)
Traditionally, consonance has been used to emphasize or immitate a sound in formal poetry but is often used in modern days to create a tongue-twister effect.
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“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)