Relationship With Poetry
The sound of words is important in the field of poetry, and rhetoric more generally. Tools such as euphony, alliteration, and rhyme all depend on the speaker or writer confidently choosing the best-sounding word.
John Mitchell's book Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments collects lists of words of similar meaning and similar sounds. For example, the entry for V begins:
- Vital and vigorous but vain and vicious.
- Vitality is in words which relate to the Latin vita (life), vis (force) and vigor. In English are vim and vigour, vitality and velocity. The effect of V can be described as very vivacious. Like several other sounds V has a second, opposite meaning. In accordance with its relationship to the sounds W and F it is sometimes weak and flustured (German verwirrt), as in the words vain, vacuous, vapid, vague, vacillate, vagrant, vaporous, vertigo, veer, and vary.
Likewise, "gl-" words for shiny things: glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glam, glimmer, glaze, glass, glitz, gloss, glory, glow, and glitter. In German, nouns starting with "kno-" and "knö-" are mostly small and round: Knoblauch "garlic", Knöchel "ankle", Knödel "dumpling", Knolle "tuber", Knopf "button", Knorren "knot (in a tree)", Knospe "bud (of a plant)", Knoten "knot (in string or rope)".
Read more about this topic: Sound Symbolism
Famous quotes containing the words relationship with, relationship and/or poetry:
“Some [adolescent] girls are depressed because they have lost their warm, open relationship with their parents. They have loved and been loved by people whom they now must betray to fit into peer culture. Furthermore, they are discouraged by peers from expressing sadness at the loss of family relationships—even to say they are sad is to admit weakness and dependency.”
—Mary Pipher (20th century)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)