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)
“We must introduce a new balance in the relationship between the individual and the government—a balance that favors greater individual freedom and self-reliance.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Firm in our beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)