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28 January 2005: Because of a discussion at New-Poetry, I got to wondering (1) what poetic devices there are that can be considered important and significantly special: rhyme, of course, but also--for me--the rim-rhyme that Wilfred Owen, so far as I know, invented; and (2) when each came into use, and what else do we know about its background.
My own spotty knowledge only goes back to 1550 or so, and only covers poetry in English. My impression is that poetic devices started with what I call "repenemes" (I think)--the use of repeated sounds, including the combinations of accents we call meter, and parallellisms as in the psalms and much of Whitman. It strikes me that form is really a poetic device, so shapes of poems would have been early poetic devices, too.
A third major category would be what I call "equaphors," my term for what most people would call figures of speech, but also for symbols, allusions, and the like. These perhaps--or probably--existed as part of the language before poetry but would probably have been emphasized in poetry. I would claim that while a metaphor, say, is not a specifically poetic device, a metaphor
It would seem that negative devices came next, much later: blank verse, then free verse (which unavoidably included organic form). Once free verse had become established--or, better, once poets had been freed of the constraints of meter--they exploded into the invention of all kinds of other devices, beginning with surrealistic images and the jump-cut, followed quickly by the pluraesthetic image, or image added to a poem from some expressive modality other than the verbal. Infraverbality and sprungrammar, or expressive misspelling and bad grammar were later.
Significant new specimens of many of these are still being created even as I speak. How wonder it would be if there were a history of all this.
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