Re: Asphyxiating Alliteration
Posted: August 10th, 2010, 12:47 am
I think alliteration is also genre sensitive. Genre range i.e., poetry or prose or mystery or action adventure, etc., reader age range like primary or middle grade, young adult, or adult genre, and reader skill range, purpose range. Campy alliteration can be funny all by itself, for example, or onomatopoeias, Bam! Bopp! Pow!.
Serious alliteration can be forced seeming and more visible than might be a best practice. Walt Whitman's alliteration in Leaves of Grass tends to deliberate seeming. Whether it's forced seeming is open to interpretation. Book II, 18th stanza of "Starting from Paumanok;" "See, steamers steaming through my poems . . ." The stanza's lines also demonstrate head rhyme alliteration, where all the lines begin with the same sounding word, "See."
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at Project Gutenberg;
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm
Serious alliteration can be forced seeming and more visible than might be a best practice. Walt Whitman's alliteration in Leaves of Grass tends to deliberate seeming. Whether it's forced seeming is open to interpretation. Book II, 18th stanza of "Starting from Paumanok;" "See, steamers steaming through my poems . . ." The stanza's lines also demonstrate head rhyme alliteration, where all the lines begin with the same sounding word, "See."
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at Project Gutenberg;
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm