works use a variety of means to help engage readers in
such interpretive processes, means ranging from the
generic conventional opening of a DREAM VISION, in
which a narrator solicits the reader’s help in under-
standing a dream, to the use of PERSONIFICATION, where
inanimate objects and/or abstractions are represented
as human beings with the ability to speak and act.
See also EXEGESIS, MIDDLE ENGLISH POETRY.
FURTHER READING
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964.
Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradi-
tion. 1936. Reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1968.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol, translated by Cath-
erine Porter. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, University Press, 1982.
Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and
Their Posterity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
J. Hunter Morgan
ALLITERATION Alliteration occurs when a
consonant is repeated in words that are next to or near
each other. In English, typically, alliteration happens at
the beginning of words that are part of a single line of
verse. It may also appear in the stressed syllables within
words, across two or more lines of a verse paragraph,
and in various kinds of prose. Because alliteration pro-
duces a conspicuous, if brief, consonantal echo, it is
best understood as a sound effect rather than a rhyme.
Scholars consider alliteration to be among the most
ancient of metrical devices. The earliest poems were
spoken or sung and therefore, if of any length, were dif-
fi cult to recall. As a mnemonic device, alliteration
enabled poets and listeners to better remember what
they had performed and heard. Besides enabling lan-
guage to be repeated more accurately, alliteration
imposed order on spoken words and, by so doing, gave
speech some of its earliest formal patterns. Listeners
(and later readers) learned to treat instances of allitera-
tion with greater attention than the more irregular utter-
ances of everyday language. Alliteration thus helped to
make poetry and prose more stylized over time.
Old English poetry had alliteration as its formal
basis. Its poets divided a line of verse by inserting a
CAESURA, or signifi cant pause, at about the line’s mid-
point. Alliterative consonants spanned the resulting
HALF-LINEs, typically by emphasizing a consonant of
one or two of the stressed syllables. By the latter half of
the 14th century, an ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL arose.
Responding to Old English versifi cation and opposing
continental poetry, MIDDLE ENGLISH POETRY both used
alliteration and varied it. As poets investigated allitera-
tive possibilities, the best and often densest poetry of
the period resulted. Indeed, major poems on the order
of PIERS PLOWMAN and SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
expanded how alliteration could be imagined.
By the early Renaissance, alliteration had changed
from an organizing principle to a less frequently used
poetic device. SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS, with their more
sporadic but still-strategic use of alliteration, best dem-
onstrate this change. For instance, the fi rst QUATRAIN of
Sonnet 30 treats the memories of lost love and dead
friends by repeating, famously, the s and w consonants
in lines 1 and 4, respectively. The repetition in “woes,”
“wail,” and “waste” (l. 4) concludes the fi rst portion of
the poem by foregrounding an onomatopoetic of
lament.
FURTHER READING
Cable, Thomas. The English Alliterative Tradition. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Larry T. ShillockALLITERATIVE REVIVAL (ca. 1350–1400)
There is little agreement about the so-called alliterative
revival. What it is, why it happened, and, indeed,
whether it happened at all are all up for debate. Never-
theless, in the last half of the 14th century a number of
nonrhyming, alliterative poems were written, most of
them originating from north and northwest England.
Although these poems vary greatly in terms of meter,
rhyme, and generic form, they have in common their
use of ALLITERATION, a poetic device in which two or
more words begin with the same sound. The opening
line of PIERS PLOWMAN serves as a good example: “In a
somer seson, whan softe was the sonne” (l. 1). This
group of poems is often referred to as a revival because
alliteration is a basic form in Old English poetry.
Traditionally, scholars have differentiated between
so-called formal (or classical) alliterative poems andALLITERATIVE REVIVAL 9