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We searched Yahoo! for "poetic devices", using quotes to ensure that the words would appear together in our results. Scrolling through the pages, we came upon an intriguing title, Poetic Devices Illustrated Through Billy Joel. The site uses song lyrics to define and demonstrate 17 common figures of speech, such as allusion and alliteration, simile and synecdoche. A search on Google returned a different selection of pages about "poetic devices", beginning with a brief glossary page from The Poet's Bookshelf.
We had a hunch that "poetic devices" were close kin to "rhetorical devices." To explore this notion, we returned to Yahoo!, visiting categories with sites about poetry writing and rhetoric. Soon, we found ourselves deep in the Forest of Rhetoric, a comprehensive guide to rhetorical terms and devices. As it turns out, there are hundreds of terms for devices used in Classic and Renaissance discourse, many of which are used equally well in poetry and prose to appeal to reason or to emotion. Finally, we visited A
Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices, a book by Robert Harris that examines more than 60 devices that can be used "to improve the effectiveness, clarity, and enjoyment of your writing."
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