You might not know where your poem is going until you finish writing it. In the meantime, stick to your literary devices. Avoid using too many abstract nouns, develop striking images, use metaphors and similes to strike interesting comparisons, and above all, speak from the heart.
Whitman wrote this poem at the beginning of the Civil War. Whitman uses the drums and bugles as symbols of the war itself (during the wars of early American history, drums and bugles would signal the beginning of each battle). In this poem, the speaker commands the instruments to play so loudly that they disrupt everyone's lives, just like war changes a society. This was especially true of the Civil War, as all the soldiers were American and all the battles took place on American soil. The war dictated everything that happened during period of American history. In this poem, Whitman does not let his reader escape the incessant drumbeat and trumpeting bugles, just as there was no escaping the Civil War.
Literary Devices Used In Beat Beat Drums
Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more consecutive or nearby words. This literary device is not only used in poetry, but also in prose, drama, songs, cartoons, and the media.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by nineteenth century American author Edgar Allan Poe. Originally published in 1843 in The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine, the story follows an unreliable (and unnamed) narrator who carefully calculates the murder of an elderly neighbor. Poe utilizes a variety of literary devices and figurative language in crafting the short story, including visual and auditory imagery. Imagery is a means of activating the senses through language. Although visual imagery is the most common, imagery also can present smells, textures, tastes, and sounds for the reader.
Poe uses imagery in "The Tell-Tale Heart" to build suspense. He describes the neighbor's room, saying that it "was a black as pitch with the thick darkness" and details how the narrator works nightly to shine "a single, dim ray" over the eye of his neighbor while he sleeps in order to terrorize him. Poe also makes strong use of auditory imagery, particularly with the repetition of the sound of the neighbor's beating heart: "there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart." The sensory, descriptive imagery of the light and the sounds of the heartbeat repeat several times in the story to create an eerie tone and to generate a sense of haunting anticipation in the reader.
Poe's use of figurative language in "The Tell-Tale Heart" generally serves to impact the reader's emotions and imaginative experience of the story. Figurative language is the use of figures of speech, poetic language, and other literary and rhetorical devices to more effectively describe characters, settings, and events and to add meaning and associations that enhance the reader's experience of a work of literature.
Poe employs a range of literary devices such as hyperbole, simile, metaphor, alliteration, foreshadowing, and personification in order to engage the reader's imagination, activate their emotions, and create a sensory experience as the reader follows the paranoia of the narrator as he accelerates his campaign of fear and violence against his neighbor.
Poe's active use of figurative language works to bring a sense of realism to the highly fictionalized scenario presented in the plot of the story; with the reader's emotions and imagination fully engaged, the fantastic details of the plot become less subject to reason. Together "The Tell-Tale Heart's" literary devices serve to enliven the narration of the story and draw the reader's attention to the inner and outer sensory details of the drama.
More than once, the narrator compares the sound of his neighbor's heartbeat to the sound of a watch. Poe describes the narrator's thought process: ". . .there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage."
Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words that appear next to or close to each other in a sentence or phrase. Poe's use of alliteration in "The Tell-Tale heart" is less pronounced than his use of other literary devices, yet it serves to reinforce the fearful and suspenseful atmosphere of the story.
Near the end of the story as the action climaxes, the narrator is anxious to silence his neighbor's beating heart which he feels has become intolerably loud. After the narrator kills his neighbor, he tries to discern whether or not he has been successful: ". . .for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound" and "I placed my hand on the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation." The alliteration of the m sound and the h sound in these phrases present both repetition and variation, mimicking how a steady beat might sputter before ceasing.
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" incorporates many literary and rhetorical devices and employs figurative language in order to activate the reader's emotions and imagination. Poe utilizes both visual and auditory imagery to create a suspenseful atmosphere in the story and to convey the narrator's state of mind. The use of imagery of darkness and slivers of light work to establish an eerie tone and provide a dramatic setting for the events of the story. Poe also uses a series of similes, including having the narrator repeatedly compare the neighbor's beating heart to the sound of a clock. By associating the everyday sound of a clock with the narrator's paranoid perceptions of his neighbor's heartbeat, the reader can more likely relate to the narrator's unreliable and unusual point of view. Additionally, the narrator repeatedly uses metaphors to describe his neighbor's eye as that of a vulture's, which demonstrates his negative attitude towards his neighbor and how fearful he has become.
Other instances of figurative language are used more frequently in "The Tell-Tale Heart" than alliteration. Yet a few key instances of subtle alliteration serve to underscore the dramatic tension of the narrator's murder of his neighbor. The narrator is anxious to confirm that his neighbor's heart has stopped beating: "I placed my hand on the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation." The repetition of the h, m, and p sounds, while interrupting the pattern of exact repetition simulates the final sputtering of the neighbor's last moments.
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" compares the beating of his neighbor's heart to the sound of a watch more than once in the story. Poe writes through the narrator's perspective, "there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart." This simile serves to connect the narrator's experience to a sound readers likely have heard their everyday lives.
Dickens describes the city through the sound of wailing, making the city seem ghostly, sinister, and chaotic. The city itself cannot wail or beat drums, so Dickens uses human traits of wailing and beating drums to help give description and character to the city itself.
Cacophonic is a poetic sound device in which certain sounds create harsh and hard tones. The opposite of euphony, cacophony is colorful, noisy, loud, and energetic like the beat of a drum or the crash of a cymbal.
Although Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York, fellow poet Herbert Huncke is credited with first using the word "beat".[7] The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was Huncke, a street hustler, who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks",[8][9][10] but Kerouac appropriated the image and altered the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the Beat Generation poem.[11]
The origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Hal Chase and others. Kerouac attended Columbia on a football scholarship.[12] Though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic,[13][14][15] many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from W. B. Yeats), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic literary ideals.[16][17]
An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach, San Francisco) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958 tourists who came to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district ten years later.[56]
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in the comic strip Pogo[58]) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic poseurs. Jack Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild.[59] 2ff7e9595c
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