Anaphora: Poetic Term

[UnderYourSpell]

The term “anaphora” comes from the Greek for “a carrying up or back," and refers to a type of parallelism created when successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany. The repetition can be as simple as a single word or as long as an entire phrase. As one of the world’s oldest poetic techniques, anaphora is used in much of the world’s religious and devotional poetry, including numerous Biblical Psalms.
See HERE

 

[Tzara]

Anaphora is one of the rhythmic/thematic techniques I've been studying lately. Walt Whitman uses anaphora extensively, as seen in this brief section of "Song of Myself":

Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheatlot,
Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,
Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,
Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides,

Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
Where the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,)
Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
Where the half-burn'd brig is riding on unknown currents,
Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;
Where the dense-starr'd flag is borne at the head of the regiments,​

Whitman is using the technique in part as a structural/organizational substitute for meter, which would have been a conventional component of poetry at the time (Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855, exactly contemporaneous to Longfellow's "Hiawatha," which is written in trochaic tetrameter, for example). It allows him to "open up" the line in his poems, allowing him to be much more expansive in his phrasing and rhythm than conventional metrical verse. Given the all-encompassing nature of "Song of Myself' ("I contain multitudes"), Whitman needed to find a way to escape the linguistic confinement of traditional meter. The use of anaphora was one of the techniques that allowed him to do that, creating one of the first examples of "free verse" in doing so.

Allen Ginsberg uses it in a very similar fashion (and, undoubtedly, with the intent of alluding to Whitman) in "Howl."

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Turns on it's head everything we've been taught yet Shakespeare was doing it way back when, I particularly liked the Joe Brainard example of 'I remember'.