FORGOTTEN GROUND REGAINED
A POET'S GUIDE TO ALLITERATIVE VERSE (ISSN 2996-6353)
Edited by Paul D. Deane
Alliterative poetry uses alliteration -- repeating sounds at the start of a syllable -- to link the parts of a line. If you have watched (much less, read) The Lord of the Rings, you have heard quite a lot of alliterative verse (even if you didn't realize it.)
Most people know about famous medieval alliterative poems, such as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fewer people realize it shows up in famous operas, like Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs, and that hundreds of modern poets have written at least some poems in the form. Alliterative verse is a lot more than most people realize. It's not using tonge twisters, like "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliterative verse has a powerfl rhythm, driven by the way the alliteration reinforces the strongest, most important content words in each line. It is easy to write natural-sounding alliterative verse in English. If anything, in a stress-based language lke English, alliteration is more natural than rhyme. It can be as natural sounding as free verse, and as musical as the most lyrical of traditional poems.
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