Sherry Chandler

Perhaps it’s purple prose, perhaps it’s poetry

but if your lines alliterate, learning will accelerate — or some such nonsense. Sense or nonsense, ’twill be remembered:

From nursery rhymes to Shakespearian sonnets, alliterations have always been an important aspect of poetry whether as an interesting aesthetic touch or just as something fun to read. But a recent study suggests that this literary technique is useful not only for poetry but also for memory.

In several experiments, researchers R. Brooke Lea of Macalester College, David N. Rapp of Northwestern University, Andrew Elfenbein and Russell Swinburne Romine of University of Minnesota and Aaron D. Mitchel of the Pennsylvania State University had participants read works of poetry and prose with alliterative sentences to show the importance of repetitive consonants on memory.

Previous studies have shown that alliteration can act as a better tool for memory than both imagery and meaning, however the reason for this has never been established. In their experiments the researchers hoped to demonstrate that alliterations retrieve similar sounding words and phrases from a person’s memory, making it a useful tool for poetry comprehension and memorization.

When I read this this afternoon, I remembered that I had read this this morning:

Otherwise, the poems [in Daniel Halpern's The American Anthology], many of them delightful in theme and diction and perception and complexity of tone, are shapeless and thus unmemorable. If we conceive of the English traditional forms as analogous in some ways to the wing collar, the poems in Halpern’s anthology are not quite like the tee-shirts of the Beats—they are more like button-downs, clean and perfectly presentable, but notably without starch.

— Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965)

I found the image quite memorable but Lea, Rapp, et al. say not.

Possibly related posts:

Henry K. Leadingham Prose & Poetry Reading & Reception

Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry

Frye on Poetry and Religion

For those prose writers among you

Speaking prose

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