What is Anaphora?
This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets
Repetition is one of our oldest and most potent tools for giving language extra impact.
For example, think of any famous speech that has gone down in history, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, to Dr. King’s “I have a dream,” and you’re certain to find repetition at its heart.
Anaphora is a simple but profound use of repetition, that goes back thousands of years, and is still used every day by poets writing now, to make great poems.
This article will show you how you can use it too!
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What Anaphora is
Strictly speaking, anaphora means repeating the same word or phrase at the beginning of a series of sentences or clauses.
It's in the Bible, it's in Shakespeare, it's in Whitman and Ginsberg, it's in Lennon and McCartney, and I've just accidentally used it too! Those repeated "it's in"s are a living, breathing anaphora.
As I guess my spontaneous example demonstrates, anaphora is relatively common in everyday language use, especially when we want to make a strong point.
There's something about it that is compelling, especially in spoken language—which is why I mentioned famous speeches at the beginning.
And as poetry has a close relationship with spoken language, being a spoken art for much longer than it has been a written one, it's not surprising that anaphora should do some cool things in poetry.
Anaphora in action
Anaphora can create several different effects. Here are three ways you might use it
1: Amassing is amazing!
I learned anaphora from Kenneth Koch, who uses it often, for example in poems like "One Train May Hide Another."
In this poem, the anaphora phrase "One [XXXX] may hide another" is used to link together a huge range of examples of something covering or concealing something else, from sisters to dreams to ideas.
This may not seem a very inspiring way to structure a poem, but in Koch's hands it becomes a method to gather a brilliant conglomeration of different kinds of ideas, from comedy to philosophy to psychology to art.
In this approach, every time you use the anaphora, it’s like opening the door on another new world of possibility.
There are just so many ways you could finish the sentence that the anaphora starts! Your imagination could go anywhere:
To real things
To wishes and dreams
To impossible things.
And the best thing is that, no matter where you range, the anaphora takes care of coherence for you:
The repetition of the anaphora, and the ideas it contains, automatically create unity in the poem.
So, Koch's poem gives us one of what anaphora is good for:
Anaphora makes it easy to cover a lot of range, while automatically creating a unified, coherent poem.
2: Cover all angles
On the other hand, sometimes poets use anaphora in a more concentrated way, to explore a single topic in depth.
In this case, I think of the poet as being like a scientist who moves around an experiment, observing it from many different points and perspectives.
Instead of Koch’s scattergun brilliance, the effect of one of these poems is of a profound investigation or multifaceted portrayal of something.
For example:
In "Sometimes," Sheenagh Pugh uses anaphora to build optimism that things might go right in the world. (Interestingly, she now says she hates the poem—I don't know why!)
In "Bleeding Heart," Carmen Giménez Smith uses it to dive deep into what it means to feel endless compassion for others.
But even in these poems, note how the poets are still able to bring in a number of different ways of considering their topic.
Even focused anaphora still gives you options!
3: Look at a moment
Lastly, a kind of anaphora poem that is less common, but can be done:
Using anaphora to paint a picture of an event, scene, or moment
I guess this is really a sub-type of the focused anaphora, but as it doesn’t get done very often, and I like it, I thought I’d include it here.
If you can find the right phrase, anaphora can be a great way to capture the emotional essence of a single moment.
In this case, you can use the anaphora to portray the emotion, whilst depicting the details of the scene in the ways you choose to complete the sentence.
My own “Walking in New England Woods, I Am Happy” is an example of this. You can read it in the pack of my poems that won the Maureen Egan Award from Poets & Writers: it’s the last poem (starts on page 10).
Changing it up
So, anaphora is a flexible and powerful device that is still very much in use today, after its thousands of years of life.
However, it’s not perfect!
There are some tricky aspects of it that you’ll want to be aware of, and chief among these are:
You feeling trapped inside the endless repetition
The anaphora obstructing a poem's ideas, by getting in the way of material that doesn’t fit with it
The reader becoming bored of the anaphora, and in fact skipping over it.
Fortunately, there is a simple answer to both of these problems:
Varying the anaphora
There are two ways to do this:
Change the anaphora phrase
If you read “Bleeding Heart," again you’ll see that Smith uses not one anaphora (“My heart bleeds”) but a series of variations on it, including:
My heart is bleeding…
It bleeds…
My heart bleeds…
I’m bleeding…
It will always bleed…
My heart bled….
Always the same basic idea, but many different ways of expressing it. This gives variety, and keep the poem engaging.
You can also change the location of the anaphora, putting in the middle or at the end of the sentence sometimed, instead of always at the beginning
2. Insert some sentences that don’t use the anaphora.
Koch does this a lot in ke "One Train May Hide Another." While he does keep coming back to his “one [XXXX] may hide another, between them, there are plenty of other sentence starters, such as:
“That is, if you are waiting to cross… “
“One waits at the tracks until they pass…”
“A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides / Her own vivacious daughter in turn…”
This approach allows you to expand beyond the limits of the anaphora, when you want to, so you don’t feel trapped.
It also allows you to broaden the ideas and structures.
And, it introduces more surprise for the reader!
Anaphora for all!
I hope I’ve convinced you that anaphora can do some pretty cool things. In particular, I love it because:
Anaphora’s greatest benefit is that it can release a flood of ideas in you.
If you find the right phrase, you’ll find it unleashing your creativity and imagination, as you think of dozens of ways you could complete the sentence.
For that reason, my last tip is this:
It’s worth taking the time up front to find a phrase that really “clicks” for you.
That way, you’ll get all the joy of anaphora, and your readers will too!
Next Steps: write using anaphora
If you've never tried an anaphora poem, give it a go! They're super easy to get started on.
1: Gather a lot of potential anaphora
Create more than you need, so you can choose the best. Here are three good ways to do that:
Look through conjunctions: words such as "Although," Supposing," or "Unless"—and list some that seem promising as anaphora.
Go personal: create anaphora using “I” + a verb (like “I love…,” “I remember…”) or “My” + a noun (like “My worst mistake…,” “My tired body…”)
Go conditional: borrow from Koch, and use “might,” “may,” or “could”: “You might wish…” “The world may never…”
Use found language: look for sentence beginnings in other places, like books, posters, food wrappers, warning signs!
2: Choose one anaphora
Pick the one that, as you look at it, is already filling you mind with possible ways to continue it.
3: Create as much material as you can
Finish that sentence in as many ways as you can! Try to pick examples from different kinds of topic—some personal, some political, some social, some impossible, some natural, and so on.
4: When you run out of steam, change things up
As I outlined above, try to vary the anaphora or start some sentences differently, and see what new life that brings in.
