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repetition

What is Repetition? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Repetition Definition

As a literary term, repetition (reh-pih-TIH-shun) refers to deliberately repeating sounds, words, and phrases within a piece of literature for the purpose of creating an intended effect. The point may be to rouse the reader, slow a reader down create rhythm, or make a passage easier to remember.

Literary Devices that Use Repetition

Repetition is a general term that serves as an umbrella for many literary devices. Below are some of the more common repetitious devices; examples may be bolded for emphasis.

  • Alliteration: This is the repetition of the sounds at the beginnings of words throughout a sentence, paragraph, or longer passage. “Pliny plucked the plants and then plated the plums.”
  • Anadiplosis: This occurs when a word or a group of words from the end of one clause or sentence is repeated at or toward the beginning of the next clause or sentence for effect. “I fell asleep on a pile of laundry, and a pile of laundry broke my fall in my dream.”
  • Anaphora: In anaphora, the writer or speaker repeats a word or group of words at the beginnings of sequential sentences or phrases. “Everybody saw you take the cupcake. Everybody saw you lick it, and everybody saw you put it back.”
  • Antanaclasis: In antanaclasis, a repeated word changes meaning each time it’s used. “A woman was cutting in front of me in line, so I whispered a cutting remark about her rudeness.”
  • Antimetabole: In antimetabole, a juxtaposing phrase is repeated and inverted. “He started over to prevent criticism but was criticized for starting over.”
  • Assonance: This is the repetition of vowel sounds, which can occur at any position within each word. “I couldn’t take the way the light and shadows played upon her face.”
  • Consonance: This is the same as assonance, except with consonant sounds. “Disaster struck when the jester stole the rest of the oysters.”
  • Diacope: Diacope is the repetition of a word or phrase with one to a few words separating the instances. “I heard the train whistle, so I ran for the train and jumped onto the train.”
  • Epanalepsis: Epanalepsis is like diacope, except the repeated word or phrase specifically occurs at the beginning and the end of the sentence. “The best course of action is to hold off on doing anything until we stumble upon the best course of action.”
  • Epistrophe: Epistrophe is like anaphora, except the repetition occurs at the end of phrases or sentences. “The station ID says, ‘We don’t just play the same five songs,’ but this station constantly plays the same five songs, then I get sick of those same five songs, even if I used to like them.”
  • Epizeuxis: Epizeuxis is what diacope would be without any intervening words. “Everyone says, ‘Where have the bees gone?’ but when I open a jar of honey outdoors, all I see are bees, bees, bees.”
  • Polyptoton: Polyptoton is the repeated use of words with the same root across a sentence or paragraph. “Your comment felt pointed, but pointing fingers seems pointless; please just make your point.”
  • Polysyndeton: This is the repeated deliberate use of a coordinating conjunction (usually and) where, typically, commas would be preferable. “The robot cooks and cleans and gardens and drinks and swears and gambles just like Mom used to.”
  • Refrain: A refrain is an anchoring repeated element in a poem. It can be a single word or several lines.
  • Symploce: Symploce combines anaphora and epistrophe. “My cat caught a mouse, and I wrote a song about it. My cat scratched me, and I wrote a song about it. My cat ran away, and I wrote a song about it.”

Examples of Repetition in Literature

1. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

In a splendid example of alliteration, Angelou repeats s and w sounds to add texture to her description of feeling uncomfortable at church:

Up the aisle, the moans and screams merged with the sickening smell of woolen black clothes worn in summer weather and green leaves wilting over yellow flowers.

2. Joanna Klink, “Some Feel Rain”

Klink repeats the phrase some feel four times in the first five lines of this poem, using anaphora to create rhythm. Then, she uses it only twice more, fairly spread out, in the remainder of the 27-line poem, perhaps to demonstrate how one gradually shakes off the concept of individualism as one enters Nature:

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air

3. Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother

Epanalepsis often appears in aphorisms. In this line from a novel about staking out one’s identity in an unjust world, Kincaid delivers a perfectly dense and concise truism:

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

4. Javier Zamora, “[Immigration Headline]”

This prose poem of powerful social commentary―which appears as a series of poems―uses several types of repetition to sustain a rhythm and express frustration with the way things never change. In the first entry of the series, Zamora repeats the line “yo soy un bicho migrante”―“I am a migrant bug” in English.

5. Carson McCuller, A Member of the Wedding

In this passage, McCullers uses polysyndeton to help the reader remember what it’s like to be a restless 12-year-old girl:

It was four o'clock in the afternoon and the kitchen was square and gray and quiet. Frankie sat at the table with her eyes half closed, and she thought about a wedding.

Further Resources on Repetition

See how many types of repetition you can identify by listening to Javier Zamora read “[Immigration Headline],” courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

BookFox offers a list of 17 literary examples of repetition.