The two great classifications into which literature can be arbitrarily divided are:  Prose and Poetry—
with their lines of demarcation often obscured by such forms as poetic prose ad unimaginative verse.

Literary Embellishments

To enrich literary expression, gradually certain devices have grown into the language of creators, with which the written forms are relieved of monotony and attain distinction and beauty.

Simile—This is one of the simplest figures of speech and the one most commonly met, in which one object or person is compared to another, with the word of likeness always expressed.  A simile:  “She is like unto a flower.”

Metaphor—The metaphor is a figure of speech in which one person or object is compared to another by asserting the one to be the other.  Examples:  “She is a flower,” or “Faith is a tower of strength.”

Apostrophe—The rhetorical form (apart from the grammatical term) means a figure of speech in which the speaker or writer turns from his direct discourse to address some absent person, some quality, attribute, etc., or some present person to whom the address would not be ordinarily directed.   Example, the apostrophe to death in the First Corinthians, 15:55—“O Death, where is thy sting?”

Alliteration—This is the successive use or frequent recurrence of the same initial letter or sound at the beginning of two or more words or stressed syllables; as in Poe’s The Bells: “What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells.”  This figure was characteristic of ancient verse and was more or less modified in Chaucer, Spenser and Swinburne.  Examples of alliterative phrases are: “storm and stress,” “fear and favor,” “live and learn,” “do or die.”

Metonymy—This is a figure of speech which refers to a person or thing by naming one of its attributes.  For example, in American literature, we say “the bench” to mean judges; we also say “the cloth” to mean the clergy, “the pen” for literature and “the sword” for war, as in “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Climax—In this figure, words or phrases or scenes are used in series and in a mounting degree of force, the strongest idea being reserved for last:  “She felt first confused, then baffled, then confounded.”

Anti-climax—This is the gradual or sudden decrease in the importance of the impressiveness of what is said—the opposite of climax.   It is often used for ludicrous effect or for contrast.  Example:  “A soldier fights for glory and thirty dollars a month.”

A Few Notes on Literary Style

Literary style reflects the writer himself as a spiritual photograph of his artistic intention.  The ordinary man might say:  “She’s wonderful!” but here is the way Byron expressed the same idea:

                                                        “She walks in beauty, like the night
                                                                Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
                                                        And all that’s best of dark and bright
                                                                Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

Or a prose writer might say:  “She spread contentment as she lived the daily round; and shed enchantments, with no sense of self.”  In each of these statements, so different one from another, the careful reader and the sensitive one will feel the quality of the writer.  Edmund Gosse says, “ . . . It is the style which appeals so vividly to the physical and moral system of the reader—not the fact, but the ornament of the fact . . .    Style appeals exclusively to those who read with attention and for the pleasure of reading.  It (style) causes a spasm of emotion, which is betrayed by tears or laughter or a heightened pulse.  This effect could not be produced by a statement of the fact, conveyed in language, but is the result of the manner in which the fact is presented . . . .”

Style changes in letters, as it does in dress—not quite so fundamentally, but nevertheless it, too, has its vagaries.  To be avoided in the cultivation of style, or to be rated unfavorably in testing or criticizing a style, are such negative or bad qualities as confusion, obscurity, inaccuracy, lumpiness (lack of smooth flow of phrase), over-elaboration and, of course, faults in grammar and construction.

The importance of the right word in the right place, the phrase which rounds off a situation and paints it swiftly and surely, the expression or metaphor which drives to the heart of a situation without waste of effort—either felt in the writer himself/herself, or by the reader—cannot be overestimated.

Robert Louis Stevenson advises would-be writers to read assiduously those authors who are generally acknowledged to be great stylists, and also to read the Bible.