These devices, as exemplified by the above examples, create emphasis, urgency, sonic joy, and structure.

The repetition emphasizes the poems’ themes or subject matter, the complexity of those ideas or concepts. For example, Whitman’s use of anaphora and parallelism creates a catalog that reinforces the poet’s ideas about the beauty of the body, the significance of Abraham Lincoln, and the complexity of American democracy. The same idea appears in Bernstein’s poem, which is comprised of 95 sentences beginning “War is.”

These devices create urgency, that what is being written is barely containable in words and in the body, as in Ginsberg’s and Lorca’s poems.

The repetition also emphasizes the poems’ words as well as the sonic and often arbitrary nature of language, of signs and signifiers. For example, Jarnot’s poems “Song of the Chinchilla,” “You, Armadillo,” and “Aardvark,” revel in the sounds of the words chinchilla, armadillo, and aardvark and question the relationships between the word and its referent.

These devices create a formal structure, an organizing principle without which the poem would dissipate like ether, as in Salamun’s “I See,” Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” and Jarnot’s “The Bridge.” Organizing a poem with these devices is similar to organizing a poem with a metrical pattern or rhyme scheme.