What "anaphora" means in rhetoric and poetry

A term you'll meet in rhetoric and prosody.

Anaphora (from the Greek anaphorá, "a carrying back") is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields" — that is anaphora. The repeated "we shall fight" is not an accident or a stylistic tic; it is doing specific rhetorical work.

What anaphora does

The figure has several effects, sometimes working simultaneously:

Accumulation. Each repetition adds another element to a mounting list. The repetition is the form of the accumulation — it tells you: there is more, and more, and more. Churchill's speech gathers resolve from this momentum. The repeated phrase becomes a drumbeat.
Emphasis. By returning to the same opening, the speaker signals: this is the thing worth returning to, the anchor of the argument. Everything that follows it is a variation; the repeated phrase is the invariant truth.
Incantatory rhythm. The repeating structure creates a forward momentum that feels close to liturgy or song. Biblical parallelism — the Old Testament's characteristic mode — is essentially anaphoric: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters." The repetition of grammatical structure at the start of each clause is the form's sacred quality.
Unity. A long anaphoric list is unified by its opening phrase, which gives the reader a thread to hold through the accumulation. Without the repeated anchor, the list risks dissolving into catalogue.

The King James Bible

The KJB's anaphora — "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" — is one of the most influential models in the English language. That opening "And" repeated at the start of each verse (in the Hebrew, waw, the connecting conjunction) gave generations of English writers a template for expansive, accumulative prose. Hemingway's use of "and" as a structural principle in his early stories is anaphoric in the biblical sense.

Walt Whitman

Whitman is the supreme practitioner of anaphora in American poetry. Song of Myself builds entire sections on anaphoric repetition: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself... I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." But the technique reaches its fullest expression in catalogues like the "I am large, I contain multitudes" passages, where anaphoric "I see" or "I hear" or "Where" anchors a rushing list of American scenes. The repetition enacts democratic inclusion — the same opening phrase for every item, no hierarchy of importance.

Martin Luther King Jr.

"I have a dream that one day... I have a dream that one day... I have a dream that one day..." The rhetorical power of the speech depends substantially on anaphora. Each repetition of "I have a dream" resets the listener's attention and signals: here comes another specification of the vision. The accumulation is not redundant; it is the accumulation itself that constitutes the vision's comprehensiveness. By the fifth or eighth repetition, the phrase has become a ritual incantation that the audience participates in.

Anaphora vs. epistrophe vs. symploce

Anaphora's sister figures: epistrophe is repetition at the end of successive clauses ("government of the people, by the people, for the people"). Symploce combines both — same beginning and same ending — creating the tightest possible rhetorical cage. Anaphora alone leaves the middle open for variation, which is why it accommodates catalogue and accumulation so naturally.

When to look for it

Any time a writer begins two or more consecutive sentences, clauses, or lines with the same word or phrase, look for anaphora. Then ask: what is the repeated element doing? Is it accumulating, emphasizing, unifying, or incanting? What would be lost if the writer had simply listed the items without the repeated anchor? The answer tells you what the figure is contributing and how central it is to the passage's effect.

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