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Mimesis

Rhetorical Devices
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The imitation or representation of speech, action, character, or reality. It makes a poem seem to enact what it describes.

Detailed Definition
Mimesis is the shaping of language to imitate lived experience, another voice, a sound, a gesture, or a recognizable social world. A poet may reproduce a child’s speech, the cadence of a sermon, or the abrupt movement of a crowd. The device can create dramatic immediacy by making readers feel that an event is occurring before them rather than merely being reported. Mimesis may be realistic, stylized, affectionate, or satirical, depending on the poet’s purpose.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” imitates the speaker’s listening to a bird’s song and recreates that experience in verse; Browning’s “My Last Duchess” mimetically presents the voice of a controlling duke through dramatic monologue; “The poem copies the river’s motion in long, flowing lines that seem to carry the reader downstream” uses form to imitate nature; “She wrote the sparrow’s quick chirps as short bursts of sound” uses poetic language to represent an observed action
Additional Notes
Mimesis concerns how art imitates or represents life, including a speaker’s voice, dialogue, gesture, and sensory detail. In poetry, vivid mimesis can make an event feel enacted in the present rather than merely reported. It is often discussed alongside representation and dramatic monologue.
Other Meanings of “Mimesis”
Also Known As
Imitation Imitatio
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