Alamkara is a Sanskrit word that means "ornamentation."
- A phrase for the more than one hundred different kinds of figures of speech in Sanskrit poetry.
- Metaphor, simile, contrast, exaggeration, alliteration, and puns are only a few of the terms employed in English poetics.
- These figures of speech were further divided into more precise kinds by the Sanskrit literati, such as a simile expressing surprise, a simile expressing uncertainty, and poetic mistake, which is the opposite of a metaphor (“that's not the moon, but her face...”).
- Other styles are specific to Indian poetry, such as respective enumeration, a prolonged comparison in which one line names many referents and subsequent lines explain their characteristics, always in the same sequence as the initial line.
- Denial is a style of Indian poetry in which the speaker's actual purpose is conveyed via denial, but with enough hint to reveal the true meaning.
- Alamkara was used in all types of Sanskrit poetry, both religious and nonreligious, and many of these forms were incorporated into subsequent devotional poetry in Indian vernacular languages.
See Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry, 1968, for more information on Sanskrit poetics.
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