Any detailed discussion of alliteration and assonance in Greek must take account of certain general considerations. The most general, I suppose, is the question – if it is worth calling a question – whether alliteration, in particular, existed as a significant possibility in Greek poetry at all. As is well known, alliteration was not formally recognised by the ancient Greek stylisticians, although they did, of course, recognise under various names several of the forms of sound-patterning and sound-repetition of which alliteration is a particular type. Most modern Hellenists have shown the good judgement that they have shown elsewhere – in regard to the ancients’ inattention to epic formulaism, for instance – in declining to interpret such a silence as the voice of authority, and have sensibly allowed their aesthetic faculties rather than dogmatic preconceptions to pronounce on the question of significant existence, although there have been complete sceptics. A few types of marked exploitation of alliteration in Greek will be noted, and this evidence can serve as adequate for an answer, if evidence is still thought necessary.

Interaction in Poetic Imagery was my first book. It was based on my doctoral researches at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. I set out to formulate a theory of a significant, but previously untheorised, aspect or potentiality of poetic imagery – indeed an aspect or potentiality not previously demarcated, either under the name I gave it, ‘interaction’, or any other name. With ‘imagery’ understood as ‘metaphor, simile and the various forms of comparatio’, I identified interaction as ‘any local cross-terminological relation between the tenor and vehicle of an image’, explicitly adapting ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ from I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric. I then categorised the modes of interaction into four groups (with subsequent subdivisions). The cross-terminological relation might be effected aurally or extra-grammatically or by intrusion or (most commonly) by neutral terminology. All this was established on the basis of a corpus of Greek poetry – early lyric and dramatic poetry, from Archilochus to Aeschylus – with additional examples from English poetry, from Shakespeare to the twentieth century.