Clearly, Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy are drunk with their own power. In the eleventh edition of An Introduction to Poetry, they define consonance as the repetition of both the initial and terminal consonant sounds in a word, with variable vowel sounds in the middle. (An example would be “stick” and “struck.”) I glossed over this issue when I initially read the text, but as I re-read this section last week to prepare for my class today, the narrow definition once again stuck in my craw. I’d always understood consonance to be repeated consonant sounds that simply weren’t at the beginning of the words (repeated, non-alliterative consonants).

I did a little research on the topic and it turns out that most definitions that I can find either agree with my broader definition, or consider only terminal consonant sounds to be fodder for consonance (i.e., “luck” and “trick”). I’m at a loss, however, when it comes to finding a source other than Kennedy and Gioia that definitively narrows the meaning of the term.

Like a coward, we discussed sound in class today, and I failed to mention to students that I thought, but wasn’t sure, that Kennedy and Gioia were unnecessarily rigid in their definition. Should have trusted the gut. Ah, well.