By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Alliteration is arguably the king of the sound-effects in poetry. It’s defined by the OED as ‘the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words, especially when employed for stylistic effect’.
However, ‘sound’ is perhaps a more important, and more helpful, word here than ‘letter’. Two words may begin with the same letter but not sound the same, and we cannot really speak of these as ‘alliteration’ in the commonly understood sense.