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Did John F Kennedy Use Anaphora In Jfk Inaugural Address

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It was 1961, the height of the Cold War, and the United States and Russia were locked in a nuclear arms race. John F. Kennedy had been elected president of the United States by less than one quarter of one percent of the popular vote. In his inaugural address President Kennedy uses repetition, alliteration, and antithesis and parallelism in his first chance to try to convince his country and the world to unite to solve their common problems of atomic weapons and poverty. Repetition is used by Kennedy to both unite large sections of the speech and emphasize small parts of it. Anaphora is used for both of these purposes. The word “to” is used at the beginning of each of the longer paragraphs six to ten, each of which is a pledge to a different group. The anaphora makes each paragraph seem to be part of a single thought that ends in the next paragraph, which, although it starts with the same phrase, transitions into Kennedy’s request for peace from, “Those nations who would make themselves our adversary.” This transitions into …show more content…

Another example is, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” This make the point of the speech more powerful by uniting the two extremes, and, by extent, everyone in the middle, in the problems that he hopes to solve. This also happens in paragraphs six and seven when Kennedy references “those old allies” and “those new States.” At the end of his speech Kennedy uses antithesis to encourage people to think of helping everyone instead of just themselves by asking Americans to, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” and for everyone to, “Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of

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Compared to the previous example of anaphora the effects are the same except for what the repetition brings attention to. Both examples put emphasis and focus on to the negative points Kennedy wants to direct to the Steel Industries. Kennedy’s diction also helps to keep the audience’s attention and focus on what he has to

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