METAPHORS AND POETRY.   Term Paper ID:29160 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: The power of metaphor to create meanings. Metaphor and poetic diction. Metaphor as the highest use of language. Metaphor as a product of thought and language. Power of language to make symbols and signs. Examples of various poet's use of metaphor (Dickinson, Rimbaud, Coleridge, Wordsworth). Metaphorical extension. Paper Introduction: It is a commonplace of elementary-school studies that a metaphor is "a figure of speech, an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing" (Morner and Rausch 131). But as Morner and Rausch explain, metaphors are not necessarily isolated to specific comparisons. Rather, a metaphor may be extended, or "sustained throughout the work and function[] as a controlling image" (132). Metaphorical extension reaches well beyond individual word associations or discrete instances of metaphorical comparison. Metaphor can be thought of as a mechanism for empowering diction, inasmuch as it need not be thought of so much as an instance of reaching or conveying a particular meaning, as a process that enables a larger project of experiencing language in a way that has the effect of arriving at a mor Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Letters. It turns out that this is also aclaim for the necessity of metaphor in uncovering meanings, since realityis a moving target. Ed. . It presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing. 3rd ed. The use of metaphor can hardly be called a conscious device. Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. . It is a medium of exchange forconveying a sense of what a thing is "like," and even though (or exactlybecause) it stands between, or mediates, word and thing, in its veryarticulation transforming the thing by attributing to it the word, itsharpens the understanding of untransformed reality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.Morner, Kathleen, and Ralph Rausch. 832-35Wordsworth, William. . . . Poetic diction may supply theliteral thing--whether thought, feeling, or image--with meaning in a waythat a literal articulation cannot. Thatis consistent with Langer's assertion that a "need of symbolization" is afundamental human characteristic, a "starting point of all intellection inthe human sense, and is more general than thinking, fancying, or takingaction" (41-2). Hollingdale. . Trans. in language really usedby men," it is encased in "a certain colouring of imagination, wherebyordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way" (3 3).The unusual presentation is linguistic; it is metaphor, and that objectiveis undoubtedly achieved in the first poem printed in Lyrical Ballads,Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 1 45- 1 65.---. It is a commonplace of elementary-school studies that a metaphor is "afigure of speech, an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginativelycompared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing" (Morner andRausch 131). The Romantics' essence of poetic diction wasmeant to be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (3 4), althoughthose feelings were to be informed and inflected by competent craft, or thediscipline of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (Wordsworth 312). Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities P, 1978.---. Trans. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1982.Lacan, Jacques. . Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being. . 29-75.Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Not onlyis that metaphor extended, but metaphors encased within that mastercomparison are multiplied over the course of the poem. On the Way to Language. Rather, because it is connected to poetry, which ismetaphorical and which makes use of signs and symbols, it is concerned withthe vital force of thought, which is more significant than a collection ofrational ideas: "Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being" (7 ).Elsewhere Heidegger says that thinking "accomplishes the relation of Beingto the essence of man . . Because the poet understandsreality "only enough to imitate" (Plato 24), a compelling metaphor may beinfluential all out of proportion to its connection with truth. Walter Kaufmann. . David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. 2d ed. The imagesencountered during the journey are organized around a meditation of andacquiescence in the inevitability of death. David H. That doesnot mean that sorting out how metaphor functions to manipulate languageinto meaning is a simple matter. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. If poetry is connected to thought and is needed by thought, thearrival of Being at the vicinity of language constitutes poetic(metaphorical) expression. Ed. . . Relations are continually renegotiated, or, one could say, the meaningof reality continually shifts, in the realm of metaphor; it could hardly beotherwise since metaphor is specifically not literal (MacArthur 653). traditional values [and]experimenting radically with form and style--sometimes even denying theneed for form" (Morner and Rausch 138), grew out of a response to thesocial priorities that emerged around industrial capitalism, Aristotle'sdescriptive formulation became an object of scrutiny and critique. . . It is another way ofsaying that many metaphors do not do the language justice. As the idea becomes familiar, this expression "fades" to a new literal use of the once metaphorical predicate, a more general use than it had before. . Among the practitioners and criticsof poetry, that possibility may lead to analysis of what are perceived asthe failures of poetry or to a manifesto of the future of very poetryworthy of the name. When does language speak itself as language? . Richter. Lincolnwood, Ill.: National Textbook Company, 1991.Nietzsche, Friedrich. A belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 265, 3 2-3, 272, 268). Ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. . Aristotle's valorization of metaphor as the highest and best use oflanguage may not be a direct analogue of metaphor configured as a processof thought that is a nisus toward ultimate concerns, but is notinconsistent with conceptualizing poetic language as a consequence ofserious effort. Language, in thisformulation is "the house of Being," but thinking brings Being to language(264), or, alternatively, thinking "gathers language into simple saying"(265). Unlesspoetry is controlled by the state, in the form of "hymns to the gods andpraises of famous men" (Plato 28), it cannot be tolerated. leaps through unheard of andunnamable things" to arrive at language that is "of the soul for the soul,containing everything" (Rimbaud 3 7-9). . 2d ed. For the Romantic poets, who "tended to regard the writing of poetry asa transcendentally important activity, closely related to the creativeperception of meaning in the world" (Crews), one manifesto was Wordsworth'sPreface to Lyrical Ballads. Rausch andMorner give the example of Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop forDeath," which narrates the story of a carriage ride as an extended metaphorfor "our journey through life--childhood, maturity, death" (132). . However, when the issue is to put into language something which has never yet been spoken, then everything depends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word. But Nietzsche wants to vet the agency of made meaning.Curiously, Nietzsche's mistrust of metaphorical expression can be comparedto a similar mistrust voiced by Plato. . The value for life is ultimately decisive. Such is the case of the poet . 3 2-311.Saussure, Ferdinand de. Metaphor at its most powerful is precise and evocative, but getting itright requires work. Theemotion so informs the tranquil moment of poetic creation that good poetrymust result and will "excite thought or feeling in the reader" (Wordsworth313). brings this relation to Being solely assomething handed over to it from Being" (217). Explaining how thathappens remains an elusive enterprise, even if one is attracted to thechase. One is continually attracted, too, to the metaphors themselves,metaphors that celebrate language as much as complicate its use. The fact that metaphor can be extended beyond a discrete simile (helooked like a lion) and elaborated as a linguistic form that points towardmeaning speaks to its functionality as a process of thoughtful experience.The medieval drama Everyman is an extended allegory in which names ofcharacter traits, both emotional and moral, are personified. Richter. According to Plato, poetry is asubjective take on some area of knowledge (say, shoemaking), which makes it"thrice removed from the truth" (Plato 23). Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism. Ed. The apt turn of phrase--that is, a linguistic expression that reachesthe status of meaning--reflects an interaction between language and itsuser and between found experience and the impulse to express reaction toit. The Illustrated Library of World Poetry. Breazeale. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Metaphor, in Langer's formulation, presents evidence of thehuman capacity "to use presentational symbols" to move toward clarity andmeaning. 3 2-314. The "unfamiliar usage" that is characteristic of individual instancesof metaphor, meanwhile, lends dignity to diction and "raise[s it] above theeveryday level" (Aristotle 63). William Cullen Bryant. Feminine_Sexuality. That is in thebackground of Aristotle's assertion that, of all the devices of diction,"far the most important thing to master is the use of metaphor" (65). Heidegger specifically dissociates thinking from ratiocination orobtaining knowledge. To the modernist sensibility of Rimbaud, the very act of definitivelyreducing meaning to a mere metaphorical expression is suspicious becauseonly rarely does expression really arrive at meaning. Basic Writings. Norton & Company, 1983.Langer, Susanne K. "Poetry," he explains, "is something more philosophical andmore worthy of serious attention than history. . Something as loaded with implication as this confluence ofthought, Being, language, and poetry cannot be reduced to isolatedinstances of simile or synecdoche but must be considered as being in acontinuous state of coming-to-Being, or becoming--or the process ofarriving at metaphorical expression as the reality and immediately feltpoetic experience. Trans. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Metaphor. D. On the Art of Poetry. compelled . David H. Ed. Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. From the perspective of the 21stcentury one could quibble about whether Coleridge's diction isrepresentative of everyday language ("he stoppeth one of three"); however,the image of the albatross around the Mariner's neck, in the rime bothliteral and exemplary of a spontaneous overflow of feeling, has been adurably evocative metaphor ever since Lyrical Ballads appeared in 18 2. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. T.S. It flashes between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection with the rest of the chain. . But the apt isolatedmetaphor, as an existential product, is to be considered also as aconsequence of thought. . It would be a rare commentator, pace Nietzsche, whocould dismiss all metaphors as exhausted or depleted of power. However, some criticism isconcerned to identify failures of metaphor. Metaphorical extension reaches well beyond individual wordassociations or discrete instances of metaphorical comparison. It could also be said that words as metaphor extend the senses of thethings or subjects encased by metaphor. Ed. London: Penguin Classics, 1965. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P/ Harvard U P, 1998.Heidegger, Martin. It is the power whereby language, even with a small vocabulary, manages to embrace a multimillion things. Nietzscheacknowledges the power of metaphor to be influential, but whereas Plato'sresponse to the rather powerful vagaries of metaphor is censorship,Nietzsche's is interrogation and subversion of the norms and controls ofstate and the society that supports it. . That manipulatedmeanings have the potential to construct aspects of the emotion,experience, society, and culture to which they refer, which could beconsidered the content of metaphor, seems clear. . He doubts whether metaphor can expressanything except a semblance of truth (Will 313), and he is suspicious ofany claims for truth that metaphor expresses ("Truth" 82) because of thehold that bourgeois society has on controlling and constructing sharedmeanings in the community. It is our needs that interpret the world, our drives and their For and Against. New York: Gramercy Books, 1999. NTC's Dictionary of Literary Terms. . According to Heidegger, the "true experience with language" is a"thinking experience." Such experience is an aspect of mental processesinvolved in making meaning, or, as Heidegger insists, making poetry."Poetry and thought," he says, "each needs the other in its neighborhood"(7 ). Such a project is further complicated bythe tendency of metaphors to metastasize into multiple meanings or extendedstructures of expression, even though that very complication points towardthe validity of Heidegger's and Langer's discussion of symbolic abstractionfrom reality as a fundamental aspect of human nature. Nietzsche is making a claim for the more or less moral status ofsubjectivity in relation to the universe. Metaphor as a product of the encounter between thought and languagesignals the power of language to make symbols and signs behave functionallyand instrumentally, to tighten and clarify the linkages of experience. Franklin. The trouble with meanings that derive from metaphor is that, howeverforceful and evocative they may be, they are not philosophically or morallyneutral. N.p. . But the tone, as well as the content,of discussion of metaphor and symbol undertaken by Heidegger and Langer--and even Aristotle, who has the highest regard for metaphor--compels theconclusion that to describe metaphor merely as a figure of speech or atrick of diction is to fail to capture its linguistic function as a processwhereby the wonder of language reveals itself. For example, the "vigour" ofeven the most potent metaphors may fade or die, reaching the status oftriteness or cliché (MacArthur 655): He struck out; that's a half-bakedidea; as slow as molasses in January. Jacqueline Rose. Thelabeling of multiple metaphorical types and subtypes, such as hyperbole,metonymy, personification, synecdoche, simile, and allegory implies thepower of metaphor to "nam[e] and extend[] the senses of words" (MacArthur653). . Poetry, then, is not a matter oftossing off a few lines of verse. But as Morner and Rausch explain, metaphors are notnecessarily isolated to specific comparisons. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Dorsch. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Proverbs25.11 puts the whole matter succinctly, metaphorically, and with deceptivesimplicity: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures ofsilver." Works CitedAristotle. It is the force that makes it essentially relational, intellectual, forever showing up new, abstractable forms in realty, forever laying down a deposit of old, abstracted concepts in an increasing treasure of general words (Langer 141). While poetry is concernedwith universal truths, history treats of particular facts" (Aristotle 43-44). Dickinson's text illustrates how what MacArthur describes as mastermetaphor (654) stretches and worries multiple latent meanings out ofmanifestly modest and simple comparisons. Metaphorical expression is, rather, aconsequence of the process of working through the unknown to theincorrigible speech or text. That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis. One might say that, if ritual is the cradle of language, metaphor is the law of its life. to put into language the experience he undergoes with language (Heidegger 59). As modernism,characterized by "breaking away from . 2d ed. 645-51.Crews, Frederick C. Langer continues: Every new experience, or new idea about things, evokes first of all some metaphorical expression. New York: W.W. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.MacArthur, Tom. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993.---. When thought is articulated as metaphor, it encounters Being, orenables what is referred to as a direct, almost existential, experience ofthe language. It is in thisway that poetic expression can be said to represent the poet's attempt athaving immediate experience of the language, as well as the attempt toshare that experience with his readers. Tom MacArthur. Richter. "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense." Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 187 's. "Literary Criticism." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD- ROM.Dickinson, Emily. Metaphor canbe thought of as a mechanism for empowering diction, inasmuch as it neednot be thought of so much as an instance of reaching or conveying aparticular meaning, as a process that enables a larger project ofexperiencing language in a way that has the effect of arriving at a moreimmediate picture of reality. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1968.Rimbaud, Arthur. "Nature of the Linguistic Sign." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Death is personified as aconsiderate and gracious friend whose "civility" overtakes and absorbs thevicissitudes--both labor and leisure--of the whole of life experience. For some, the uses to which metaphor and language,indeed art itself, were put was the proper province of the discourse ofmetaphor and its philosophical companion metaphysics. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. The Will to Power. . . Ralph W. The issue assumes special importance for Nietzsche, whoacknowledges--not unlike Langer and Heidegger--the ubiquity of metaphor.The problem Nietzsche poses with regard to metaphors that express thevalues of a culture he despises is that they are unable to function aspoetically honest artifacts. The soul of anauthentic poet (says he) "must be made monstrous," that true poetry emergeswhen the poet "reaches the unknown, and . [M]etaphor occurs at the precise point at which sense emerges from nonsense, that is, that the frontier which, as Freud discovered, when crossed the other way produces the word that in French is the word par excellence, the word that is simply the signifier "esprit" (Lacan, Agency 1 52-1 53). Metaphorical expression, which makes one thing interact linguisticallywith another, unlike thing, identifies what Heidegger refers to as the"relation between word and thing" (6 ). . It isconsistent, too, with Heidegger's observation that the poet, whose currencyis language, "experiences an authority, a dignity of the word than whichnothing vaster and loftier can be thought" (Heidegger 66). . . . Ed. Letter to Paul Demeny. Metaphor has relevance here as the given of poetic diction.Accordingly, even though an important objective of Wordsworth's Preface isto rationalize poetry drawn from "common life . Ed. "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. We cannot establish any fact 'in itself': perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. Toward the end of a 19th century framed in Europe and America bynothing so much as the Industrial Revolution and modes of psychosocial andmaterial organization serving industrially constructed priorities, poets,critics, and philosophers alike appear to have felt the need for apolemical aesthetics. This does not mean that the isolated metaphor may nothave uncommon power to light the way toward meaning. Rather, a metaphor may beextended, or "sustained throughout the work and function[] as a controllingimage" (132). The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two signifiers equally actualized. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.