Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T16:40:18.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Seven - Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2019

Michael Ferber
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
Get access

Summary

Metaphor seems most at home in poetry. Many would say it provides poetry’s best and most distinctive furniture. Those two sentences each contain a metaphor, and the two metaphors are similar (poetry is a home, and has furniture in it), but the sentences are not parts of poems, as far as I know, and they even sound rather prosaic. So we cannot make a case that metaphor is the unique defining feature or common denominator of poetry, for there are poems without metaphors, or at least without any expressions that stand out as metaphors, and there is plenty of metaphor-rich prose. In fact, as Nietzsche insisted long ago, and Lakoff and Johnson and many other scholars have argued in detail in recent years, metaphors are pervasive in ordinary speech, and many of the ones that strike us in poetry are variants or extensions of the basic ones we use, usually without thinking about it, all the time. Still, most readers and writers would agree that metaphor counts as one of the characteristic features of poetry, one of the most salient of poetry’s “family resemblances.” In a “prose poem,” for example, where meter, rhyme, and even line have been abandoned, what keeps it a “poem,” many would say, is its density of figurative language, and especially metaphor.

Type
Chapter
Information
Poetry and Language
The Linguistics of Verse
, pp. 195 - 237
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Metaphor
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Metaphor
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Metaphor
  • Michael Ferber, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Poetry and Language
  • Online publication: 02 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.007
Available formats
×