Metaphor in Martin Harrison’s Wild Bees: New and Selected Poem

In T. Kusumi (ed.) New Directions in Metaphor Research, Hitsuji Shobo, Tokyo: 483–501, 2007

ABSTRACT Every literary writer seeks nothing but to communicate efficiently with his audience through language. Metaphor has been a driving force behind the success of every poetic idea conveyed through language. However, metaphor is not just a rhetorical device, but an issue of conceptualization in cognitive linguistics. Studies showed that although recent researches have been conducted on the use of metaphor in poetry, yet little has been done on the aspect of poetic metaphor, most especially in African poetry. It was against this backdrop that this study attempted an Analysis of poeticMetaphor of the Poetry of Gbonabam Hallowell’s ‘the Dinning Table’ and Phillips Umeh’s ‘Ambassadors of Poverty. The conceptual metaphor theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. This study found out that metaphor functions are not only as ornaments but also as the poet’s conceptualization and cognitive means. Conceptual metaphor has the rhetoric function because it offers the advantage of being at once expressive, compact and vivid. Cognitive function and aesthetic function of poetical metaphor make poetry convey the truth and the beauty. KEYWORDS: Poetic Metaphors, Critical Appraisal, Gbonabom Hallowell, Phillip Umeh

William Carlos Williams Review, 2011

Poetics Today, 1999

In this essay I present the outlines of a cognitively motivated, discourseanalytical approach to metaphor in poetry. I will begin by emphasizing that analysis has to be seen in the context of the more encompassing framework of research into the relation between language structure and process. I will then adopt one particular starting point in a three-dimensional approach to metaphor as expression, idea, and utterance, presenting the groundwork for a conceptual taxonomy of metaphor. In particular, distinctions will be introduced between simple and complex metaphor, restricted and extended metaphor, and explicit and implicit metaphor. All of these distinctions are independent of each other. They also require support from linguistic and communicative metaphor analysis. Finally, I will apply these principles to the first two lines of William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," revealing how the linguistic, conceptual, and communicative structure of these lines interact to produce an intricate piece of poetry.

1989

More than Cool Reason is a direct successor to Lakoff and Johnson's widely read Metaphors We Live By (1980). The earlier book proposed a general view of the importance of metaphor in how people make sense of daily life, and it began the task of identifying the general metaphors of modem Western culture (e.g., Argument is War, Life is a Journey, Mind is a Machine) that can be found in common, everyday speech. It also proposed a rather complicated theory of the nature of metaphorical truth that diluted some genuine insights from cultural anthropology (e.g., that how we live shapes how we make sense of the world) with the rather less useful perspectives of academic philosophy (e.g, the "objectivism" vs. "subjectivism" debate). The book was mainly read for its central thesis: that the specific metaphors of ordinary language shape both general habits of reasoning and particular conceptual views.