To Aristotle's quotation, for taxonomies you can add Quintiliano's
Institutiones Oratorias (VIII, VI, 18), Cicero's De Oratore (III), Du
Marsais's Traite des tropes (AD 1730). You have also hundreds of articles
and studies (some of them can be useful as mechanical or psychological
descriptions) I remember now The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York,
1936), by I. A Richards; Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, by Hugo
Friedrich (Freiburg,1956); Problemele Metaforei Si Alte Studii de Stilistica,
by Tudor Vianu (Bucarest, 1957), A Grammar of Metaphor, by Christine
Brooke-Rose (London,1958); Essais de stylistique structurale, by Michael
Riffaterre (Paris,1971); Semantique de la metaphore et de la metonymie, by
Michel Le Guern (Paris, 1973), Literatur und Reflexion, by Beda Allemann
(1973), etc., etc.,etc.
Anyway, as Doug pointed, all of them talk about technique (sometimes about
fashion), but almost never about poetic impulsion which is a matter of poets
and not of grammarians. But poets use to be remiss about talking of their
poetic impulsion. If they do so, they speak in a metaphorical way -that is,
vaguely.
I've worked for a while on the problem of poetic image. As far as I now,
some poets tend to mix images and metaphors (Pablo Neruda, Oliverio
Girondo, Paul Reverdy, etc); others tend to identify image with pictural
image (Herbert Read, for instance) or symbols (Yeats, Rilke); the rest just
repeat what the grammarians had said. All of this with complete
independence of how well they use metaphors and images in his poems.
The only useful views I've found were fragmentary: Pound talking about
chinese poetry and on Remy de Gourmont; Williams on their own poems;
Dylan Thomas on Gerald Manley Hopkins; Borges on kenningar; Gottfried
Benn on his experience as medical doctor; Francis Ponge on his refusal of
using metaphors.
Personally speaking, I would say that most of the good metaphors I know
use to come from perception's mistakes, misundertandings of reality,
funny ways of seeing. Doug wrote: "Presumably the fact that language is
insufficiently powerful to render experience is one reason (for what we need
metaphors) -- we require metaphor to do fuller justice to our experience
and also to extend its possibilities for ourselves." And I will add, for the
others too.
Jorgee
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