I always take such a long time thinking through interesting ideas such as your insights into metaphor here that I usually fail to write any comments. So this will be likely very inarticulate. I think there's a fear of kitsch we've come to connect to metaphor, which is unfortunate. Your essay made me think of some metaphors I cherish in favorite poems (for example, the rocky breasts from which knowledge flows in Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," which I feel like I've deflated by not simply quoting the lines) and some startling encounters with them in prose. Most recently, Doris Lessing surprised me with the metaphor of the door at the end of "Love, Again." Like Bishop's metaphor, Lessing's concerns access to difficult knowledge. Metaphors can condense meaning in unusual ways, ways that are not at all precious, and yet it seems that perhaps the fear of preciousness has led us to associate them with adornment.
I really appreciate your reflection on the prose of "Middlemarch" (which I'm slowly rereading right now, amazed by the sense of humor I largely missed in my first sloppy reading in grad school). And I might give Collins's poetry another go as well!
I always take such a long time thinking through interesting ideas such as your insights into metaphor here that I usually fail to write any comments. So this will be likely very inarticulate. I think there's a fear of kitsch we've come to connect to metaphor, which is unfortunate. Your essay made me think of some metaphors I cherish in favorite poems (for example, the rocky breasts from which knowledge flows in Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," which I feel like I've deflated by not simply quoting the lines) and some startling encounters with them in prose. Most recently, Doris Lessing surprised me with the metaphor of the door at the end of "Love, Again." Like Bishop's metaphor, Lessing's concerns access to difficult knowledge. Metaphors can condense meaning in unusual ways, ways that are not at all precious, and yet it seems that perhaps the fear of preciousness has led us to associate them with adornment.
I really appreciate your reflection on the prose of "Middlemarch" (which I'm slowly rereading right now, amazed by the sense of humor I largely missed in my first sloppy reading in grad school). And I might give Collins's poetry another go as well!
“Metaphor takes us from a precise somewhere to a diffuse nowhere” - Louis Zukofsky. The best Pietry eschews metaphors and similes…