theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
ficially. Viewed for the most part as decorations, rhetorical orna-
ments, they were therefore studied as detachable parts of the
works in which they appear. Our own view, on the other hand,
sees the meaning and function of literature as centrally present
in metaphor and myth. There are such activities as metaphoric
and mythic thinking, a thinking by means of metaphors, a think-
ing in poetic narrative or vision. All these terms call our attention
to the aspects of a literary work which exactly bridge and
bind together old divisive components, "form" and "matter."
These terms look in both directions ; that is, they indicate the
pull of poetry toward "picture" and "world" on the one hand
and toward religion or Weltanschauung on the other. As we sur-
vey modern methods of studying them, we can feel that tension.
Since older methods treated them as aesthetic devices (albeit
conceiving of such as merely decorative), the reactionary danger
today is perhaps a too heavy stress on Weltanschauung. The
Scotch rhetorician, writing at the end of the Neo-Classical period,
rather naturally thought of similes and metaphors as calculated,
elected 5
today's analysts, working after Freud, are disposed to
see all images as revelatory of the unconscious. It calls for a nice
equilibrium to avoid the rhetorical concern on the one hand and
on the other both psychological biography and "message hunt-
ing."
In the last twenty-five years of literary study, theory and
practice have both been pursued. That is, we have attempted
typologies of figuration or, more specifically, of poetic imagery;
and we have also devoted monographs and essays to the imagery
of specific poets or works (with Shakespeare as a favorite sub-
ject). The "practical criticism" having gone on with particular
ardor, we begin to have some excellent sharp theoretical and
methodological papers scrutinizing the sometimes too easy as-
sumptions of the practitioners.
Many have been the attempts at reducing all the minutely subdivided
figures—some two hundred and fifty in ambitious lists
into two or three categories. "Schemes" and "tropes" is itself one
of these : a division into "sound figures" and "sense figures." An-
other attempt separates figures of "speech" or "verbal figures"
from "figures of thought." Both dichotomies have the fault,
however, of suggesting an outer, or outermost, structure which
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