theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image> Metafhor, Symbol, Myth 201
pluralist or personalist but a pantheistic monistj and the total
effect of his catalogues is not complexity but simplicity. First he
lays nut his categories, and then he copiously illustrates them.
Metaphor, which has had the attention of poetic theorists and
rhetoricians since Aristotle, who was both, has won large atten-
tion in recent years from linguistic theorists also. Richards has
protested vehemently against treating metaphor as deviation
from normal linguistic practice instead of its characteristic and
indispensable resource. The "leg" of the chair, the "foot" of the
mountain, and the "neck" of the bottle all apply, by analogy,
parts of the human body to parts of inanimate objects. These ex-
tensions, however, have become assimilated into the language,
and are commonly no longer felt as metaphorical, even by the
literarily and linguistically sensitive. They are "faded" or
"worn-out" or "dead" metaphor. 26
We must distinguish metaphor as the "omnipresent principle
of language" (Richards) from the specifically poetic metaphor.
George Campbell assigns the former 'to the "grammarian," the
latter to the "rhetorician." The grammarian judges words by
etymologies ; the rhetorician, by whether they have "the effect
of metaphor upon the hearer." Wundt would deny the term
"metaphor" to such linguistic "transpositions" as "leg" of the
table and "foot" of the mountain, making the criterion of true
metaphorism the calculated, willed intention of its user to create
an emotive effect. H. Konrad contrasts the "linguistic" with the
"aesthetic" metaphor, pointing out that the former (e.g., the
"leg" of the table) underlines the dominant trait of the object,
while the latter is conceived to give a new impression of the ob-
ject, to "bathe it in a new atmosphere." 2T
Of cases difficult to classify, probably the most important is
that of metaphors common to a literary school or generation,
shared poetic metaphors. Instances would be "bone-house,"
"swan-road," "word-hoard," and the other kennings of Old
English poets; Homer's "fixed metaphors" such as "rosy-
fingered dawn" (used twenty-seven times in the First Book of
the Iliad) ; the Elizabethan's "pearly teeth," "ruby lips," "ivory
necks," and "hair of golden wire"; or the Augustan's "watery
plain," "silver streams," "enameled meadows." 2S To modern
readers some of these (notably those from the Anglo-Saxon) are