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Metaphor: Its Power and Uses

erience. That, too, is consistent with metaphor: "While poetry is concerned with universal truths, history treats of particular facts" (Aristotle 44).

Another way metaphor functions to arrive at meaning has to do with how things are described or named. Consider the meanings of the following:

Life could be a dream, sh-boom (Keyes, Feaster, McRae, and Edwards).

Life's but a walking shadow (Mac. V.5)

In each example, life is figured as something different, but the statements yield opposite thoughts and feelings about life because of the thing to which life is compared. The first quotation evokes lightheartedness, the second nothing less than doom.

The power of metaphor to create meanings by the simplest of comparisons between unlike elements suggests why metaphor touches on metaphysics; the terms share more than a Greek root meaning change. Aristotle connects poetry with philosophy in Chapter 4 of the Poetics, when he connects the learning potential embedded in the imitative impulse to the learning impulse embedded in philosophy. Learning gives pleasure; so does the quality of mimetic execution (35). Imitation is both pleasurable and instructive, a feature of vicarious enjoyment that Aristotle indicates is in the nature of humankind. If learning, mimesis, and pleasure are connected, these, in particular as articulated by poetry, are implicated in a whole range of human pursuits, including the quality of social and moral experience. Thus it makes sense that Aristotle introduces his distinction between poetry and history as universal and particular by stating that poetry "is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history" (43-4). That is in the background of Aristotle's a

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Metaphor: Its Power and Uses. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:52, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683056.html