Skip to content

Only Herald to the Gaudy Spring

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought [simile and metaphor] in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a ‘suggestive magic including at the same time object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself. The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.

—Northrop Frye, “The Educated Imagination”

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared.