Page 181 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

stylistic consistency which he felt that Shakespeare would not have missed.
It is from this strain of thought that the familiar idea of the inappropriateness of mixed metaphor, which survived until the Edwardian period in manuals of composition, is derived.
5. The Romantic View
In the Romantic period, poetry gained a new ascend- ancy as the paradigm of literature itself. The Roman- tics, reacting against the rhetoric of Augustan Rome and reaching back to Aristotle and Plato, as Vico had done, gave an enormous impetus to metaphor as the dynamicfoundingtropeofpoetryandliteraryculture.
Two views are to be distinguished here, which ulti- mately influence the modern tradition in different ways; the Organicism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and the Romantic Platonism of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), both of which make equ- ally far-reaching claims for metaphor but by different routes.
Metaphor for Coleridge is part of the 'inter- inanimation of words' and his view is neither that of 'simple replacement' nor 'substitution' nor 'compari- son,' but of'organic unity.' In his 'Lectures on Shake- speare' (1808, publ. 1836), Coleridge closely analyzes how metaphors reveal an inexhaustible mutual reac- tiveness amongst their elements, which creates an unparaphraseable richness of meaning. This approach depends on Coleridge's notion of the 'imagination' as a separate and dynamic faculty. Coleridge's view of metaphor is deeply antiempiricist. A metaphor has the form of a duality but is always surmounted by a unity in the mind of the perceiver. Coleridge's main dis- tinction is to have isolated and stressed this drive towards unity-in-difference in metaphor.
Shelley's Defence Of Poetry (1821) again uses the argument from the origins of language, but gives it a new, optimistic twist. Language, it is argued, was in its beginning not a set of atomic labels, of names, as the empiricists would argue, but 'the chaos of a cyclic poem'; and 'In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry...' A defense of poetry amounts to a defense of metaphor, which is the agent by which language produces new meaning. 'Their language [i.e., the poets'] is vitally metaphorical; it marks the before unapprehended relations of things...' Metaphor, for Shelley, is the Ur-perception of analogy and hence the governing trope of language and poetic art. 'Lang- uage,' he claims in the Defence, 'is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone.' Shelley's poetic practice is ruled by perpetually dispensible analogy, as in his triply metaphorical description of Plato as 'kindling harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action'—a phrase in which the reader is required to shift lightly from music, to fire, to clothing, without pausing or isolating these single
elements, in order to apprehend fully Shelley's notion of the entirely conceptual nature of Plato's art.
6. Post-Romantic Views
Coleridge's view of 'organic form' has been heavily influential in the modern period, developed, trans- formed, and hardened into the loose collection of doc- trines known as Anglo-American Formalism. This movement is a continuation of the Romantic oppo- sition between Poetry and Science, which crystallizes in the early statements of I. A. Richards (1893-1975). In 'Science and Poetry' (1926), Richards proposed to reduce meaning to two types—the 'emotive' and the 'referential,'inwhichmetaphorbelongstotheformer not the latter category. There is a residue of 'empiri- cism' and utilitarianism in the early Richards which he later came to change.
The notion that a metaphor is a vital part of language's power to generate new meanings, is an assumption which underlies three or four different movements in poetry and criticism in the modern period, and in this tradition the romantic view of metaphor is preserved but renamed and assimilated into certain related terms, for example, 'image' and 'symbol,' which seem to many writers in this period exclusive features of lyric poetry itself, not of discourse in general, but which can be regarded as reducible to metaphors with one term suppressed, and which no longer display explicitly their analogical character.
There is a general movement in both theory and practice towards the autonomy of figurative language. Poetic theory, in Symbolist France and Imagist Eng- land up to the 1920s, turns inward. Despite the rise of the novel, the ascendancy of lyric poetry—and the corresponding demand for a theory of the lyric moment in language—is unbroken from the Romantic to the Modern Periods and the modulation from high Romanticism into Symbolism which has been exhaus- tively documented, yields a high concentration on the autonomy of symbolic—in reality, metaphoric— language as part of the general conception of what Eliot called the 'autotelic' nature of poetic language.
This attitude is reified in the obsession with 'ima- gery' in the Anglo-American criticism of the post- war period, which began in Shakespeare criticism and spread into general critical vocabulary under this rather misleading name, and which later writers, notably P. N. Furbank, in his book Reflections on the
Word 'Image' (1970), have again reduced to metaphor. I. A. Richards, however, shifted his viewpoint rad- ically and went on to write one of the most influential modern accounts of how metaphor works based on a significant re-reading of Coleridge, which pushes him much more towards the anti-Empiricist and Platonist tradition—the so-called Interaction theory of meta- phor. In his later book The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1930) Richards attacks the empiricist account of metaphor quite explicitly as The Proper Meaning
Metaphor inLiterature
159