Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...goes for to explain, in Crane's case, the obscurity of his long poem, "The Bridge," and most of his lyrics, though it is not the whole truth. To an extraordinary degree, apart from legitimate compression of phrase, Hart Crane developed a personal idiom, and a habit of mixed metaphor, which frequently makes it impossible to translate his meaning into English. And occasionally he was betrayed into an inflated rhetoric, a jungle of language into which it is profitless to venture...
...ambition, as his essay on "Modern Poetry," (included in this volume) indicates, was to assimilate the urban and mechanical aspects of contemporary life while resuming Whitman's celebration of the American nation. To this task he brought an exceptionally large and varied poetic vocabulary, and it fecundity in metaphor with appears unique in contemporary poetry. Poems like "Lachrymae Christi," "Belle Isle, " and-the lyrical portions of "The Bridge," have surface brightness of texture alien to most modern poetry. It is possible that Crane, as almost any poet is tempted to do today, wrote with too much consciousness of a theory...
...Publicly to against expound himself and last week denounce the "plot"against himself last week Josef Stalin chose his Right-Hand-Man-Of-The-Moment, Comrade Lazar Kaganovitch. Ingenious, this henchman found the perfect metaphor with which to explain away major breaks in the Five-Year Plan and heap all praise upon Dictator Stalin. Keynoted Comrade Kaganovitch: ". . . Why wail over broken eggs when we are trying to make an omelette...
Hymn-Writer Watts, a gentle, humorless metaphor-mixer, wrote many & many a hymn. Probably he never pictured to himself a Christian, with spotted soul under his arm, flying to the fountain as to a gory laundry. But modern Methodists, sincere as any one in accepting the allegory of the Blood Atonement, raise their eyebrows at the language in which it was couched. Currently a number of hymns by Watts and the Wesleys are slated for omission from a revised hymnal prepared by a joint commission of three Methodist Episcopal Churches (TIME, March 14). To young people they are "revolting," says...
Other "Surrealiste" manifestations have followed in rapid succession. What of the invention of the metaphor? "A blushing rose entered my chamber." Who ever heard of such a thing? Imagine the shocked surprise of the first audience to hear the first metaphor. The poet was not so prosaic as to say, "like a blushing rose." He stated out and out that a rose entered his room. Somehow that has more meaning for the imagination than to say that a girl, a lady, a woman, a wench, a female, entered his room; and it is that sense of revelation, of outer nonsense...