More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lakoff argues that poetic metaphor is not essentially different from our everyday language or thought processes. And the metaphors in any poem are largely the metaphors of the culture it was composed in, only elaborated, extended, and wielded by an expert. Lakoff analyzes a number of poems and shows how they can be understood only by making use of a great many metaphors so basic and automatic that we barely notice them at all. Great stuff.