The Problem
This week in my Writing About Literature course, we discussed the following passage from Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher’s Literature Through the Eyes of Faith.
In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words ‘stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.
Lundin and Gallagher are at pains to make us see that literal or proper words are born rather than made. Metaphors are language’s clothing. They are language’s body, and the clothing of “proper” words only comes later.
How does this apply to God and Love, the two subjects of the 10+ poems my students read this week?