Metaphor as Poetic Device: Tenor, Vehicle, and the Poetics of Comparison

M ost accounts of metaphor stop at the level of a spot-the-device exercise: find the comparison, note that "like" or "as" is absent, move on. That's a perfectly serviceable classroom drill, but it treats metaphor as decoration rather than as the thing many poets and theorists have argued it actually is, the basic engine by which poetry, and arguably thought itself, manages to say more than its words literally contain. This is a closer look at metaphor specifically as a poetic device: the vocabulary critics use to talk about how it works, the major categories it comes in, and the theoretical claim, taken seriously by linguists as well as literary critics, that metaphor isn't just something poems use but something minds are built out of. Table of Contents Definition and Etymology A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one thing by asserting it is another, transferring the qualities, associations, or emotional weight of the second thing onto the first, w…