Boggy soil

Ted Cohen's article, truly a major contribution to metaphor theory, from which I borrow the title of the present weblog, is entitled "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy".* However, while Cohen's identification of the functioning of metaphors with the fuctioning of jokes tells a lot about jokes and metaphors, this complacent "cultivation of intimacy" between a "metaphor maker" and his audience has very little to do with poetry, I'm afraid...

Truer to poetry than any modern contribution to the theory of metaphor is, as I would venture to say, Martin Heidegger's well-known but most often poorly understood "adage" in "Das Wesen der Sprache": As long as we take Hölderlin's Worte, wie Blumen as a metaphor, as metaphors, or even as a metaphor for metaphor, "we stay bogged down in metaphysics". This is how the English translation, by Peter D. Hertz, nicely puts it. The original text reads as follows (Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 207):

Wir blieben in der Metaphysik hängen, wollten wir dieses Nennen Hölderlins in der Wendung »Worte wie Blumen« für eine Metapher halten.

Outrageous, like poetry.
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* Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1, Special Issue on Metaphor, Autumn, 1978, pp. 3-12.