What is it about?
Poets serve as arbiters of and commentators on the way humans understand and interpret their world. Emily Dickinson rejected the LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME metaphor that informed the Puritan notion of the Christian way of life and replaced it with the more scientific metaphor of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE.
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Why is it important?
Learning to recognize the metaphors that structure a poet's poetics helps us to understand the metaphors that shape our understanding of ourselves as participants of the social, cultural, and natural worlds.
Perspectives
We all have our own conceptual universe that shapes our understanding of ourselves as participants of our world communities. Understanding the way metaphors structure a poet's conceptual universe can help us recognize our own.
Professor Margaret H. Freeman
Los Angeles Valley College
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This page is a summary of: Metaphor making meaning: Dickinson's conceptual universe, Journal of Pragmatics, December 1995, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(95)00006-e.
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