metaphor
Our metaphors matter. Indeed, our metaphors about trees by and large determine the fate of trees.
Second Nature (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 171.
A lot of metaphor must be in the beholder’s eye. My kind of mind is so used to “seeing double” that it finds unwelcome subtexts in an instruction manual…A psychiatrist friend calls the creative temperament Janusian—after Janus, whose nature is to look both ways.
“James Merrill,” interviewed by Thomas Bolt, BOMB magazine, Issue 36, Summer 1991.
Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”
“Poetry for Everyday Life,” The New York Times, April 11, 2011.