[1] The Riddle of Poetry

· Poetry, and even books of poetry, is something beyond aesthetic theories

· Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars.

· … books are only occasions for poetry.

· A poem is a book is dead until someone reads it.

· Art happens only when we read a poem

· I must confess that I think a book is not really an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty.

· So we needn’t really worry about the fate of ‘classics’?

· Greek: oinopa pontos. English: wine-dark sea.

· Sometimes beauty is also created by how language and the reader simply shift in and with time.

· And at the end of it, poetry is impossible to define in language.

[2] Metaphor

· Every word is a dead metaphor.

· That sentence is a metaphor in itself, and is true in an etymological sense.

· Twelve or so ‘stock patterns’ of metaphors can be identified at work in various poems.

· Chesterton: A monster made of thousand eyes? Night sky

· Stevenson: a mere animal, the color of flowers? A woman

· The effectiveness of Chuan Tzu’s beautiful poem of metaphor – a man dreaming he was a butterfly etc – hinges on the use of butterfly. It would have not been as beautiful if he had used, say a tiger, a whale or a typewriter instead.

· The beauty of Frost’s repetition of the line ‘and miles to go before I sleep’, lies in its allusive use of metaphor. Miles = life. Sleep = death.

· Some metaphors, like the Anglo Saxon kenning – sea = whale road – cannot be traced back to one of the stock patterns of metaphor.

to be completed later