The Motive for Metaphor

Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis

Henry M. Seiden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782203261
• eBook ISBN: 9780429907265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a small anthology: each chapter a kind of meditation-on poetry and psychoanalysis; on a poem, sometimes two; on poetry in general; on thought itself. The poems are beautiful, some are contemporary, some are classical and well worth a reader's attention. "The motive for metaphor" is the title of a short poem of Wallace Stevens in which he says he is "happy" with the subtleties of experience. He likes what he calls the "half colours of quarter things, " as opposed to the certainties, the hard primary "reds" and "blues." To grasp and make sense of what is elusive (and beautiful), that is, for the essential and puzzling condition of poetry, we are obliged to make metaphors. The same is perhaps true of psychoanalysis-this is the essential argument of the book. The chapters were originally poetry columns that the author wrote for Psychologist-Psychoanalyst and Division/Review (both journals of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER I Jokes, fathers, grief, and angels: a poem by Sherman Alexie
• CHAPTER II Speaking of pain: Yehuda Amichai
• CHAPTER III A sad story, briefly told: a poem by Simon Armitage
• CHAPTER IV “Finding in the sound a thought”: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover beach”
• CHAPTER V Auden’s “Lullaby” and Winnicott’s “Hate …”
• CHAPTER VI An awakening: a poem by Elizabeth Bishop
• CHAPTER VII On the pleasure in play: the poetry of Billy Collins
• CHAPTER VIII Tyger time: e. e. cummings on conscientious objection
• CHAPTER IX On idea and image and “the space between”: a poem by Albert Goldbarth
• CHAPTER X “When your heart cries out, being carried off …”: a poem by Eamon Grennan
• CHAPTER XI “Old pond, frog jump in …”: the genius of haiku
• CHAPTER XII Postmodern metaphor: a poem by Robert Hass
• CHAPTER XIII The air of another time and place: a poem by Seamus Heaney
• CHAPTER XIV Poetry as argument: a poem by Tony Hoagland
• CHAPTER XV Marie Howe on “What the living do”
• CHAPTER XVI Kenneth Koch on psychoanalysis in the “glory days”
• CHAPTER XVII An old man’s love song: a poem by Stanley Kunitz
• CHAPTER XVIII “They fuck you up …” Philip Larkin’s “This be the verse”
• CHAPTER XIX The art of the ordinary: Philip Levine on “What work is”
• CHAPTER XX How otherness dissolves: a poem by Thomas Lux
• CHAPTER XXI Mysterious tears: a poem by Rose McLarney
• CHAPTER XXII A meditation without punctuation by W. S. Merwin
• CHAPTER XXIII Narrative as metaphor: Sharon Olds
• CHAPTER XXIV “The meaning of simplicity”: a poem by Yannis Ritsos
• CHAPTER XXV Saying a lot with a little: the poetry of Kay Ryan
• CHAPTER XXVI On the love of beauty—and a poem by Charles Simic
• CHAPTER XXVII When the narrative changes: a poem by A. E. Stallings
• CHAPTER XXVIII Metaphors for mind: the poet Gerald Stern
• CHAPTER XXIX Negative capability and Wallace Stevens’s “The emperor of ice-cream”
• CHAPTER XXX Tracks in the snow: a poem of the Sung dynasty
• CHAPTER XXXI On style: Tennyson and Cavafy, and intersubjective engagement
• CHAPTER XXXII Empathic music: a poem of William Carlos Williams
• CHAPTER XXXIII The pathetic fallacy: William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson
• CHAPTER XXXIV W. B. Yeats on “Where love has pitched his mansion …”