More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor

Reading "More Than Cool Reason" will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has not yet encountered the "Lakoff-Johnson-Turner" bibliography on metaphor human thought. I found this more helpful than "Metaphors We Live By" (Lakoff & Johnson), since it deals with specific texts (e.g., "Because I could not stop for Death", "Sonnet 73" (Shakespeare), "By the Light of the Jasmine Moon"), which anchors their discussion, which might otherwise veer into the rather abstract.Reading this book changed my thinking about metaphor, and has drastically affected--for the better--my teaching on metaphor in my courses on poetry. Students have also found it extremely helpful. There is some rather tiresome repetition, but much of the authors' reiteration of points is necessary to understanding what they are saying. The indices are very helpful, although I found it necessary to extend their topical index with my own "speed index".

More than Cool Reason Ain't so Hot Reason. The professorial jargon, and , laborious labeling and system building was tiring. As for interpretation of poems most were overly complex, and, incorrect. The poem about a church and a young poet, is more about not being confined to set frames.At best this is how not to understand metaphor.

That's what i needed for my thesis! The idea's presented in this book you can also found in other books of Lakoff, but the title looks great in my list of used literature;)

A must-read for anyone who seeks who seeks understanding and knowledge that opens new vistas. It's like a choice between the red pill and the blue pill.

it is new. really good.

Important work--it was new to me.

This IS an important contribution to literary theory. The points that Lakoff and Turner make are very good, very logical, and will make you go "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" It will not only change the way you read poetry, but will impact the way you watch t.v., listen to people speak, read the newspaper - any endeavor involving language. Why the low rating, then? Lakoff and Turner are structuralists, and they repeat everything over and over again, breaking things down to their minute building blocks. They made a very convincing argument in the first chapter, I thought, and didn't need to keep going the way they did. The third chapter, in which they apply their theory to a William Carlos Williams poem is also very good. Those two chapters would have sufficed. Again, an important book, but rather boring at times.

The important claim this book makes is that literary language does not differ from common everyday language. Poets make use of the same linguistic resources and cognitive mechanisms we all use in everyday situations. They just do it better, in innovative ways. The discussion of poems the authors provide to support their argument should perhaps be more articulate and systematic in order to be truly persuasive. At times one gets the impression that this book was conceived as a kind of divertissement in wait of future, more carefully planned incursions on the subject.However, this does not diminish the importance of a book which urges literary critics and all those who like books to consider the cognitive basis of both everyday and literary communication. Also, More than Cool Reason can be read as an accessible introduction to Lakoff and Turner (and Johnson)'s theory of conceptual metaphor. For a much more articulate discussion, I would recommend Lakoff and Johnson's "Philosophy in the Flesh", but then you will have to draw the implications of their theories for literature by yourself.

Poems use metaphor, obviously, but is this in the same as we use metaphor everyday. The answer is perhaps surprisingly yes and surprisingly no. Poets can't just make it up, they are not humpty dumpty in Alice. They will use the eternal verities that are central to our language - e.g. love is fire or love is madness or time is an object "he disappeared into the night" BUT like the chess grand master using the same opening as a novice so with the poet, the grandmaster attempts to play "off book" to a move as yet undocumented, after a well known opening. So the poet will use a 'cliched' metaphor and then attempt make again something new. And this book describes this process in wonderful detail.

Arrived quickly and the book is as described (better than the one I borrowed from the library - a good clean copy).

Soweit ich sehe ist dies noch immer die einzige gut lesbare Studie, die sich der Frage nach dem Unterschied zwischen "conceptual metaphors" in der Alltagssprache und jenen in der Lyrik widmet und zu dem provokativen Schluss kommt, dass selbst die komplexesten Metaphern eines Shakespaere-Sonetts auf den selben "basic concepts" basieren wie die gebräuchlichsten Redensarten, das Origialität also, wenn überhaupt, nicht auf den konzeptuellen Ebene stattfindet, sondern lediglich in der Erweiterung und Akkumulation altbekannter "basic metaphors". Das einzige, was mich an dem Buch stört ist, dass die Abgrenzung gegen andere Metapherntheorien auf der Basis von summarischen Labels ("Literal Meaning Theory", "Dead metaphor theory", etc.) stattfindet und nicht in der Auseinandersetzung mit einzelnen Texten und Autoren, so dass man sich selbst zusammenreimen muss, wer oder was hier kritisiert wird, so dass die vermeintliche Allgemeinverständlichkeit und Lesbarkeit des Buches in ein etwas mühseliges Rätselspiel mündet.

A very clear straightforward exploration of language and metaphor.