Dear subscribers,
Thank you to all who attended our symposium on The Forms of Criticism at in London on Saturday. We were delighted to see so many of you there and hope you enjoyed the day. For those who couldn’t attend, we will publish a selection of talks from the event on creativecritical.net soon.
Thank you as well to everyone who has subscribed to this Substack since the last post. If you’re new here, I recommend reading this post, which introduces the project and explains its roots in John Hollander’s Daily Themes course at Yale.
As usual, today’s instalment features a set of five exercises followed by an anthology of literary examples. The exercises are often quite elaborate and require some effort to get the hang of, but they are carefully designed and reward attention. They were intended for undergraduates to carry out on consecutive days between seminars but you can also do them all at once, or select one or two that interest you.
As ever, we would love to see your results, however selective and however modest. Please send us any work you do! This helps us to keep the projet interractive and your deciphring of the exercies will help future readers to do the same.
With your permission, we will send these our in a subsequent instalment. If you do share your work with us, please indicate whether you wish for the work to be shared under your name or anonymously.
Thank you for reading
Assignment 9: Figurative Language
Exercises:
1. Write two paragraphs, developing in each of them a figurative presentation of some ‘moral or intellectual fact.’ In the first one, personify the abstraction. In the second, instead of personifying, embody the abstraction in a place, a process or a thing. For your abstract concepts, you may choose moral ones, such as Fraud, Elegance, Hypocrisy, Gentleness, Self-Deceit, etc., states of consciousness, such as Terror, Elation, Despair, Despondency (not the same thing at all!), Boredom, etc., or more general concepts such as Triviality, Profundity, Latency, Illusion, Belief.
2. (a) Write a paragraph of description or report, in which in at least three sentences a verb will work figuratively on its subject (personifying, locating, or whatever).
(b) Take some paragraph from one of your previous assignments and revise it so that, again, on at least three occasions, previously inert verbs will be animated figuratively.
3. Take some abstract concept you have not worked with before. Set up an extended comparison between it and some object, process, place, person, etc., but in this case, extend the comparison through all the details of likeness. The form of your writing itself depends upon making explicit these details, which have remained implicit in your previous days' work. thus: We shall (or How may we) compare A to X? A has its b, followed by c; X, its y, followed by z, etc. Like all of these assignments, this one will require you to think a good deal about the abstract concept you choose, before beginning to write about it.
4. (a) Describe some object or place or process, as if to someone totally unfamiliar with it. Use at least three major similes, likening some part or aspect of the unfamiliar entity to something with which your listener/reader is unfamiliar.
(b) In a second paragraph, and in a more distanced, neutral tone, analyze the similes you employed in the previous one. If one likened A to X, for example, show what unstated terms or qualities were at work (i.e., A is like X in that they share properties 1 and 2, or, in that A's 1 is the same as X's 2, etc.)
Examples
1)
To these uses of speech there are also four correspondent abuses. First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conception that which they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for, and thereby deceive others…
(Hobbes, Leviathan)
2)
Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some spiritual appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of an eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed.
(Emerson, Nature)
3)
True wit is nature to advantage dressed.
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.
(Pope)
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
(Burke)
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
(Johnson)
Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
(Psalm 85)
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by incapacity.
(Blake)
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
(Blake)
4)
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but links out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure…
(Milton, Areopagitica)
5)
Personification is more ubiquitous a figure than is usually seen. Verbs – not one's usual assistants, but visiting strangers – can build the image all by themselves. Personification can reach out to you and guide you through an abstract concept's abode. She can be called up by a non-neuter pronoun, as here. Personification will always be more eloquent about an idea – even, indeed, about the idea of herself – than the dead body of the abstract word.
….All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
(Donne, Devotions)