The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis

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 certainti...