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 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:
Foreword , Introduction , Jokes, fathers, grief, and angels: a poem by Sherman Alexie , Speaking of pain: Yehuda Amichai , A sad story, briefly told: a poem by Simon Armitage , “Finding in the sound a thought”: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover beach” , Auden’s “Lullaby” and Winnnicott’s “Hate …” , An awakening: a poem by Elizabeth Bishop , On the pleasure in play: the poetry of Billy Collins , Tyger time: e. e. cummings on conscientious objection , On idea and image and “the space between”: a poem by Albert Goldbarth , “When your heart cries out, being carried off …”: a poem by Eamon Grennan , “Old pond, frog jump in …”" the genius of haiku , Postmodern metaphor: a poem by Robert Hass , The air of another time and place: a poem by Seamus Heaney , Poetry as argument: a poem by Tony Hoagland , Marie Howe on “What the living do” , Kenneth Koch on psychoanalysis in the “glory days” , An old man’s love song: a poem by Stanley Kunitz , “They fuck you up …” Philip Larkin’s “This be the verse” , The art of the ordinary: Philip Levine on “What work is” , How otherness dissolves: a poem by Thomas Lux , Mysterious tears: a poem by Rose McLarney , A meditation without punctuation by W. S. Merwin , Narrative as metaphor: Sharon Olds , “The meaning of simplicity”: a poem by Yannis Ritsos , Saying a lot with a little: the poetry of Kay Ryan , On the love of beauty—and a poem by Charles Simic , When the narrative changes: a poem by A. E. Stallings , Metaphors for mind: the poet Gerald Stern , Negative capability and Wallace Stevens’s “The emperor of ice-cream” , Tracks in the snow: a poem of the Sung dynasty , On style: Tennyson and Cavafy, and intersubjective engagement , Empathic music: a poem of William Carlos Williams , The pathetic fallacy: William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson , W. B. Yeats on “Where love has pitched his mansion …”*

About the Author :
Henry M Seiden