9 Quotes by Nowottny

For in metaphor Abstraction can give one kind of wind, Concretion another, and if one metaphor is complicated by another they can together untie the bag of all the other winds that toss us between reality and imagination.

Metaphor shakes our bearings on the question of how we stand in relation to 'objective reality', and a metaphor inside a metaphor unfixes those bearings altogether; it makes us lose our direction-fix on the position of what is 'out there' in 'reality' and the position of our own consciousness of that.

...metaphor's power to collapse the wall between fact and fiction and between subject and object is brought into full play firstly by displaying the element of contriving, or of invention, which says of the contents of the poem, 'These contents are "framed".

To be inexplicably haunted by or suddenly confronted with or obscurely convinced of meaningfulness, where no apparatus for its communication is visible, is an experience both remarkable and important…

It is because ordinary language is such a shifty and unreliable means of communication that poetic language can say more than one thing at a time.

Metaphor metaphorized—the double jump outside the convention—breaks the hold of the convention and enables us to become aware of the subjectivity of objects and the objectivity of subjective processes.

Studied erosion of the boundary between figurative and literal is a common device in symbolic language. And, since it is usually the common word that has the long history and the great range of uses, this kind of symbolic language can use vocabulary that is apparently very simple and innocuous, but conceals a tracery of fly-overs from literal to metaphorical terrain.

If the power of a language to endure through time and change depends on its power to convert old apparatus to new uses, we should regard the poet not only as a source of poems but also as one who does something of incalculable importance for the future of the language.

Shakespeare, the contriver of all, has carefully manoeuvred the speech into a state in which it is, finally, possible to make the words of the climax echo and re-echo against the structure in which they are set.