Metaphor: The Logic of Poetry, A Handbook
John Briggs &Richard Monaco

Poetry baffles the "reasonable" mind. We wonder, "How can I tell when it simply means what it says?" "Why do these poets say one thing and mean something else? Why don't they just say it directly?" The problem is such questions are reasonable but misleading when applied to poetry …. Poetic language cannot be understood in the same way that ordinary language is understood. To try to understand it in those terms is frustrating at best, and at worst actually destroys any chance of really experiencing the poem. The words in poems are ordinary words, but something happens to them in the poem, transforms them …. Is there some way to unify our perception of the poem, rather than fragmenting it, to learn to think in poetry the way we can learn to think in music or in a foreign language? In this we're asking a fundamental question: Why read poetry at all? And perhaps we'll discover that when we experience poetry as metaphor, the question answers itself …. This text focuses on the terms "metaphor" and "metaphoric language" because understanding how these terms can be extended to cover all the major aspects of poetry will facilitate experience of that special state of insight poems aim to evoke. Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, "The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor," and in the Rhetoric, "From metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh." And Robert Frost wrote: "There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing in terms of another."

John Briggs is an associate professor of English at Western Connecticut State University and was for fourteen years a member of the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. His book on creativity, Fire in the Crucible, was originally published by St. Martin's Press and is now in paperback with Jeremy P. Tarcher. He is also coauthor of Looking Glass Universe and Turbulent Mirror. A widely published science writer, his doctorate is in aesthetics and psychology. He was for long time managing editor of the poetry magazine, New York Quarterly. His poems have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Richard Monaco is a poet and writer, perhaps best known for his novel, Parsival or a Knight's Tale which was a main selection in 1977 of the Quality Paperback Book Club and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. More recent novels iclude The Final Quest, Runes, Unto the Beast and Journey to the Flame. In the early 1970's he was editor of McGraw-Hill's anthology New American Poetry, and served as poetry editor editor of The University Review. He also studied musical composition at Columbia University under the Pulitzer prize winning composer Charles Wuorinen.

Briggs and Monaco first published The Logic of Poetry in 1974 with McGraw-Hill. For three years in the mid 1970's the pair co-hosted "The Logic of Poetry" weekly half-hour radio show on public radio station, WNYC in New York City. Metaphor: The Logic of Poetry is a condensed and extensively revised edition of their original anthology.