ABSTRACT
Art and literature exhibit such profound historical changes that it is often difficult to find much in common between works in the same medium produced during different eras. Consider, for example, the following excerpts of French poetry:
The lines by Chenier, written in the late eighteenth century, are perfectly consistent and understandable. The simile in the excerpt from Baudelaire, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, is remote, and the adjectives used to modify "waltz" and "vertigo" are incongruous. Breton's simile, written in the early twentieth century, is so incongruous that it violates conventional logic. In a variety of poetic traditions, there seems to be a historical movement of similes and metaphors away from consistency toward remote-
ness and incongruity. Similar historical trends can be found in other artistic media as weIl. For example, it is generally agreed that Western music has become more dissonant across the last several centuries.
