ABSTRACT
A modern poet constructs metaphors that realize, or attempt to realize, personal responses to the world, and tries to convey these with some degree of accuracy. The Rhetorica ad Herennium was a major model, and preceded the influence of Quintilian and Cicero which became very marked in the Renaissance. Traditionally, rhetoric had five parts; Invention, Disposition, Elocution, Memory and Delivery, and each part made an indispensable contribution to the construction of a good speech. The essence of the Ramist revolution was the reduction of the personalized resonant human world of sound to a depersonalized silent world of space. The pursuit of ‘clarity’ and ‘distinction’ naturally took its toll of metaphor. The notion of ‘ornament’ as the function of rhetoric at large and of metaphor in particular will obviously and ultimately have its effect on the notion of language.
