ABSTRACT
Lunsford uses a psycholinguistic method, developed by Michael C. Haley in 'Concrete Abstraction: The linguistic Universe of Metaphor', to examine the imagery in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, and Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind'. Byron's metaphor in Canto III is an attempt to attain a transcendent experience by getting as far away from the HUMAN as possible. Mr Haley's psycholinguistic model accounts for the metaphor in a similar manner by assigning TERRESTRIAL to the word 'mountain' and ANIMATE to the word 'friends'. He proposes a linguistic model which can account for the connection between psychological space and a speaker's knowledge about how a word may be used. The selection restriction analysis of metaphor reveals graphically the patterns that literary critics have been intuiting. Literary critics from Aristotle on, recognizing that metaphor is one of the essential ingredients of poetry have sought methods to investigate its crucial role.
