ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author demonstrates the continuities between the ways that people express their emotional lives through both creative and conventional metaphor and the use of metaphorical expression in poetic texts. Ginsberg’s poetic experience was not centred on metaphor alone, but Blake’s metaphors took centre stage in Ginsberg’s emotional, aesthetic response to ‘Ah Sunflower!’. In essence, Ginsberg’s account of being moved by metaphor is beautifully captured by an aphorism created by another great American poet, Wallace Stevens: ‘Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor’. Cognitive linguistic studies on the metaphorical nature of emotion talk illustrate the importance of movement in people’s emotional experiences. For instance, Kovecses provides numerous examples of how emotions are understood as forces that appear to change people’s embodied positionings. An emotion may have distinctive kinetic forms that are dynamically congruent with it, but these forms are not identical with the emotion.
