ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to expose individual traits and recurrent trends in how authors exploit the universal creative capacities of the human mind for their particular aesthetic goals. The focus will be on the figurative language of emotions in the lyric, where, despite the daunting variety, cross-cultural meaning construction patterns arise from the cognitive operations underlying spatial schemas and the mapping and integration of mental structures. To model these templates across examples from different authors in Western literary traditions, I will combine image schemas and blending theory into a model that goes beyond the sheer understanding of one thing in terms of another. The model will also allow for theoretical claims about how individual creativity takes advantage of the patterns arising from these cognitive skills, thus suggesting some initial steps to explain the great variety in emotion imagery that we observe across authors, but with a basis on structural similarities.
