On Poetry and the Science(s) of Meaning.

Young cautions us not to simplify poetic cognition, and argues that, "metaphors should not be thought of as objects; while metaphors can utilize preexisting structures in the brain ... they are realized as a process and not as an accessing of pre-stored metaphorical relations." We have gone off and explored metaphor and other meaning-making processes in practically everything that is human, but what has gone on in the world of poetry, where many people used to believe metaphor originated? Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful Rita Dove (David Streitfeld, Washington Post, "Laureate for a New Age", March 19, 1993). They ask two questions: (a) what make a metaphor good (and not just apt, more commonly associated with comprehensibility), and (b) the more specific question "what discriminates good poetic metaphors from good non-poetic metaphor. [Extracted from the article]