Language Recreated Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor [Paperback]

HAROLD SKULSKY is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College, and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Hofstra University. His works include Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays and Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor (both Georgia), as well as Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile, Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in Paradise Lost, and Staring into the Void: Spinoza the Master of Nihilism.A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of Metaphysicals. Harold Skulsky argues that Metaphorists is the more apt label. After exploring the dramatic and transactional theory of figurative language that these poets owe to the traditions they share, Skulsky gives close and carefully argued readings of their major poems. We watch metaphor being enacted rather than made in a high-stakes game of cue and response between writer and reader, a game sustained by a network of mutual understandings. In effect, Skulsky provides a reader-friendly manual of the skills we need to be players.A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of Metaphysicals.