Shall I Compare Thee? Finding Affection for the Metaphor
by Melissa Bryan, Guest Contributor In the 20th Century, Olson argued against the weak simile. Pound called for a poetry that is "austere, direct, free from emotional slither." Tristan Tzara announced the death of logic, and by extension, the logic of comparisons. Contemporary poets raised on the poetics of these masters often discard simile, not even deigning to employ it in the aforementioned ironic contexts. Metaphor doesn't fare much better. Nothing is like anything else;