Introduction: “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
“The Motive for Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue first appeared in 2014 in the journal Raritan, Volume 33, Issue 3. In this landmark essay, Donoghue explores the philosophical and poetic motivations behind the use of metaphor, drawing on classical rhetoric, literary criticism, and the metaphysical musings of poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Butler Yeats. Central to Donoghue’s argument is Quintilian’s notion that metaphor is both a natural and essential gift—something that lends grace and necessity to language by ensuring that nothing remains unnamed. The essay traces metaphor’s dual nature as both a linguistic necessity and an aesthetic desire, emphasizing its ability to reshape reality through imagination. Drawing from Stevens’s poetry, especially his eponymous poem “The Motive for Metaphor,” Donoghue argues that metaphor functions as a form of resistance—shrinking from the hard, fixed “primary noon” of reality in search of mutable truths and imaginative escape. The piece is notable in literary theory for its synthesis of rhetorical history, poetic analysis, and philosophical speculation. It positions metaphor not merely as ornamentation, but as a vital cognitive and spiritual operation, underscoring its central role in both literature and the human effort to know and name the world.
Summary of “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
· 🔸 Metaphor as a Natural and Noble Act of Naming:
Drawing from Quintilian, Donoghue opens by stating that metaphor is a natural human gift:
“It is both a gift which Nature herself confers on us… [ensuring] that nothing goes without a name” (p.182) ✴
This framing treats metaphor not as a mere rhetorical flourish, but a fundamental linguistic and existential impulse.
· 🔸 Metaphor and the Liberty of the Mind:
Metaphor emerges from the freedom of the imagination, striving to give things their “proper names,” though often failing.
“The source of metaphor is the liberty of the mind among such words as there are” (p.184) ✴
· 🔸 Metaphor as Both Resource and Failure:
Metaphor reflects the inadequacies of language, and thus, its use becomes a noble but doomed attempt to make sense of a deficient world.
“Rhetoric… is a glorious failure, and the cry of metaphor is doomed” (p.184) ✴
“We cry out to change the world by giving things their proper names—but often we fail” (p.184) ✴
· 🔸 Allegory and Catachresis: Extensions of Metaphor:
Metaphor gives rise to allegory and to its extremes, catachresis—abused or “forced” metaphors that reveal linguistic limits.
“Allegory is its narrative form… Catachresis is the figure of its abuse” (p.185) ✴
“Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses” – Paul de Man (p.185) ✴
· 🔸 Metaphor as Escape from Literal Reality:
According to Wallace Stevens (via Frye), the motive for metaphor is to escape the oppressive weight of objective reality, “the weight of primary noon.”
“The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon” – Stevens (p.186) ✴
“To defeat or evade the force of the world, it must resort to the imaginative capacity of the mind” (p.188) ✴
· 🔸 Interpretive Differences: Frye vs. Ransom:
Frye sees the metaphor as a bridge between mind and world; Ransom views it as a poetic solution to inexpressible moral feelings.
Frye: “The only genuine joy… is in those rare moments when you feel that… we are also a part of what we know” (p.187) ✴
Ransom: The metaphor avoids “the dreary searching of your own mind” (p.187) ✴
· 🔸 Stevens’s Hegelian Idealism and Artistic Desire:
Stevens’s poetic vision resonates with Hegel’s aesthetics, where art “lifts the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness.”
“The universal need for art… is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness” – Hegel (p.189) ✴
· 🔸 Art and Metaphor as Acts of Decreation:
Donoghue invokes Simone Weil and Picasso to show how metaphor contributes to a modern aesthetic of undoing the real, transforming or annihilating it.
“Modern reality is a reality of decreation” (p.191) ✴
“A poem is a horde of destructions” – Stevens (p.191) ✴
· 🔸 The Danger of Bad Metaphors:
Metaphors have the power to undermine themselves—a bad metaphor, Donoghue notes, can “murder” a good one.
“He must defy / The metaphor that murders metaphor” (p.191) ✴
· 🔸 Repetition, Association, and Stevens’s Reluctance to End:
Stevens’s poetry exhibits an additive and associative structure—where metaphors are strung together without clear hierarchy.
“One phrase is instructed to produce another by association” (p.192) ✴
“His sentences tend not to be decisive… he always sees a further possibility” (p.193) ✴
· 🔸 Shrinking from Fixity and Embracing Change:
Stevens shrinks from fixed truths, favoring the fluid, unstable states metaphor enables.
“A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noon-day” – Stevens (p.196) ✴
· 🔸 Resemblance as a Core Principle of Metaphor:
Stevens’s metaphors rely heavily on resemblance, which Donoghue critiques as too general to be philosophically sound.
“In some sense, all things resemble each other” – Stevens (p.198) ✴
“Similarity… is relative, variable and culture-dependent” – Nelson Goodman (p.199) ✴
· 🔸 Metaphor Intensifies Reality:
When it works, metaphor heightens our sense of reality, transforming the mundane into the sublime.
“It enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it” (p.200) ✴
Example from Ecclesiastes: “The silver cord… the golden bowl… the wheel broken at the cistern” (p.200) ✴
· 🔸 Metaphor vs. Simile:
A metaphor demands total imaginative immersion, unlike simile which allows safe distance.
“A metaphor incurs resistance… and is indifferent to shame” (p.201) ✴
· 🔸 “X” as Final Resistance and Symbol of Limit:
Stevens’s “dominant X” represents the intractable world, the final, unchangeable reality metaphor fails to penetrate.
“Nothing in the poem defeats the final ‘X'” (p.206) ✴
· 🔸 No Final Word on Metaphor:
Donoghue concludes that Stevens’s relation to metaphor is inherently unstable. Each poetic mood shifts the meaning and function of metaphor.
“We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207) ✴
“In such seemings all things are. Metaphor… will do its transforming work another day” (p.207) ✴
Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
| 📌 Term | ✨ Explanation | 🔖 Reference/Quotation |
| 🧠 Metaphor | A natural, imaginative act of naming that both expands language and transforms perception. | “It ensures that nothing goes without a name” (p.182) |
| 📖 Catachresis | A strained or improper metaphor that stretches or abuses meaning, yet remains rhetorically valid. | “To speak of ‘forced metaphor’ is not to degrade its manifestations” (p.185) |
| 🔍 Resemblance | Stevens’s preferred foundation for metaphor, based on likeness; Donoghue critiques it as too vague to sustain theory. | “In some sense, all things resemble each other” (p.198) |
| 🌀 Allegory | An extended metaphor that takes on narrative and moral form—what Fontanier calls “prolongée et continue.” | “Allegory is its narrative form…” (p.185) |
| 🎭 Prosopopoeia | A figure of speech in which non-human entities are personified—often emerging from overextended metaphors. | “Catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia…” (p.185) |
| 🔧 Concrete Universal | A Hegelian concept in which abstract ideas are made materially present; Ransom uses it to frame metaphor’s real-world function. | “It becomes a Concrete Universal when it has been materialized…” (p.187) |
| 🧬 Imagination | The mental faculty that powers metaphor, allowing us to reshape reality through poetic transformation. | “Metaphor creates a new reality…” (p.188) |
| 💫 Decreation | From Simone Weil: the spiritual undoing of created reality, which metaphor helps initiate as aesthetic escape. | “Modern reality is a reality of decreation” (p.191) |
| 🔗 Similarity | Often aligned with resemblance, but critiqued by Goodman for lacking objectivity and explanatory power in metaphor theory. | “Similarity… is relative, variable and culture-dependent” (p.199) |
| 🗣️ Rhetoric | A system of language arising from human insufficiency; metaphor is its central figure—both noble and doomed. | “The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason” (p.184) |
| 🎇 Transformation | The creative operation by which metaphor changes how we see and name reality; tied to imagination and perception. | “The object… turned freely in the hand…” (p.205) |
| 🧩 The ‘X’ | Represents the unyielding, dominant force of the world or moral universals that metaphor cannot dissolve. | “The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” (p.186) |
| 🖋️ Poetic Authority | Stevens often relinquishes control, letting language guide itself—challenging the notion of the poet as a final authority. | “There are words / Better without an author…” (p.193) |
| 🎨 Aesthetic Escape | Metaphor as a method of fleeing fixed, literal meaning in favor of poetic freedom and subjective truth. | “Metaphor alone furnishes an escape” (p.191) |
| 📜 Idealism | A philosophical stance—prevalent in Stevens’s poetic moods—that assumes consciousness can transform external reality. | “In most of his moods he was a Hegelian” (p.189) |
Contribution of “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue to Literary Theory/Theories
- 🧠 Metaphor as Cognitive and Ontological Tool
Donoghue elevates metaphor beyond ornamentation, presenting it as essential to how humans name, understand, and exist within the world.
“It ensures that nothing goes without a name” – Quintilian (p.182)
- 🌀 Poetic Language as Idealist Expression
Stevens’s metaphoric thought aligns with Hegelian idealism, portraying metaphor as a spiritual act uniting inner consciousness and external reality.
“He woke in a metaphor: this was / A metamorphosis of paradise” (p.189)
- 🎨 Metaphor as Aesthetic Resistance
Metaphor becomes a form of imaginative protest against oppressive, fixed realities—”the weight of primary noon.”
“The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon” (p.186)
- 🔧 Engagement with Classical Rhetorical Tradition
Through references to Aristotle, Fontanier, and Quintilian, Donoghue reinterprets rhetorical devices like allegory, catachresis, and simile.
“Allegory is its narrative form… Catachresis is the figure of its abuse” (p.185)
- 🧩 The ‘X’ as Limit of Language and Metaphor
The “dominant X” in Stevens’s poem marks the threshold where metaphor fails—where language can no longer transform reality.
“Nothing in the poem defeats the final ‘X'” (p.206)
- 🗣️ Rhetoric as Anthropological Necessity
Donoghue, citing Blumenberg, reframes rhetoric not as persuasion but as an existential necessity driven by human lack and insufficiency.
“The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason” (p.184)
- 📖 Validation of Radical and ‘Abused’ Metaphors
Defending even bizarre metaphors like “bisqued mountain,” Donoghue legitimizes catachresis as a productive, imaginative force.
“To speak of ‘forced metaphor’ is not to degrade its manifestations” (p.185)
- 🔍 Critique of Resemblance as Metaphoric Ground
Donoghue challenges Stevens’s assumption that resemblance is natural, invoking Nelson Goodman’s view that similarity is culturally constructed.
“Similarity… is relative, variable and culture-dependent” (p.199)
- 🧬 Metaphor as Creative Ontology
Metaphor does not just reflect reality—it makes it. It is a poietic act that creates new ways of seeing and being.
“Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal” (p.188)
- 📜 Interplay of Modernist Certainty and Postmodern Ambiguity
Donoghue highlights Stevens’s shifting moods and refusal to settle on a singular metaphoric theory—an openness aligning with postmodern literary theory.
“We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207)
Examples of Critiques Through “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
| 🔹 Symbol & Literary Work | 🧠 Critique via Metaphor Theory | 🔖 Reference from the Article |
| 🦌 “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” – W. B. Yeats | Donoghue analyzes Yeats’s line “one a gazelle” to show metaphor as essence-transference, not mere comparison. It evokes a luminous unity between image and being. | “The girl’s nature goes over into the nature of a gazelle as if both came from one luminous source” (p.183) |
| 🌳 “The Motive for Metaphor” – Wallace Stevens | This poem is Donoghue’s central text, used to explore how metaphor resists fixed meaning (“X”) and serves as aesthetic escape, yet ultimately fails to resolve existential or epistemological tensions. | “Nothing in the poem defeats the final ‘X'” (p.206) |
| 🥄 “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” – Wallace Stevens | Donoghue critiques this poem for its bizarre metaphors, especially the “bisqued mountain,” as extreme cases of metaphor stretching meaning. They test the limits of metaphor as imaginative creation. | “An Alp, a purple Southern mountain bisqued with the molten mixings of related things” (p.202) |
| 🌞 “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” – Wallace Stevens | Donoghue interprets Stevens’s metaphors (e.g., “chrysalis of all men”) as efforts to unite subjective perception and external form, though often open-ended and unresolved. | “The self, the chrysalis of all men / Became divided in the leisure of blue day…” (p.203) |
Criticism Against “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
- 🧩 Overreliance on Stevens’s Poetic Authority
Donoghue hinges much of his theory on Wallace Stevens, potentially narrowing metaphor’s scope across diverse literary traditions.
➤ Critics might argue that using one poet’s temperament to frame a general theory of metaphor limits its broader applicability.
- 🔄 Philosophical Inconsistency
The essay oscillates between idealism and skepticism, invoking both Hegelian unity and postmodern ambiguity without fully reconciling the two.
➤ “We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207) may reflect this unresolved tension.
- 🎨 Romanticization of Metaphor
Donoghue tends to elevate metaphor to near-mystical status, emphasizing its aesthetic and existential powers while underplaying its structural or political dimensions.
➤ This limits metaphor’s role in critical discourse, including feminist, postcolonial, or ideological critiques.
- 📏 Neglect of Formal and Linguistic Precision
Critics may find Donoghue’s acceptance of vague terms like “resemblance” too generous, despite his citation of Nelson Goodman’s challenge to that notion.
➤ He critiques Stevens but doesn’t fully abandon slippery conceptual terrain, potentially undermining analytical rigor.
- 🧠 Underuse of Contemporary Linguistic Theory
While Donoghue engages with classical and continental thought, he gives minimal attention to modern cognitive or conceptual metaphor theory (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson).
➤ This makes the work more philosophically poetic than practically linguistic or interdisciplinary.
- 🌐 Limited Cultural Range
The examples and allusions are primarily Western, white, male, and canonical, raising concerns about inclusivity and broader relevance in global poetics.
➤ There’s little engagement with metaphor in non-Western traditions or contemporary marginalized voices.
Representative Quotations from “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue with Explanation
| 🔹 Quotation | 🧠 Explanation |
| “It ensures that nothing goes without a name”: a beautiful, caring motive. | Metaphor satisfies a human need to name and give meaning—language becomes an act of care and completeness. |
| “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” | Stevens sees metaphor as a means to liberate perception from the dullness of habitual reality. |
| “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.” | Metaphor doesn’t mirror the world—it transforms it, reshaping how we perceive and interact with reality. |
| “The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon.” | Metaphor serves as a retreat from the harsh clarity of objective truth, favoring imaginative ambiguity. |
| “We live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.” | This expresses existential dislocation, suggesting metaphor as a tool for self-integration and understanding. |
| “Metaphor alone furnishes an escape.” | Ortega y Gasset’s concept, cited by Donoghue, emphasizes metaphor’s power as a vehicle of liberation from oppressive realism. |
| “A metaphor incurs resistance from our sense of absurdity and is indifferent to shame.” | True metaphor challenges logic and comfort—it transforms language through audacity and creative force. |
| “The whole world is less susceptible to metaphor than a tea-cup is.” | Stevens humorously points to the challenge of expressing large concepts through metaphor versus simple ones. |
| “Similarity does not explain metaphor or metaphorical truth.” | Citing Goodman, Donoghue dismantles the naïve belief that resemblance underlies metaphor—it’s often the other way around. |
| “Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor, / Too actual…” | Metaphor may sometimes fail—when reality is too concrete to be poetically transformed. |
Suggested Readings: “The Motive For Metaphor” by Denis Donoghue
- DONOGHUE, DENIS. “The Motive for Metaphor.” The Hudson Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 2013, pp. 543–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43489263. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
- O’Donoghue, Josie. “‘A Fling of Freedom.'” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1, 2015, pp. 69–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43492472. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
- Donoghue, Denis. “The Motive for Metaphor.” Metaphor, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 182–208. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wps2d.9. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.