Metaphor

Metaphor and figurative language

The classical view

Aristotle

Cicero, Horace, Longius

The Rhetorica ad Herennium

Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Views

The middle ages

Donne and the compasses

Ramus

Dryden and the pimples

Plain style

The eighteenth century

The romantic view

Plato

Shelley, Herder, Vico

Wordsworth

Coleridge

Some Twentieth-century views

I.A. Richards

William Empson

Owen Barfield, Philip Wheelwright

Christine Brooke-Rose

Linguistics

Anthropology

Conclusions.