Cognitive Pragmatics Of Poetic Metaphors

Poems are essentially constructed by metaphor which carries a soul principle in poems.Metaphor lies at the heart of our entire abstract thought, and serves as a crucial strategy viawhich human conceives of the relationship within diversified things all over the world. Lakoffbrings poetic metaphor into the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in his book MoreThan Cool Reasons: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, demonstrating that poetic metaphor isoperated under the guidance of basic metaphor. Fauconnier and Turner put forward theConceptual Integration Theory or Blending Theory. They claim that elements from twodifferent input spaces will generate new blending explanation through integration andinteraction process. The Blending Theory makes up for the Conceptual Metaphor Theory atsome level of metaphor interpretation, so it is believed that the former has more explanatorypower on metaphor study. The paper examines contemporary American poems from theperspective of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Blending Theory, investigating variouspoetic metaphor embodiments in terms of different types of metaphors through classifying andstatistically analyzing the metaphoric phenomenon in contemporary American poems, andreaches some conclusions:1) the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Blending Theory share acomplementary relationship on metaphor interpretation on the aspect of Poetic MetaphorTheory construction;2) the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined.The poetic metaphor deals with indispensable and central aspects of our conceptual system;3)the basic metaphor discussed in Conceptual Metaphor Theory bridges different inputs inblending networks together and gives great contributions to the realization of blending andmeaning interpretation of a poem as a whole;4) the distinctive characters of poetic metaphorreflect the poets’ creativeness of poets and are also great challenge to human imagination.