defining metaphor

Of the many definitions of metaphor available, I prefer Kenneth Burke’s (1969) for its simplicity and ambiguity: Metaphor is a “device for seeing something in terms of something else” (p. 503).

Here are a few other definitions of "metaphor." Choose the one(s) you like best.

Writer Definition of metaphor

Michael Aribib & Mary Hesse

 

“[A]ll language is metaphorical” (1986, p. 150).
Aristotle

“Metaphor is the application of the name of a thing to something else, working either (a) from genus to species, or (b) from species to genus, or (c) from species to species, or (d) by proportion” (1967, p. 57).

“Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy” (1932, p. 81).
St. Augustine “For who does not say, ‘So you may flourish?’ And this is the trope called metaphor” (1958, p. 103).
Max Black

(i) “The chairman plowed through the discussion.”
(ii) “A smoke screen of witnesses.”
(iii) “An argumentative melody.”
(iv) “Blotting-paper voices” (Henry James).
(v) “The poor are the negroes of Europe” (Chamfort).
(vi) “Light is but the shadow of God” (Sir Thomas Browne).
(vii) “Oh dear white children, casual as birds, Playing amid the ruined languages” (Auden)

I hope all of thee will be accepted as unmistaken instances of metaphor, whatever judgments may ultimately be made about the meaning of “metaphor” (1962, p 26).
Cicero

“A metaphor is a brief similitude contracted into a single word; which word being put in the place of another, as if it were in its own place, conveys, if the resemblance be acknowledged, delight; if there is no resemblance, it is condemned” (1986, p. 237).

“Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference” (1999, p. 343).
Ralph Waldo Emerson “… man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man” (1903, p. 27-28).
Oxford English dictionary online Metaphor is a “figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical expression” (2004).
Chaim Perelman & Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca “In the context of argumentation, at least, we cannot better describe a metaphor than conceiving of it as a condensed analogy, resulting from the fusion of an element from the phoros with an element from the theme” (1969, p. 399).
Quintillian A “metaphor is a trope, that is, ‘the artistic alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another’” (qtd. in Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, p. 399).
I. A. Richards “In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is the resultant of their interaction” (1936, p. 93).
Thomas Wilson “A metaphor is an alteration of a word from the proper and natural meaning to that which is not proper and yet agreeth thereunto by some likeness that appeareth to be in it” (1994, p. 198).