Billy Mills' *Thoughts on Analogy*

a few further thoughts from me

For the sake of the bubbling fizz and steaming warmth of poetry potboiling, I’d like to complicate some thoughts on the pitfalls of metaphor and analogy, which were offered today in a Substack note by Billy Mills, whose excellent book of sounds I reviewed here a few weeks ago.

Mills points out that poetry’s extravagance of metaphor and simile are structured by the basic logic of analogy : “A is to B as C is to D”. Mills warns : “As with any logical structure, use well : analogy can either be a statement of the obvious or contain an interesting insight.” This reminds me of Coleridge’s distinction between Imagination and Fancy. Fancy, for Coleridge, means pleasing ornament, the decorative details of verbal conceits; whereas Imagination is the primary force of invention, the natural power of the mind : an intellectual fire which fuses poetic materia into organic life.

Mills is wary of the negative effects of trivial analogies, which manage a kind of verbal holding pattern or prestidigitation, attracting readerly attention with witty if irrelevant comparisons. He contrasts such stylistic effects with the principles of nascent 20th-century Imagism (T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, et al). Here is Mills’ opening statement :

“Analogy is the siren song of poetry, irresistible but fraught with danger for the poet. Somehow, we’ve been sold the idea that simile and metaphor *are* poetry, that everything has to be spoken about in terms of something else.

Maybe that’s why the Imagist dictum ‘Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective’ was so radical, and remains so radical.”

As it happens I began pondering these remarks at 3 a.m. this morning, while couched on my supposed bed of slumber. I’ve been reading Edward Butscher’s biography of American poet Conrad Aiken, a near-contemporary of Eliot and Pound, who criticized Imagism at its moment of emergence – arguing that its absolutism, its austere foregrounding of sharp images of visual objects, resulted in a narrowing of poetry’s complexity, its humane resonance. This was an iconoclastic stance for a young poet, then – the shining hour of the avant-garde, Imagist “Poetry Boom” in England and America, pushed along by Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, Pound, Eliot et al. And Aiken, through a long, eminent-marginalized career, never relinquished this skeptical attitude toward the dogmas of the Pound Era.

I continue to explore the haunted byways of Conrad Aiken : the shocking trauma of his childhood; his troubled, somewhat perverse personality; his mentorship and close friendship with Malcolm Lowry; and above all the antithetical figures cast by his own poetry and prose. But let me close this notational brief with a few primitive thoughts of my own on the subject of metaphor, analogy, and Imagism.

Aiken’s characterization of a “narrowness” planted in Imagism set me pondering. Objective imagery, “direct treatment of the thing” – underneath the valid craft of these aims, its allegiance to the plainness of the “real”, lurks ambiguous lexical ground. Are not words themselves – language in toto – symbolic, metaphorical, analogical? A word is never “the thing itself” : a word is an icon, representing something else (visible or invisible). And if we believe that strict imagism in poetry offers a transparent equivalent to the “thing itself”, we are inevitably turning that icon into an idol.

Pound defined poets as “the antennae of the race” : but sole reliance on the image, as the basis of poetic style, can transform those antennae into mere tools for insect-vision. Just so the charisma of a flashy photograph can deflect us from the roots, the deeper syntheses of experience (emotional, intellectual, visceral, spiritual).

I think this is in part what Aiken was getting at, and I tend to agree. “Direct treatment of the thing” is a kind of shibboleth. Because word and thing are never simply identified – never just one and the same (no matter how powerful the insect-antennae of a Pound, or say a Hemingway, may be).