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This chapter will summarize some traditional uses and sources of metaphor and introduce patterns that run between those points. For the sake of overview, let us begin with the uses, or effects, of a figurative comparison. Perhaps no two metaphors are identical in their precise consequences. On a longer view, however, a metaphor usually serves one or more of these general purposes, examples of which will follow shortly:

 Making an unfamiliar subject familiar by comparing it to what the audience knows better.

 Throwing a familiar subject into a surprising perspective (in effect the opposite of the first purpose just mentioned).

 Giving visible form to something inherently invisible, or otherwise making an abstraction available to the senses.

 Caricaturing the subject by drawing a comparison that exaggerates some of its features, whether for the sake of ridicule or elevation.

 Simplifying a complex subject.

Most good comparisons do more than one of these things, but on inspection one purpose or another often will seem paramount. Such an inspection typically is not conducted, of course; we rarely respond to a good metaphor by asking what function it serves. We admire the justice of the comparison, and find our perception and understanding improved by it, without pausing to notice how it worked. The workings vary considerably, though, and the student of our subject may find it instructive to think about them.

I described those purposes of metaphor as general. By “general” I mean to distinguish the consequences just listed – making a subject simpler, or more familiar, or more visible – from the specific and substantive comment the author means to make. To take a well-known example:

Portia. The quality of mercy is not strain’d; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath.

The Merchant of Venice, 4, 1

The comparison makes an intangible quality available to the senses. It also makes a claim about the nature of mercy. A comparison to a blizzard would have had similar general effects; it likewise would have made the subject available to the eyes, ears, and skin. But the specifics of what it said about mercy would have been different. The specific aims of metaphor – the particular things that their authors mean to say about their subjects – tend to be individual to each case; they do not lend themselves to systematic discussion. The general aims of metaphor, however, are limited and recurring, and can more productively be made the subject of analysis. And rather than referring vaguely to general and specific effects, it may be more exact to distinguish between the structural consequences of a comparison (shrinking the subject, making it visible, and so on) and the claim the author makes about its subject (the difference between the gentle rain and a blizzard).

Now turn to the material from which metaphors are made. Any metaphor or simile has two ends, or elements: the subject or “target” of it (the thing described) and the source (the thing invoked, to which the subject is compared). The sources from which comparisons are made can be considered as families: they generally may be taken from –

 The animal kingdom.

 Nature (apart from animals).

 Human behavior, circumstances, and institutions.

 Stories of various kinds, as from history, myth, or literature.

 Man-made objects: machines, architecture, tools, etc.

Those categories might have been carved out differently; there is no reason in principle why animals might not be considered as part of nature, or why human behavior could not be considered part of the same family of material as mythology or literature that depicts it – or, for that matter, part of the animal kingdom. And each category could also be subdivided easily enough. But the divisions just sketched are convenient and tend to separate types of material that have produced different traditions and have been put to different use.

I have suggested that the uses of metaphors and the sources of metaphors are both infinite in detail but not in type; and that while any ordering of those types may be arbitrary in the end, we can draw some lines between them that are intuitive and functional. It remains to consider the interaction between those two sides of the inquiry: the ways in which writers combine the sources of comparisons and the uses of them. The resulting combinations might seem random at first glance, but with study it is possible to identify patterns, or traditions, to which those skilled in the art have returned, and to consider why. For caricaturing humans, the classic sources of material are animals and mythology and people in extreme circumstances; for giving visible form to an abstraction, nature and man-made things are more likely to serve; and we shall see other tendencies, many of them more specific.

The rest of this chapter provides an illustrated and more detailed outline of the themes just listed and claims just made. The chapters to come will then explore them more completely.

1. Uses of comparisons. To return to our first theme: the effects of comparisons vary in their specifics, but their typical and general goals are capable of summary.

a. Comparison to make the subject familiar. Achieving familiarity is a standard purpose of comparison. The speaker wants to describe a face, or an idea, or an experience that the reader hasn’t encountered directly (the subject of the comparison); so the speaker says that it resembles a source the reader has encountered or can imagine more easily. Telling others of a subject foreign to their experience can be done in literal terms, but the audience is more likely to be affected and enlightened if the thing is compared to what they know or can summon to mind.

The using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of.

Hazlitt, Mr. Gifford (1825)

The air of supreme respectability – that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against.

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his head against anything, and really his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine, that I was tempted to drop it and run away.

Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

The experiences and feelings of the speaker are not known directly to the reader but are illustrated by things familiar: the feeling of a frog in the hand. But is it so familiar? Many people have never held a frog or broken their noses, yet the comparisons succeed anyway. They work because the feeling of a frog or a broken nose is familiar to the imagination even if not readily available to the memory (which may, after all, be considered a branch of the imagination). Many comparisons work this way. They make a subject familiar by likening it to a source that is easier to imagine even if the reader knows it no more directly.

b. Comparison for the sake of perspective. Increasing the familiarity of the thing described is often one aim of a metaphor or simile, but sometimes a comparison works the other way around: it throws a too-familiar subject into a surprising perspective, causing the reader to see it from a different point of view. It is taking the reader for a balloon ride, or looking at the subject through one end or the other of a telescope. The effect may be to shrink the significance of the subject, or to cause it to seem enlarged, or to otherwise let an old thing be seen anew. We might regard this as making a familiar subject unfamiliar. Some examples of comparisons that serve this perspective-giving purpose by making their human subjects, or certain features of them, seem small:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.They kill us for their sport.

King Lear, 4, 1

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.

Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)

My bet is that we have not the kind of cosmic importance that the parsons and philosophers teach. I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant heap were kerosened.

Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (1909)

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Sr. were both prolific producers of metaphor, and they each appear a number of times in the chapters to follow. The younger Holmes – the one who served on the Supreme Court – was the more underrated of the two in literary ability. His comparisons tended to be notable for their pungency, as we shall see again.

c. Comparison to make the subject visible. A comparison often makes an intangible subject available to the senses. Appeals to any of the five senses are possible, and some comparisons invoke several of them; by far the most frequent and important sensory effect of a comparison, however, is to make the subject visible, with uses of the other senses often present but subsidiary. Thus a simile may give visible form to an abstraction:

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble on a railway can stagger the Scotch express.

Chesterton, The Giant (1910)

Or to invisible features of inner life:

The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.

Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Or to the effects of language:

No poem should be long of which the purpose is only to strike the fancy, without enlightening the understanding by precept, ratiocination, or narrative. A blaze first pleases, and then tires the sight.

Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781)

Making those subjects available to the senses, and especially to the eyes, is one of the great repeating purposes of metaphor, and this book will spend a chapter on each of them. We respond strongly to what we see, and things can be seen as vividly in the mind’s eye as they can in the world – sometimes more vividly. Images also inspire feeling, and good metaphors are felt as well as observed. If one wants an audience to respond to an abstract proposition or to what otherwise cannot be seen, one does well to convert it to visible form by making a comparison.

d. Comparison for the sake of caricature. A quite different purpose of comparison is to caricature the subject – that is, to exaggerate some feature of it, whether for the sake of reduction, elevation, or mere emphasis.

Mrs Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen.

Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848)

There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

[I]t was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

In none of these cases does the comparison make an invisible subject visible or otherwise available to the senses in a new way. Granted, in the case from Dickens the comparison lets the reader see a face that was otherwise visible only in the mind’s eye of the author; and so, perhaps, for each of the others. But for purposes of this book we would call that a case of making something familiar that the reader has not seen – a face. It is not an instance of giving visible form to an abstract thing inherently unavailable to the senses. Thoreau compares one noise to another, and Melville compares one smell to another. While both comparisons are picturesque, their primary purpose is to exaggerate. They compare the subject to a source with common properties but more extreme.

The examples just shown were similes. Sometimes, of course, a comparison of this kind takes the form of a metaphor, and the exaggeration or caricature just amounts to renaming the subject, as in this specimen:

Shake the whole constitution to the centre, and the lawyer will sit tranquil in his cabinet; but touch a single thread in the cobwebs of Westminster-hall, and the exasperated spider crawls out in its defense.

Sheil, argument for the defense in the trial of John O’Connell (1844)

(Sheil claimed that William Pitt the Elder devised this metaphor first; whoever may be entitled to credit for its invention, its use in the argument of a criminal trial suggests higher standards for rhetoric in that setting than we have since come to expect.)

Caricature of the type just shown is a major and recurring purpose of comparison. Sometimes a literal account of a subject does not speak sufficiently for the impression it creates, nor is the effect conveyed by adjectives. It can only be brought home by comparison to something extreme. The listener knows that the subject described wasn’t really quite as hooked or as loud or as dreadful as the source of the comparison but understands it to have seemed that way. And whatever the listener may know as a matter of reason, new associations are now attached to the subject and may not come off easily. The audience who imagines the subject also imagines bits of what it was compared to, and likely forms a combined picture – a composite (the lawyer as spider). The picture may contain strange proportions and juxtapositions, which can serve as foundation blocks of another rhetorical resource: comedy.

Exaggerated comparisons may be further divided into those that elevate their subjects and those that diminish them – the difference between caricaturing a person by comparison to Atlas or to a reptile. The latter category is especially handy, as metaphor is a potent instrument for the delivery of insult and invective. These applications require care. The victim’s complete recovery is by no means assured; when the results are clever they may enjoy a longevity out of all proportion to their accuracy, if any, as in Johnson’s unjust but well-remembered case:

Next day, Sunday, July 31, I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)

Let us be mindful of Beerbohm’s appreciative sensibility:

After an encounter with him they never again were quite the same men in the eyes of their fellows. Whistler’s insults always stuck – stuck and spread round the insulted, who found themselves at length encased in them, like flies in amber. You may shed a tear over the flies, if you will. For myself, I am content to laud the amber.

Beerbohm, Whistler’s Writing (1909)

e. Comparison to simplify. A comparison can give simpler form to a subject that is complicated. In theory a comparison might also do the opposite, but in practice that is rare; simplifying a complex idea has advantages that do not arise from giving complexity to an idea that is simple. Simplification may have pedagogical value, as it can bring clarity to a point that is hard to understand. Another frequent rhetorical consequence of simplicity is to make a claim more persuasive. Complexity begets confusion and resistance. A simplifying comparison soothes the mind and makes an idea easier to accept; the listener’s judgment about the merits of a claim may be favorably influenced by the relief and pleasure of having a satisfying way to think about it. Pleasure may be had, too, and sometimes good humor, in seeing an inflated subject summed up in a humble way. Johnson had a gift for such usages.

A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone. Government there cannot be so firm, as when it rests upon a broad basis gradually contracted, as the government of Great Britain, which is founded on the parliament, then is in the privy council, then in the King.

Johnson, in Boswell’s Life (1791)

We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. Johnson. “Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both.”

Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)

We talked of the numbers of people that sometimes have composed the household of great families. I mentioned that there were a hundred in the family of the present Earl of Eglintoune’s father. Dr. Johnson seeming to doubt it, I began to enumerate. “Let us see: my Lord and my Lady two.” Johnson. “Nay, Sir, if you are to count by twos, you may be long enough.” Boswell. “Well, but now I add two sons and seven daughters, and a servant for each, that will make twenty; so we have the fifth part already.” Johnson. “Very true. You get at twenty pretty readily; but you will not so easily get further on. We grow to five feet pretty readily; but it is not so easy to grow to seven.”

Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)

Comparisons that simplify almost always also serve other purposes, too, such as making their subjects visible or exaggerating some feature of them. In a sense all of the examples just shown may be said to involve caricature, as they compare their subjects to sources that might be considered more extreme. But the sources also are simpler than their subjects. An increase in simplicity can be hard to define when comparing pictures of two things that are different in kind, as always is the case with a metaphor. In general, however, we may regard a comparison as simplifying its subject when the source has fewer variables and can be understood more easily or immediately. The examples just shown fit that description. (Granted, references to an inverted cone have become less accessible since the advent of the ice-cream cone, experience with which calls the natural position of a cone into question.)

2. Sources of comparisons. The source material from which metaphors and similes may be drawn is limitless in detail but can be reduced without much violence to the five categories mentioned at the start of the chapter and set out below. While any of these categories can be used to advance any of the goals just considered, some serve certain purposes more readily than others.

a. Comparisons to animals. A first great tradition uses animals to describe people for the sake of caricature, usually with unflattering results. The bird of ill-omen offered by Dickens a moment ago was an example.

He reminded one of everything that is unsavoury. His slow laborious walk resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the legs alone moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly.

Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791)

As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 2, animals lend themselves to these uses because they look and act like grotesque versions of people. Most features of human appearance and behavior have rough but exaggerated analogues in the animal kingdom; animals are structurally like humans but with different proportions in all ways. These similarities also make animals an apt source of material for putting humans into a surprising perspective, as shown in the comparison Holmes drew earlier between humanity and an ant heap. Animals occasionally but less often give visible form to abstractions, as we shall see from time to time.

Comparisons to animals are good practice for the student of metaphor and simile. The appearances and doings of most of the people one encounters in daily life can be made the subject of such silent comparisons, as is the author’s own habit.

b. Comparisons to nature. By “nature” we mean here to exclude animals, for the rest of nature tends to serve different comparative purposes. Nature is less frequently used to caricature human appearances but is immensely helpful for giving visible form to abstractions and other invisibilities. The most frequent advantage of animals, in the making of metaphors, is their structural resemblance to humans. Nature has other comparative virtues: properties of growth, intricacy of action, and images of force that are simple and evocative. Abstractions and inner states often are complex in ways that make those features of nature ideal for illustration.

Waverley had, indeed, as he looked closer into the state of the Chevalier’s court, less reason to be satisfied with it. It contained, as they say an acorn includes all the ramifications of the future oak, as many seeds of tracasserie and intrigue as might have done honour to the court of a large empire.

Scott, Waverley (1814)

Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp.

Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Under the heading of nature we might include, too, human biology, which provides excellent visible comparisons to inner states.

[C]opy their politeness, their carriage, their address, and the easy and well-bred turn of their conversation; but remember that, let them shine ever so bright, their vices, if they have any, are so many spots which you would no more imitate, than you would make an artificial wart upon your face, because some very handsome man had the misfortune to have a natural one upon his: but, on the contrary, think how much handsomer he would have been without it.

Chesterfield, letter to his son (1748)

Comparative uses of nature are examined in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Human biology receives its own consideration in Chapter 6.

c. Comparisons to human activity. Many fine comparisons are drawn from human behavior and roles. This pattern is commonly used for the sake of caricature: a person is compared to another who is more extreme. But a metaphor drawn from behavior also may serve the cause of familiarity or simplicity.

Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also.

Emerson, Lecture on the Times (1841)

In these dialogues, my sister spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron, would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.

Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

[W]hen a new insect first arrived on the island, the tendency of natural selection to enlarge or to reduce the wings, would depend on whether a greater number of individuals were saved by successfully battling with the winds, or by giving up the attempt and rarely or never flying. As with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all and had stuck to the wreck.

Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

A caricature compares the commonplace form of a thing to the epitome or extreme form of the same. Comparisons to human activity for the purpose are thus drawn most often from its fringes – from the doings of people who are at some distance from the conventional center of human affairs by their nature (the madman, the child, the disabled) or by circumstance (the shipwrecked sailor). The skilled eye, the eye of a Dickens, is able to see the extreme possibilities in a wider range of less obvious circumstances: the ways in which an architect may, in the right circumstance, epitomize a certain kind of skepticism.

The meaning of a source in the lexicon of metaphor may diverge from its meaning in the world. The line just shown from Emerson is an example. The insane do not bite others and cause them to run mad also (today the metaphor would probably borrow from horror movies); and to recur to previous examples, the stench of a plague in old Assyria, or the effect of a pebble on the Scotch Express, may have a tenuous relation to fact. We will see more such cases in every chapter. Makers of metaphor traffic heavily in lore. And there is a larger point to observe as well: the strength of the image in a metaphor typically arises less from its factual rigor than from its vividness; indeed, the mind tends to treat vividness as evidence of accuracy – a bad habit, but valuable for makers of metaphors to understand.

As the illustration from Darwin shows, comparisons to human behavior can also simplify a subject in valuable ways. Sometimes these comparisons also function in a manner that might be considered the opposite of caricature. Instead of comparing a common thing to an extreme one, they compare a thing more contentious or obscure to a source that is more common. The comparison demystifies the subject. Johnson’s simplifications often work this way and can be artful for their homeliness, as we saw earlier in the chapter: comparing a decision about education to a decision about which leg to put in the trousers first.

Under the heading of human behavior and roles we also might include, finally, human institutions: the use of governments, religions, markets, and other such entities as sources of metaphor.

Brutus. . . . Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

Julius Caesar, 2, 1

Sources of this kind are sometimes invoked for the sake of visibility. The institution borrowed for the purpose – a kingdom – may itself be an abstraction, but the incidents associated with it (here, images of insurrection) give perceptible form to an inner state that had no visibility of its own. Institutions may also be borrowed to describe other abstractions; the author means to trade on the reader’s sense of familiarity with one of them in order to explain another, and so to drive home a conceptual argument, as in this case:

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.

Abrams v. United States (1919) (Holmes, dissenting)

Some traditional uses of human activities as sources of comparison are examined in Chapters 7, 8, and 9.

d. Comparisons to stories. Under this heading go both mythology and history; those sources might be separated, of course, but they frequently do similar work in comparisons. Both tend to be used for the sake of caricature. The reason can be viewed by considering what makes a story memorable and famous, whether it be historical or mythical. It is often because the story epitomizes something resonant and recurring in human behavior or experience. Metaphor draws out those prime features of a tale and uses them to illuminate the meaning of a new case.

We saw earlier that comparisons to animals serve a similar purpose. They caricature human appearances and activity. But mythical and historical comparisons throw a different light onto their subjects. They more easily elevate or lend grandeur to them, and may put a subject into a more contemplative and dignifying posture even when the comparison is unflattering.

In the Pythian fury of his gestures – in his screaming voice – in his directness of purpose, Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited, because he could not steal, Jove’s thunderbolts; hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming; demoniac gas, you think – gas from Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump out the imaginary gas, and, behold! it is ditch-water.

de Quincey, Schlosser’s Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1880)

The South means to repress with decisions of the Supreme Court; they might as well, like Xerxes, try to subdue the waves of the ocean by throwing chains into the water.

Schurz, speech at St. Louis (1860)

The materials in this general category are wide-ranging. They can include any comparisons drawn to stories in history or literature or, for that matter, to the movies or television shows mentioned in the preface, though those particular sources won’t detain us here. We will make a sample study in Chapter 10 of some parts of this field: uses of mythology, fable, and classical history.

e. Comparisons to man-made things. Another family of material for metaphor comes from human invention.

The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is in the performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger.

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

[J]ust as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858)

The usual purpose of comparisons to the manufactured world, as these examples show, is similar to the most common use of nature (for notice that both sources are intricate and impersonal): they can give visible form to abstractions or other invisibilities, or make complex systems easier to understand, or both. We will take a chapter-long look at this family of material with emphasis on one distinguished aspect of it: architecture (Chapter 11). The most reliable sources of metaphor tend to be the features of the world we know best, and dwellings are among the most familiar of all human creations.

There are exceptions to every generalization just made. Animals and mythology are most often invoked to exaggerate a feature of human appearance or behavior, not to give visibility to an abstraction or the workings of the mind – but all combinations occur sometimes, and at various points the chapters that follow will step away from their primary themes to notice some of those secondary ones. Nor do I mean to suggest that examples within the traditions we will examine are any better than examples outside them, which are often splendid. I only mean to say that the traditions exist and are interesting.

The study of patterns and traditions might seem dangerous if they are thought to invite the formulaic creation of metaphors, or repetition of what has been seen and said before. They don’t. The skilled practitioner works in them with originality and spontaneity, just as when working within traditions of architecture or music or any other art. The chapters that follow supply the proof; we will see outstanding makers of comparisons borrowing similar material for broadly similar purposes, but with each producing their own singular effects. The relationship between the study of examples and the avoidance of cliché might best be captured by considering, as if they were part of a conversation, three passages from writers who understood the issue well:

Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other; an effusion of wit, therefore, presupposes an accumulation of knowledge; a memory stored with notions, which the imagination may cull out to compose new assemblages.

Johnson, The Rambler no. 194 (1752)

He who loves music will know what the best men have done, and hence will have numberless passages from older writers floating at all times in his mind, like germs in the air, ready to hook themselves on to anything of an associated character. Some of these he will reject at once, as already too strongly wedded to associations of their own; some are tried and found not so suitable as was thought; some one, however, will probably soon assert itself as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become exactly what is wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right man’s mind, it will have modified itself unbidden already.

Note Books of Samuel Butler (1912)

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)