governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and

manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the

reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of

comparison. Extended conceits in English are part of the poetic idiom of

Mannerism, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

Metaphysical conceit In English literature the term is

generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets, an extension

of contemporary usage. The metaphysical conceit differs from an extended analogy

in the sense that it does not have a clear-cut relationship between the

things being compared. Helen Gardner observed that "a conceit is a comparison

whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison

becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly

conscious of unlikeness." An example of the latter would be John Donne's "A

Valediction: Forbidding Mourning ", in which a romantic couple is likened to a

compass. The metaphysical conceit is often

imaginative, exploring specific parts of an experience. John Donne's "The Flea"

is a poem seemingly about fleas in a bed. When Sir Philip Sidney begins a

sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression "My true-love hath my heart

and I have his". He takes the metaphor literally and teases out a number of

literal possibilities in the exchange of hearts. The result is a fully formed

conceit. Petrarchan conceit

The Petrarchan conceit is a form of love poetry wherein a man's love interest is

referred to in hyperbole. For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and

his mistress is either "a cloud of dark disdain" or the sun.

The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using

oxymoron, for instance uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth.

But images which were novel in the sonnets of Petrarch became clichés in

the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan conceits when

describing his love for Rosaline as "bright smoke, cold fire, sick health".

Etymology In the Renaissance, the term indicated

any particularly fanciful expression of wit, and was later used pejoratively of

outlandish poetic metaphors. Recent literary critics have used the

term to mean simply the style of extended and heightened metaphor common

in the Renaissance and particularly in the 17th century, without any particular

indication of value. Within this critical sense, the Princeton

Encyclopedia makes a distinction between two kinds of conceits: the Metaphysical

conceit, described above, and the Petrarchan conceit. In the latter, human

experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor, like the stock

comparison of eyes to the sun, which Shakespeare makes light of in his sonnet

130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

Notes ^ Stephen Cushman; Clare Cavanagh; Jahan

Ramazani; Paul Rouzer. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:

Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press. p. 290. ISBN 1-4008-4142-9.

^ Helen Gardner, The Metaphysical Poets, 1961, "Introduction" p. xxiii.

^ Robert H. Ray. An Andrew Marvell Companion. Taylor & Francis. p. 106.

ISBN 978-0-8240-6248-4. ^ "Sir Philip Sidney. "My true love hath

my heart, and I have his." Love sonnet from "Arcadia."". Luminarium.org.

Retrieved 2013-07-05. ^ Najat Ismaeel Sayakhan. THE TEACHING

PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS. Author House. p.

58. ISBN 978-1-4969-8399-2. References

Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to

Poetic Metaphor. Princeton, NJ: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and

Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

External links George Herbert, "Praise"

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, from Wikisource.