Eleanor Wilner: The Mutable Magnitudes of Metaphor (July 2000)

Eleanor Wilner examines the “power of radical scale shifting in poetic imagery” as a source of “imaginative energy, sudden insight, enlarged perception, intensified feeling” and empathy. Wilner conducts close readings of poems by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Yeats, Yehuda Amichai, Sharon Olds, Tim Seibles, and Derek Walcott to illuminate the effects of dramatic shifts in time and scale–from the drop to the deluge—expanding the mind while restoring a truer sense of proportion, of “our intractably real limitations.”