In literary terms, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. By juxtaposing images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.

Metaphysical conceit

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The term is generally associated in contemporary usage with the 17th century metaphysical poets. In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely conceptual, and thus tenuous, relationship to the thing being compared. An example of the latter would be George Herbert's "Praise (3)," in which the generosity of God is compared to a bottle which ("As we have boxes for the poor") will take in an infinite amount of the speaker's tears.

An often-cited example of the metaphysical conceit is the metaphor from John Donne's "The Flea," in which a flea that bites both the speaker and his lover becomes a conceit arguing for the depth of their union:

   Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
   This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

History of the term

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In the Renaissance, the term (which is related to the word concept) 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 (a kind of metaphorical hyperbole), 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."

Other uses

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For later literature and film, the term is sometimes used (somewhat inaccurately) to refer to a device that stretches reality to take advantage of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." This usage is seldom seen in formal literary criticism.

References

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• 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

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• George Herbert, "Praise (3)"
• wikisource:The_Sonnets/130 , from Wikisource.

Literary concepts