Spider's Thread

<b>An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination--a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.</b> <p/>In <i>The Spider's Thread</i> Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak a psychologist and poet draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities--poets philosophers and critics--and from the sciences--psychologists neuroscientists linguists and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem--by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge Sylvia Plath Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson Robert Frost Theodore Roethke Du Fu William Butler Yeats and Pablo Neruda--and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind. <p/>Holyoak uses Whitman's poem A Noiseless Patient Spider to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms analogy and conceptual combination to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge--who called poetry the best words in their best order--and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion controlled and associative thinking memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration the brain is wider than the sky Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers among other things the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats Jung and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.