Spider's Thread

An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination-a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.In The Spider's Thread, 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. Holyoak uses Whitman's poem "e;A Noiseless Patient Spider"e; 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 "e;the best words in their best order"e;-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 "e;the brain is wider than the sky,"e; 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.