No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

If you’ve seen the film “Il Postino,” you probably remember the scene where the actor playing the part of Pablo Neruda explains the meaning of the term “metaphor” to his new friend, the postman. Pablo ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

There are those who regard the availability of metaphor as a blessing, an enhancement of the ranges of life. In one of the epigraphs to Denis Donoghue’s subtle and engrossing new book, the poet John ...