Definition and Examples of Conceit - Literary terms

Tags: Definition and Examples of Conceit, Petrarchan conceits, metaphysical conceit, what is conceit, conceit definition literature, conceit examples

Definition and Examples of Conceit - Literary terms

Conceit: 

An elaborate figure of speech comparing two very dissimilar things. The comparison may be startling, farfetched, fanciful, or highly intellectual and may develop an ANALOGY or METAPHOR to its logical limits and beyond.

There are two types of conceits.

The Petrarchan conceit, borrowed from Italian love poetry, compares the subject of the poem to a rose, the sun, a statue, or some other object. Skin is alabaster, teeth are pearls, and so on. Petrarchan conceits were widely used in ELIZABETHAN love poems and SONNETS. In this sonnet, William Shakespeare employs conceits to satirize their abuse:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

The metaphysical conceit, a common feature of the METAPHYSICAL POETRY of the seventeenth century is more startling, ingenious, and intellectual, sometimes carried to the point of absurdity. In A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, John Donne compares the union of two lovers' souls to a drafting compass:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Though conceits fell out of favor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have regained respectability in the poems of such modern poets as T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Emily Dickinson, who wrote:

Remembrance has a Rear and Front

'Tis something like a House –

It has a Garret also

For Refuse and the Mouse.

Tags: Definition and Examples of Conceit, Petrarchan conceits, metaphysical conceit, what is conceit, conceit definition literature, conceit examples