essential things

Yeats saw the things of this world differently; he was an essentialist. In the men and the women he knew—both those he loved and those he hated—as well as in swans, hares, swords, and towers, he spied some changeless and irreducible essence. He was a Realist in the medieval sense. He believed that universals are real, that those abstract terms by which we categorize entities—Man or Woman, Beauty or Liberty, Swan or Goose—possess the fullest measure of genuine existence in sone suprasensual realm, and that the earthly embodiments of these transcendent archetypes are but momentary instantiations.

—Eric Ormsby, “Passionate Syntax,” Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)

image to archetype

At its best, metaphor transforms the image into archetype--a deepening process—the transformational power of the ingeniously conceived and well-rendered metaphor. [JF]

archetypes

All art is memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in artists.

—Paul Klee