Northrop Frye

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The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind

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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that

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The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know

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Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…